OI Partners - E.K. Ward and Associates
August 2004 Newsletter

This month's newsletter is about executive coaching. By all accounts, the use of executive coaching is growing, focused on shoring up succession planning, customizing leadership development initiatives, helping leaders adapt to new roles or correcting potentially derailing behaviors of selected employees.

With this rapid increase in coaching and the number of coaches in the market, comes confusion about uses of coaching, approaches to coaching and the qualifications of potential coaches. You may be asking: How can I tell if coaching is appropriate? How do I position coaching in my organization? How do I justify the expense? How do I select a coach?

In our first two articles, we offer guidance for the HR executive in sorting through the coaching landscape with the goal of helping you achieve your objectives when involving an external coach. The remainder of our newsletter provides insight into selected coaching and leadership topics to help you further broaden your perspective on coaching.

In a world of budgets and cost justification, coaching can be an excellent investment, provided you are clear about objectives and expectations, and implement a process that makes sense for your business. Our goal is to help you maximize the success of any coaching activities you may undertake, so that you achieve your goals in today's changing marketplace. Let us know if we can help. We would be pleased to sit down on a preliminary basis to review your needs, our approaches to coaching and whether there might be a fit.

Sincerely,

Anne Mahoney Glose

OI Partners (Williamsville, NY)

Please click on the links below to read the complete articles.

Executive Coaching: What It Is, What It Is Not
Coaching is a term that is quite diverse and confusing to the business world today. There are coaches who cover the complete gamut of golf, weight loss, personal life, finance, career, executives, high potentials and leadership. In the New World of Work, business and executive coaches have become a profession that has entrenched the marketplace like the wild west.

How Do I Select a Coach?
Once you have determined that an executive coach may be helpful to achieving your business objectives, the first question is "who?" The match between a coach and your business culture, and the needs of the individual(s) requiring coaching is critical to the success of the process. Just as important are the qualifications of the coach, and the coaching model he or she uses.

Executive Coaching: Lessons from the Front
Over the past seven years in building our executive coaching practice, we have been asked to support our clients' success in a wide variety of situations. We have had engagements ranging from fixing potentially career-limiting performance issues and behaviors, to helping groom a senior leader for the CEO role. We have learned many practical lessons, through both successes and failures in the coaching process. Here are a few of the more important ones:

The First 90 Days on the Job Can Make or Break You
The early days in a new position set the tone for future success or struggle. Executives face many challenges at once. They must balance learning about the organization and its dynamics with the impressions they are making on others. They have to work to understand the new position, new colleagues and their operating styles and build relationships. Discovering the way things really are as compared to what they expected can generate a disturbing array of emotions. There is a lot to absorb when entering a new organization.

Leading vs Managing
What makes a leader? Down through history, myths have told the stories of great leaders and around the mythology has grown the mystery of how a leader is created. Is it an inborn trait waiting to emerge? A skill that can be learned? A unique situation that creates the opportunity? The strength and viability of our companies, our governments and our organizations at all levels of society depend upon leadership, but leadership alone is not enough. It's time we began to understand and value both leaders and managers for the contributions they make to our organizations' successes.

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