What is Executive Coaching? And why the highest performing execs don’t go without it

Despite the growing buzz around it, executive coaching is often misunderstood, so what exactly is it, and why do top performers rely on it? Coaching is a positively framed, change-oriented, resource-building conversation. The highest performing executives know their place and how that place differs from mentoring, consulting, and leadership training.  To ‘unpick’ the differences, coaching is the one that’s the outlier. And in truth, it is the most misunderstood. Coaching is nondirective, the answers sit within the individual. Sacred time is carved out to help the high-performer get clear on their thoughts, feelings, and how they lead their role, organisation and themselves, as their best. The coach’s role? To facilitate it all, knowing their client has the answers and using their heightened communications skills (those only found in a coach) to unlock them. Many high performing executives believe they need to look outside themselves for answers, seeking out services like mentoring, consultancy, or training. And there is an absolute place for them. Put simply, they each play a different role:

• Leadership training recognises, develops and fills the gaps in the individual’s leadership capabilities or competencies. It provides structured development and input towards a learner’s desired development outcomes.
• Consultancy often focuses on transforming the organisation’s strategy or structures. The consultant investigates the organisation’s vision, strategy, finances, people, and processes, drawing on their unique experiences and career knowledge to help the organisation make necessary changes.
• Mentoring is often the discipline most confused with coaching. Mentors sit by their clients’ sides, understanding their vision, direction, and desired outcomes. They then guide based on their own experiences and what worked for them. Mentors have often worked in similar roles or industries and can offer a useful lens, filling knowledge gaps. These three disciplines input, shape and give information for the good of the individual. Coaching differs.  

Coaching isn’t about the coach’s lived experiences, knowledge, or career history. To a coach, their own thoughts are a disservice to their client, distracting the client’s thinking and preventing the coach from being client-centred. This state of ‘not knowing’ is useful. 

A coach’s job is to use their communication skills to stand by their client’s side. They get to know their journey, facilitating a self-directed conversation to help them clarify it, build motivation for it, and prompt any necessary changes. A coach then helps build strategy and resources to move forward, keeping the client on the road and hold them there as a high performer. 

Why many of the highest-performing executives use coaching as a performance tool, not a remedial fix

High performers don’t wait for problems. They use coaching to stay at the top, not get back to baseline. Being a high performer requires regular discipline, tools and strategies that are developed through coaching and repeatedly practised so they can be relied on when needed.

Here are three quotes from my clients that I believe sum up why coaching should be viewed as a tool and not a quick fix.

1. “Coaching is a need, not a want. I can’t afford not to have it.”

Coaching, at its least effective, is remedial, it’s used to address a problem. Coaching at its best is about possibility and potential, and when used proactively, the problems don’t happen.  The client knows that success is in front of them, and during a positive, future-focused, championing-and-challenging conversation, the coach skilfully invites the client to explore ‘better’ or ‘best’. They help them get clear on what that could be, then build resources to move towards it. The result is that they eventually have the capability to live and breathe as their best selves.

The client knows they are their own limiting factor. They need perspective and to get out of their own heads. They then need to know what to do with the information they’ve found. These regular sense checks ensure they aren’t waiting around for something to need fixing; they’re constantly improving. 

2. “If you’re not working with your unconscious, you’re not doing the work.”

There’s a phrase, “we are a sum of our experiences”, and psychological models and neuroscience will tell us how that’s the case. But this truth doesn’t need to own us! 

The life we have lived shapes our values. These values drive us to create beliefs, behaviours and our leadership styles. 

Our unconscious mind shapes how we show up in our world and our roles and high-performing leaders start here. When coached, they ask themselves, “Am I showing up as I need to?” As they look inwards, they see why we can lead brilliantly and why we can get in our own way. This insight helps them answer: what do I want to do about that, and how will I do it.

The best, most high-performing people spend time nourishing the roots, not just focusing on the condition of the leaves. They’re aware of what deeply motivates them and how these motivators help them thrive, but can also trip them up along the way. 

Working with the unconscious is an ongoing process that benefits the individual and those around them, and a coach facilitates that.

 As a exec client recently said to me, “How can I expect my team to work with me if I can’t even work with myself?”

3. “If I don’t know where I’m going, how do I know what I need to be doing?”

Inspiring leaders and executives have a compelling vision for the future. They take time out to get clear on what they want, why they want it, how it aligns with their values, and how it serves those they lead. They jump into a future that hasn’t happened yet and imagine it in rich technicolour, building personal motivation for it. 

Once they have it, the rest is simple. The strategy unfurls naturally. The milestones and objectives become simple checkpoints along the way to ensure that things happen. 

Time taken to get clear on their vision makes everything so straightforward. But what happens when we experience the lows of leading a business? Often, when a client is feeling flat or disoriented, they’ve lost sight of where they’re going or what’s important. Having regular access to a coach quickly recalibrates them, reigniting everything within, it’s this that keeps performance high over time.

What high-performing executives really use coaching for 

Executives often start with one challenge, but it actually turns into another, they can see the potential or the problem and believe they need tips or techniques to overcome it.

Perhaps they need:

• To overcome their impostor syndrome.

• To find the love they’ve lost for their role.
• To get out of the weeds and delegate more.
• To get better at having challenging and robust conversations.
• To improve relationships with their peers

But coaching is not about providing tips or techniques to overcome these points. Coaching helps the person work with themselves, building resources to tackle any challenge in their way, developing their own techniques, the kind that really work. When leaders develop in this way, the results tend to look like this: 

• Overcoming imposter syndrome leads to strong self-efficacy and a truly developed sense of who they are as a leader.
• Coaching helps those who are ‘lost’ tune in very quickly to what they want and what that achieves for them personally. Leaders who have coaching transform and connect to an exciting future, one they cannot wait to lead and get going with.
• Improved clarity brings a higher sense of purpose. They quickly become leaders who cannot afford to be in the weeds. They develop into someone with strong strategies and structures in place to liberate and enable those on their teams. These leaders have time in their diary and space to think.
• Because they’re tuned into their direction of travel, they build strength from it. They feel strong enough to have difficult conversations because they care deeply about the right things. They’re candid and able to navigate their own emotions in robust environments. They become able to have the conversations they need to have while maintaining the relationship.

High-performing executives who have coaching find that the ultimate outcome is becoming who they want to be. They’re emotionally strong, they like working on themselves and are proud of who they are. As their business evolves, they turn into the leader they want to be and the leader others want to follow.