Definitely not! The words therapy and counselling may have many meanings for an individual. If therapy means lying on a couch talking about your mother or father while the therapist nods a lot and speaks in Germanic accent, then no – coaching is not therapy. There are many reasons why executive coaching is not therapy. Here are just a few: in therapy the therapist is considered the expert, coaching views the coach and client as co-experts in the relationship Best JEE main coaching mumbai. As such the plan for coaching is designed as an alliance by the coach and coachee. In therapy the the therapist plans the treatment. Therapy is problem-oriented and involves spending many hours examining the problem, whereas coaching is solution-oriented with a much smaller amount of time spent examining the problem. Therapy tends to focus on people with major mental or emotional issues.
Coaching is about working with a functioning individual with the goal of working to the executives strengths. Having presented these facts, it is only fair to point out that there is some overlap with coaching and therapy. Both the coach and therapist have many skills in common, such as listening and helping the clients find insights. Both the coach and therapist utilise the clients past experience in helping them to make sense and to then move forward taking action while utilising new knowledge. Also the coach and therapist work with emotional material that their client brings as a means to facilitating their growth.
This is not necessarily so. It may be of help to the executive to know the coach has been through what they have been through, in which case a programme of mentoring may be of value to the executive. However, an executive coach will bring a whole new set of skills that the executive may be unlikely to possess. The executive coaching relationship works best when both the executive and the coach are engaged in the learning process. So the balance of the executive’s knowledge coupled with the coach’s skill at being able to provide learning strategies to assist them create a powerful alliance.
Certainly not! It is true to say that coaching has been the subject of a remarkable trend since the turn of the millennium but fads come and go – just like corduroy flares or mullets! Executive coaching has been around in many guises (but not under this label) for over twenty years. Popularity and demand for executive coaching has increased in the last ten years or so mainly due to the accelerated rate of business change.
This rapid rate of change has forced organisations to reconsider the business paradigms that they have operated within for many years. As a result organisations are now understanding the need for continuous learning that remains adaptive to the current and future needs of the marketplace. This new paradigm shift has also brought about the need for a new type of leadership where emotional intelligence and collaboration are more highly valued.
Executive coaching provides these new leaders and organisations with the tools to operate more effectively in the ever changing business environment, something that traditional training or business schools are failing to deliver. Executive coaching is here to stay and will continue to go from strength to strength as more and more executives and organisations discover its power and potential.
Expensive is a relative term so let’s compare the cost of coaching to training. Firstly finding space in the busy executive’s diary for training is a task requiring much patience and tenacity on the part of the training organisation. Once the training has been delivered, one of the major challenges facing the executive is they are left to apply the knowledge learned from the training on their own. The result is that little, if any, of the training is applied when the executive returns to their day to day role. Research has shown that potentially up to 90% of an organisation’s training budget is wasted because it is rarely applied.
Executive Coaching on the other hand, provides a tailored form of continuous education and learning which enables the executive to immediately apply the learnings from the coaching and discuss their observations about the application with the coach at the next session. This ensures value is derived from the coaching. Studies have also shown that coaching can provide as much as 500% return on investment (coachingfederation. org) so coaching can actually make money for your organisation and thereby become less of a cost and more of an investment.
This is untrue and arises from a misunderstanding of the differences between an executive coach and a mentor. While there are large overlaps among the skills of a mentor and an executive coach, there are some fundamental differences that you need to be aware of to determine whether mentoring or executive coaching is the most appropriate course of action.
The first major difference is that a mentor tends to be someone in-house who is qualified to act as a mentor because they model the ideal work behaviours, attitudes and beliefs that the organisation places value on. A mentor acts as a role models for their mentee (a person being mentored), instructing them on ways to behave and think in certain circumstances. Executive coaching as a process tends to be less directive than mentoring and relies heavily on the executive coach bringing the best out of the coachee, by assisting them in finding the answers within themselves rather than supplying them the answers.
Does this mean an executive coach never instructs or provide answers? Preferably not, but in the instances where the coachee has hit a plateau or a brick wall, the executive coach may offer carefully framed suggestions or advice that facilitates the forward movement of the coachee. In mentoring, there are always right or appropriate answers and the mentor knows them. With executive coaching, the only answers are those that the coachee offers and these are not judged by the coach as being right or wrong. The job of the coach, as stated earlier, is to facilitate the coachee’s access to their answers from within themselves. In this way, coaching fosters independence in the coachee whereas mentoring can foster dependence on the mentor.
Another difference is that mentoring relies heavily on the mentor’s expertise of the subject matter, whereas executive coaching relies on the coach facilitating the advanced learning and/or the improved performance of their coachee. The agenda of the mentoring relationship is mainly set by the organisation. The agenda of coaching is mainly set by the coachee, in collaboration with their organisation and coach. In summary, mentoring is a valid tool for directing the learning of individuals so that they behave, think and communicate in a way that is aligned with the mentor. If you require creativity and free thinking to provide an extra edge in performance and effectiveness, then executive coaching is a more appropriate tool for this outcome.