By Karen Glatzer
Knowing seven key principles behind successful executive and organizational consulting can help your company reduce the time and money needed to interview firms who provide this service, ensuring a higher return on your consulting investment.
Business and market knowledge provide important credibility and insights. Find a coach/consultant who routinely learns as much as possible about your business – and the organizational dynamics – thus providing the appropriate context for the coaching. Your coach/consultant should also be able to provide additional industry-specific resources to reinforce the sessions. Never work with a coach who has not been a manager or executive in the corporate world. Their advice will be missing the practical, credible element that you need.
The most effective coaches know that in the final analysis they are dealing with changing people’s behavior. Coaches with training and experience in clinical & organizational psychology combined with business savvy have the foundation needed to lead their clients through the rapid and treacherous waters of change.
Having the ability to address performance issues honestly is vital to executive coaching and organizational consulting. Feedback cannot be explained away, rationalized, re-framed or sugar-coated if you ever expect to make important changes. This is particularly true for executives who, by virtue of their authority, often don’t hear the “truth” from those with whom they work. And, the higher one climbs on the organizational ladder, the tougher it is to have confidantes who don’t have personal agendas of their own. Coaches/consultants fill this role with candor.
To build the rapport necessary for a strong coaching and consulting relationship, preliminary meetings and regularly scheduled sessions are best done in-person, especially in this virtual world. (There is no technological substitute for the effectiveness of looking each other in the eye.)
It might seem simple, but if you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never know when you get there. The coach and client (along with input from his or her manager and possibly an HR executive) should agree upfront to the goals of the process and how they will be achieved. Agendas must be set for every meeting and notes provided as follow up to every coaching session. This holds both the coach and pupil accountable, underscoring the true partnership element of this powerful relationship.
Effective coaches integrate assessments into their process, so they ensure the results are first effectively delivered to the coachee and then shared with his/her larger corporate community of manager, peers and direct reports in order to gain support for behavioral change and “feed-forward” mechanisms to chart progress.
Look for a firm that conducts regular due-diligence on its coaches/consultants, its processes, and the results their clients are achieving as a result. Feedback works both ways, and the firm you are considering should seek regular, formal progress reports from their clients through an independent auditor. It is important that your coach go through a rigorous self-improvement process themselves usually done through a coaching or therapeutic relationship. Coaches/consultants cannot be effective if they do not know themselves.
Karen Glatzer is the founder and President of GH Consulting, a consultancy specializing in leadership development and executive coaching. Contact her at 770.454.8229 or kglatzer@ghconsultinggroup.net.
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