Just as great athletes require great coaching to reach their full potential, so too do great business leaders. As an executive leadership coach, it’s your job to help your coachees grow their effectiveness as leaders by increasing their skills, which often revolves around developing their emotional intelligence.
Effective executive coaching improves an executive’s ability to energize co-workers, manage conflicts, generate positive communication, and grow both personally and professionally. Coaching stimulates leaders to do exceptional work while simultaneously addressing their observable growth opportunities and uncovering hidden strengths.
Executive Coaching Objectives
Your coaching engagement will be shaped by many factors including the state of the company, the coachee’s history and personality, and the expectations of the people hiring you. However, there are some clear objectives you should have in mind when you start coaching any executive-level client. If you can support their growth in these areas, there’s a reasonable chance you’ll play a key role in helping them maximize their leadership potential by moving to a new level of effectiveness.
Here are what we believe to be a list of key objectives of executive coaching. 
- Empowerment
Empowering leaders to do exceptional work should be your #1 coaching objective. Most people are capable of taking small steps to improve their abilities, but taking big steps to the next level usually requires steady guidance from a masterful coach. You must be that trusted advisor. Coaching sessions should empower a leader to fully embrace their opportunities to improve, track their progress, and appreciate the work they’ve done to meet their ambitious goals.
- New Insights
You should help your coachees gain a new perspective on their everyday responsibilities by gaining new insight into their lives and their careers. Your coaching should move them to slow down, step back and reflect upon their behaviors and underlying perceptions that drive them. By becoming highly self aware and being open to new ways of thinking and behaving, real and meaningful change can occur that others can see and feel. Moreover, once these changes are manifested, leaders rarely retreat back to the way they saw the world previously. It sticks with them.
- Creative Thinking
Building off of the last objective, coaching reduces narrow-minded thinking in leaders. Coaches encourage the leader to open their thought patterns and consider other points of view by asking questions. This benefits the leader by provoking free thoughts and encouraging flexible leadership that allows for greater creativity in decision making – a coveted attribute. To get here, leaders need to learn to seek out and appreciate the thoughts of others on important matters. They need to stop their own thinking and truly listen to what others have to say. Great ideas usually come after hearing multiple points of view, then distilling them into something entirely different that represents a bold, new direction.
- Growing Performance
Coaching allows a leader to learn and implement new leadership techniques tailored to their strengths and weaknesses. While performance can always be measured on the bottom line, you will champion the idea that executive performance is multi-faceted, encompassing non-tangibles like team morale, innovative spirit, loyalty, vision, and dedication to employees and clients. A truly effective leader grows in all these areas, which in turn manifests itself in better business performance by the team members and the company.
- Improved Communication
Coaching enables leaders to realize their communication isn’t always as clear as they think. Coaches will highlight areas of communication that need improvement and practice those areas with the leader through conversation and role play. Coaches can also teach leaders how to communicate with individuals of different personality types, cultures, or ages using their past experiences as examples. When leaders take their communication skills from good to great, it will increase clarity, inspiration and motivation to work together to take the organization to the top of their field.
The Payoff 
When your engagement ends, you may assess your coaching by gauging the achievement of any or all of these desired outcomes in your coachee:
- Are they able to create a focused and compelling vision?
- Have they demonstrated sustainable behavioral changes?
- Are they now accountable for successfully executing strategic plans?
- Have they broken past previously limiting perceptions?
- Are they exhibiting increasing and deepening self-awareness?
- Have they acquired valuable new skills and abilities such as: focus, decision making, assertiveness, self-management, positive thinking, effective communication, accountability, brainstorming, conflict resolution, long-term thinking, strategic planning, systematic thinking, leadership presence, among others?
- Have they demonstrated significant development of three levels of intelligence: emotional, social, and business-related?
When you play a significant role in developing a better leader, you do much more than simply fulfill your coaching engagement satisfactorily. What you’ve actually done is unlock the potential of a leader who’s now better able to effect positive change in the lives and fortunes of many more people than you might imagine. Very few careers enable someone to have this kind of an impact.
When you play a significant role in developing a better leader, you do much more than simply fulfill your coaching engagement satisfactorily. You may also be modeling great coaching for your leader/client to emulate as they go forward. Learn why leaders should be more like coaches here.
If you benefited from reading this post and have yet to be formally trained as an executive and leadership coach, consider enrolling in one of our accredited coach training programs.
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