Advance Your Career
Executives seek the safety and privacy of a coaching relationship to explore skills and aptitudes and critically examine and overcome skill deficits that stand in the way of maximum professional and financial performance. Executive coaching offers the opportunity to explore career options, test out ideas, gain clarity, renew passions, enhance strengths, and overcome performance deficits.
Value of Executive Coaching
Executives today are caught in times of unprecedented organizational change and complexity. Motivated professionals seek executive coaching to help them move up in their professional careers or set out in new directions.
Coaching Helps Individuals To:
- Develop leadership skills and strategies
- Build on natural strengths
- Enhance interpersonal skills
- Identify and overcome self-imposed barriers to success
- Manage and build business relationships
- Improve communication effectiveness
- Master high-level communication skills
- Build and use quality problem-solving processes
- Assess conflict situations to effectively confront and resolve conflict
- Incorporate a flexible interpersonal style to bring out the best in others
- Build loyalty and partnership with peers
- Establish professional goals
- Network to achieve professional advancement
- Balance work and life issues
Why Coaching?
Professional coaching has become popular because it places emphasis on the individual, tailoring exploration, skills development, and practice to the unique needs of the executive. Coaching can help successful executives seeking to advance in their careers, do better in their current position, or change careers.
The Chartered Institute of Personnel & Development (CIPD) lists some characteristics of coaching in organizations that are generally agreed on by most coaching professionals:
- It consists of one-to-one developmental discussions.
- It provides people with feedback on both their strengths and weaknesses.
- It is aimed at specific issues/areas.
- It is a relatively short-term activity, except in executive coaching, which tends to have a longer timeframe.
- It is essentially a non-directive form of development.
- It focuses on improving performance and developing/enhancing an individual’s skills.
- It is used to address a wide range of issues.
- Coaching activities have both organisational and individual goals.
- It assumes that the individual is psychologically healthy and does not require clinical intervention.
- It works on the premise that clients are self-aware, or can achieve self-awareness.
- It is time-limited.
- It is a skilled activity.
Personal issues may be discussed, but the emphasis is on performance on work.
Whether company-sponsored or contracted privately by an individual executive, coaching provides a targeted assessment of talents and challenges followed by individualized training, facilitation, practice, and evaluation toward established professional goals.
Margaret Sumption is an experienced executive coach who has worked with dozens of successful people. Margaret holds a master’s degree in guidance and counseling, is a licensed professional counselor (LPC), and is also a certified senior professional in human resources (SPHR and SHRM-SCP). Her education, licensure, and certification, as well as her extensive experience, make her uniquely qualified to help professionals and executives.