A Performance Coach or Executive Coach is an experienced professional who works with professionals, executives or executives-in-training to educate and prepare them in areas of self-awareness, to learn how to identify, state, and how to develop and pursue goals and objectives The purpose of performance or executive coaching is to identify and unlock the potential of the individual for professionals and executive roles in organizations and businesses. The Performance/Executive Coach can also act as a sounding board for the developing professional or executive, to give them the opportunity to analyze and test their ideas and thinking, in regard to objectives development. While their function may entail activities related to consulting and psychological treatment, these are not their major approaches, techniques, or processes. The Performance or Executive Coach can work with the client in helping to solve specific problems, and advice on specific business or organizational matters. The Performance or Executive Coach asks questions to help clients gain insight into the processes of identifying and solving future problems.
What do Performance Coaches or Executive Coaches do?
A critical function of the Performance or Executive Coach for his or her clients is to act as a personal, confidential, and supportive sounding board. Using a questioning educational approach, the Performance or Executive Coach asks questions of the client for the purpose of leading the client to recognize and challenge their assumptions, to clarify their thought processes and ideas, and to provide relevant resources conducive to the client’s self-exploration and self-development.
Occasionally, they make suggestions and provide advice. The use, application, and interpretation of behavioral assessments relative to professional and executive roles and functions is essential to the process. The Performance or Executive Coach may also set up and carry out personal and professional interviews with the client to aid in their focusing for real interviews encountered in the workplace and to give them the tools they need to assess and determine their own behavior in such interviews. The purpose of these activities is to help the client to gain in self-awareness, self-control. and to develop meaningful and realistic goals and objectives.
Hiring Performance/Executive Coach
In the past, companies and organizations hired Performance/Executive Coaches to upgrade the quality of their middle and upper management personnel. Companies still hire Performance Coaches for these purposes, but, increasingly, people seeking professional advancement in their fields or jobs hire Performance Coaches to help them to upgrade and perfect their executive awareness and skills. While, at one time, it may have been seen as a negative indicator that an individual wanted or needed executive development, this is no longer the case. Now, to have received and benefited from the services of an Executive Coach is a status symbol demonstrating the individual’s desires and efforts to improve their executive skills to benefit their employers.
In some cases, companies or organizations hire their own Executive Coaches, but in other cases, the companies recommend to promising employees that they initiated the services of an Performance Coach to contribute to their upward movement in the management operations of the company. More and more, however, enterprising employees already in management positions or seeking to move into management positions are hiring their own Coaches. Sometimes, Performance Coaches are hired by companies or organizations to help solve general or particular problems in the management or administrative levels.
What is the process for Performance Coaching?
The process of Performance Coaching often involves a series of steps or phases. It usually begins with some form of assessment to discover where the individual’s strengths and skills lie and what might be areas of weakness. This assessment provides a kind of road map to the Performance Coach in determining the next phases of the process. Typical subsequent phases focus on personal development planning, goal and objective setting, and how to plan to make positive progress towards goals and objectives. The process also involves a number of check-ins or check-ups with the Performance Coach to assess progress and determine possible change in direction or subsequent actions in pursuit of the original plan. The process is evaluated to have been completed with the achievement of the goals and objectives of the client. Mutual agreement between the client and the Performance Coach determines when exactly the process has been completed. The typical time period for the coaching process to be effective is between seven and twelve months.
At Blair Wellness Group, Dr. Cassidy Blair offers experienced and professional Executive Coaching services tailored to the specific needs of the client along with the identification of other areas of attention and activity as revealed by the application of specialized assessment tools and measures. As a knowledgeable Performance Coach in the Los Angeles area and in the Beverly Hills area, Dr. Cassidy Blair recognizes that personal motivation and career objectives provide critical guides for the application of positive Performance Coaching.
