Executive coaching courses have been moulding andredefining industries and businesses for decades now – and they are most definitely here to stay. Amid ever-evolving leadership coaching styles and the new normal thrust upon offices across the globe by the COVID-19 pandemic, CEO coaching has become more relevant than ever. Why? Because in a professional landscape marked by “The Great Resignation,” clamour for a hybrid work setting, and changes seen in both employees’ key performance indicators and pertinent factors that keep a team intact and running remotely, more companies look to their leader as coach – effectively challenging the archetypal roles of managers and those in the corporate C-suite.
According to a 2022 survey by the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan think-and-fact tank focusing on “issues, attitudes, and trends shaping the world,” in 2021, the United States’ labour market saw its highest “quit rate” in 20 years. This is one of the clearest illustrations of “The Great Resignation,” a trend that has been moving upward the past decade, but whose numbers skyrocketed just when offices were reopening, and the world was starting to navigate a post-lockdown environment. Workers attributed their decision to quit in 2021 to “low pay (63%), no opportunities for advancement (63%), and feeling disrespected at work (57%)” – issues with solutions that are expected to fall heavily on the shoulders of managers and company heads.
So, where do executive coaching courses fit into this grand scheme of post-pandemic office operations? And just how beneficial are the results for teams face-to-face and even virtually?
Executive coaching courses as pathways to coaching leadership
Before diving into leadership development coaching, leadership coaching styles, and the impact they bring, one must ask: What is coaching leadership? The characteristics of this type of management slightly vary across programs, but its foundation has always been guidance-based support and highly immersive collaboration between a leader who is also a coach and their team members or coachees.
In contrast, and at the other end of the coaching spectrum, is autocratic coaching – which is more authoritarian in nature. Leaders who follow schools of thought under autocratic coaching tend to decide for teams and make little to no room for input and collaboration.
The Institute of Executive Coaching and Leadership (IECL) advocates and mobilises the former, coaching leadership, for the following reasons.
The positive impact of the leader as coach system
Simply put, coaching leadership establishes the leader as, not just sole decision maker or a figurehead, but as a coach who keeps communication lines open. Executive coaching courses allow leaders and managers to:
- Make room for experiential adult-level learning
- Foster willingness to give and receive feedback across the team, where both praise and criticism are held in high regard
- Initiate goal setting that makes sense and takes into account team members’ needs at work and outside the office setting
- Spearhead efficient action mapping built around trust, routinary evaluation of existing structures and action plans, and sustainable change
- Establish an exploratory safe space for healthy curiosity and productive creativity.
Therefore, compared to older hierarchical structures often in place, leadership coaching styles call forth a more collaborative and thoughtful reimagination of the workplace. In times like these, where an unprecedented global event like the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the undoing and reframing of job-related constructs, the flexibility that coaching leadership affords companies may just be the antidote to heightened dissatisfaction in the workplace.
In fact, employment website Indeed confirmed in 2020 that “leadership styles dictate how well employees achieve their goals and find satisfaction in their careers.” Perhaps the first step to achieving this is to make sure the executive coaching courses management takes are at par with the stringent standards of respected accreditation bodies like Accredited Coach Training Program (ACTP) and International Coaching Federation (ICF). Such is the case with IECL.
Courses, Coaching for Leaders, and more with IECL
Aside from accreditation, IECL boasts of a course selection that connects leaders to the level of learning they want, need, and have the time for. Coaching courses to consider with IECL are:
- Organisational Coaching Essentials (Level 1)
- Organisational Coaching Essentials (Level 2)
- Level 3 Coaching Accreditation
- ACC Fast Track
- Team Coach Training
- Principles of Organisational Coaching
- Graduate Diploma
With IECL, coach-leaders gain foundational knowledge, practice knowledge, and personal knowledge – a foolproof combination that unlocks not only leaders’ potential but those around them. Carefully tailored IECL programs like Individual Coaching and Coaching for Leaders are great ways to get any leadership development coaching journey started. The sooner a leader begins to transition into a coach mindset with the help of executive coaching courses, the sooner a team takes steps towards sustainable, collaborative, considerate change – post-pandemic and beyond.
