3 Reasons You Need an Executive Coach

Are you considering hiring a coach?  Or wondering why anyone would pay a coach or spend time with one?  As someone who has always considered myself pretty self-aware, I realized I doubted myself in specific areas.  Especially as my company grew/grows, and the demands of my leadership increase.  I decided to hire my first coach about seven years ago.  I had a new business and was about to become a mom for the first time.  I was excited and terrified.

The decision to hire a coach was one that changed the trajectory of my life forever.  I have worked with three over the course of the last seven years learning something different from each of them and their experiences.  The lessons are invaluable.

Here are three reasons I think you need a coach:

They will help you develop new skills.  For me, having difficult conversations had always been a real challenge. It just wasn’t something I wanted to do, and I knew I wasn’t good at it. It’s my nature always to want everyone to be happy.  When I started leading a larger group of people, I recognized my need to be liked and knew it was something I needed to work on. There’s no one better than a coach to sit down and work on something like this with – someone who isn’t going to judge you, and who can genuinely help. My coach helped me to see how this was holding my team and me back.

They will help you fix ongoing issues. One of my coaches had worked in a vast health care corporation, and she knew that I wanted to scale – and she could see before I could the things that would keep me from doing that, thanks to her experience and other executives she had worked with. Her insight was unique.

Your coach will help you see things different thanks to this unique insight. I had an employee who came in one day overwhelmed, next to tears and communicated to me in an unprofessional and almost hurtful way. When I brought this to my coach, she was able to give me some insight that I wasn’t seeing; she reminded me that, based on everything I’d ever said about this employee, efficiency was essential to her. Since this employee wasn’t feeling efficient, she was overwhelmed and reacting negatively. She helped me to recognize a pattern and something in an employee that I hadn’t been able to see, which helped me look out for instances like this in the future.

They will provide you with accountability. You should employ an executive coach expecting them to hold a mirror up to you. They should be giving you homework, and if you’re not doing it and improving, they should be calling you out on that. That’s not something anyone else in your life can do; it’s not something you’ll necessarily want from your family or friends. That’s why an executive coach is so essential.

My coach was great at giving me personal insights I was overlooking. She helped me quit taking things so personally and taught me the value of practice – literally, helping me practice situations and scenarios I was struggling with, so I could be a better leader. She guided me to a more developed sense of self-awareness.

I believe having a coach is an essential part of growing as a leader and a business owner – it is an investment that you will never regret.