Executive Coaching

The best way to develop and maintain the ideal state of mind for performance is to build awareness and responsibility continuously throughout the daily practice and the skill acquisition process …Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximize their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them.’
Coaching for Performance, John Whitmore, Nicholas Brealey Publishing 2002

If leaders are those responsible for taking the organisation to a place it hasn’t been before then it is unlikely they are going to learn their craft in a business school. There they’ll only be studying others’ case study experiences in a different context and time period. We work with reality and have the highest class of coaches any UK organisation can claim. Ask the others how many Olympic Golds they have coached….

We see executive coaching as the support and challenge mechanism required for busy people to maximise their learning opportunities as they work. This absolutely aligns with our action learning bias and our stance on knowledge – it is not a finite object that transfers from teacher to learner, it is constructed by individuals in their own way and, as adults, building on their own experience.

Our executive coaches bring wisdom to the workplace but do not expect to act as teachers or mentors. Their job is to create the environment and context within which the executive can develop his or her own thinking and explore options and avenues of thought. Coaching should have a short and direct route from thinking to application with feedback and evaluation mechanisms or loops to build the confidence and competence. Our industry experienced coaches understand the importance of regular contact driven by the executive not the coach. Read any one of our case studies to see how successful this approach is.

The GROW model is widely used within the coaching world and we see this as a good foundation for the process of working together. Our work has built and developed on this basic framework to provide a comprehensive structure within which coaching operates with full reference to our principles of Responsibility, Reality and the need for Results.

Oh – and one final thing. Those Olympic Golds. If you’re really serious about coaching you’d want that level of expertise wouldn’t you? What did the others say? Call us and find out how you can be in a class apart.