How to Gain Career Momentum by Working With a Coach

How to Gain Career Momentum by Working With a CoachHow to Gain Career Momentum by Working With a CoachImagine sitting down with your boss for your regular update session and hearing her utter the following words I would like you to start working with an executive coach. Your first reaction is likely to be, Why, whats wrong with me? and not, This is great She must really believe in me. And like so many instances in life, your gut reaction will be wrong. Almost without exception, senior leaders invest in executive coaching for high potential individuals, not problem employees on a fast track to the exit. And while the coaching will likely involve both amplifying and developing your strengths and identifying and curing blind spots in your behaviors, the emphasis is on helping you grow from good to great or great to greater. Three Key Benefits of Working With an Executive Coach Coaching prepares you for larger rolesand next steps. Every step up in responsibility offers new challenge s and opportunities to learn as well as make mistakes. Coaching helps you acclimate to the demands of the new role for critical thinking, leadership, and decision-making.Coaching helps you amplify your strengths and gifts. While much of professional development preoccupies on fixing weaknesses, the biggest gains come for emphasizing the further development of our strengths. An effective coach ensures that developing strengths is a focal point of the engagement. Coaching supports the development of the discipline and mindset necessary for success in complex situations. Career growth means you are accountable for problems of increasing ambiguity, including strategy and talent selection. A proper coaching program exposes you to these challenges and offers help in cultivating the tools and skills necessary for success. Yes, the opportunity to work with an executive coach is a privilege, not a problem. It is also a situation where you get out of the experience what you put into it. If yo u have the good fortune to work with an executive coach, here are seven ideas to help you get the most out of this experience. 7 Ideas to Help You Get the Most out of Your Executive Coaching Experience 1. Accept that there is room for growth in your professional skillsets. Do not let ego and arrogance get in the way of recognizing there are always opportunities to improve. The worlds elite athletes reached their levels of peak performance with great coaches observing and helping them tune and tweak or radically cowboy their techniques in search of improvements. We have the same needs and the same opportunities to strengthen as business professionals. 2. Bring a Beginners Mind. This concept borrowed from Zen Buddhism describes setting aside preconceived ideas and being open and eager for new ideas. Without this beginners mind, learning becomes difficult, and you end up in a fight against yourself. 3. Recognize that the coachs role is not to offer answers or to do the work. The co ach is there to observe, ask questions, challenge you and hold you accountable. The heavy lifting and hard work of change are all yours. 4. Accept that success means you will have to change your behaviors. We all understand how difficult it is to change our behaviors. Hows that fitness program or diet going? Are you on target with your New Years resolutions? Have you kept your commitment to meet with your team members every 60 days to discuss their professional development? Are you leise smoking? Regardless of the issue, changing our own behaviors is incredibly difficult. Yet, coaching only works when you follow-through and change, adapt or add the behaviors necessary for you to improve your performance. 5. Accept that you need help from those around you. In the most successful coaching engagements, the coaching client is open with his or her teammates, direct reports and colleagues about this professional development work. Many invite team members or direct reports to hold them acc ountable and support the process. By doing this, you will be modeling a set of behaviors around personal professional growth that others will emulate in their own careers. And most of all, the coaching is about how you engage with others, and you need those others involved in evaluating progress. 6. Create additional mechanisms to reinforce accountability. The worlds leading executive coach, Marshall Goldsmith, pays a person to call him every day and ask 32 questions that he defined, about his own performance. Yes, she asks Marshall his own questions and keeps a scorecard of his yes or no answers. This daily reinforcement coupled with the visible indicator of his failure on key questions that are important to his work and life serve to drive his own improvement. Adopt or adapt this technique to reinforce your own positive behaviors. Ask your significant other or a valued colleague to ask you the questions and score you daily. After a few too many days of no on something important to you, you will either adjust or tell your colleague to quit asking you this question. One answer supports change and the other capitulates to the status quo, but at least the issue is in front of you daily. 7. Show up to your coaching meetings and be in the moment. As trivial as this sounds, many of these arrangements are derailed because the client is consistently out of pocket or dealing with a crisis during scheduled coaching call times. Keep these meetings sacred and unless the loss of life is involved (particularly yours), be there and be in the moment. The Bottom line for Now The opportunity to work with an executive coach can be transformational. For you, not the coach However, coaching only works for someone who truly wants to improve. If you believe you have it all figured out, dont bother. If you are willing to listen and change, we guarantee you will come out the other end of the process a more effective professional.