7 Reasons Why Your Organization Needs Executive Coaching

If we had to guess, you’re likely working too many hours and have less to show for it each year. Your executive team all the way down to your front-line employees — they're not doing much better.

Despite your "best" efforts, everyone feels overworked and unappreciated. The team doesn't share your vision, and they're leaving because they think the grass is greener somewhere else. Sadly, it usually isn't.

Could executive coaching help you create an environment where everyone thrives?

It doesn't matter where your organization is right now. It could be completely dysfunctional, or maybe minor adjustments are called for. Every leader and every organization can benefit from leadership coaching; here are seven reasons why.

1. Increased Revenue — and Profits

At the end of the day, you need to have a clear vision and the ability to meet business goals. And, of course, increasing revenues is a huge piece of the puzzle.

Yet, that determination driving you toward success and growth can unintentionally guide you into a narrow way of looking at your business. You know what's worked for you in the past, which can make it hard to change course, even when the current path isn't working anymore.

Maybe you could generate more revenue if you looked at things through someone else's eyes for a moment.

Executive coaching can help business leaders who've fallen into this trap — or who are at risk of doing so — look at things from another angle, broadening their understanding of revenue generation and what motivates customers to spend more money with you.

Through leadership coaching, you can uncover, explore, and evaluate different strategies to do more than merely generate revenue; you can learn to operate cost-efficiently, increasing cash flow and profits. Through coaching, you can actively look at your situation and how this might increase your revenue-generating potential.

This isn't because a coach tells you what to do. That couldn't be further from the truth. Organizational coaching should never feel like someone's telling you how to run your business. 

The answers are inside you. Leadership coaching just helps you pull them out, look at them, and determine the best way forward, looking past you and your team's perceived limitations to what you're truly capable of. That's what InsideOut Development™ is all about.

2. Increased Productivity

If you're not productive, your team won't be either.

One of the first things you're likely to work on in executive coaching is how you manage your time. And more often than not, people who are engaging in leadership coaching find they suddenly have a lot more hours in their day.

Through coaching, you learn to live and work more effectively by:

• Setting daily priorities
  
  
• Tracking goal progress
  
  
• Setting mini-objectives for those elephant-size goals
  
  
• Using data to show results and progress

With executive coaching, you can learn how to better focus on creating positive habits and reinforce them with repetition. As a result, you never get to the end of the day wondering why you got nothing done.

Productivity happens when you:

• Focus on what you want to achieve
  
  
• Develop discipline, order, and decisiveness around this focus 
  
  
• Realize that you'll only get results where you place your focus — even if those are results you didn't want

If you're struggling to manage an increasingly large workload and are becoming a "victim of your own success," this productivity plan of attack can help you get your life back.

Better Team Productivity, Too!

Since you lead by example, you become a better coach for your team, creating synergy throughout your organization. This inevitably results in greater workplace productivity, creating an organizational culture of efficiency, lifelong learning, and growth opportunities.

Executive coaching brings to light the value of efficiency and professional growth throughout your organization for all employees. And because of that, you want more for your talent. You expect more from them. You see the win-win as investing in your talent increases revenues and cuts costs.

As a result, you make sure your employees have the online resources they need to grow professionally. You invest in technology and training that enhances teamwork and collaboration.

You don't fall for the "training illusion". You recognize that for lasting, positive changes to your organizational culture, three things must be present:

• Know it
  
  
• Practice it
  
  
• Get consistent data-based feedback

Did you know a Pew Research study found 63% of employees leave companies because there is no way to advance? This metric is tied with low pay and just beat out feeling undervalued.

Giving people a way to grow within your organization increases productivity. It increases the size of the pie. They have the potential to make more money because they're generating more revenue for you. This is a major step toward ending the perpetual turnover many companies are dealing with today.

3. Improved Organizational Morale

When every leader in your organization gets the same high-quality business coaching, you're all on the same page and working as a team. Together, you move toward optimal business operations and business growth.

Leaders begin to understand personalities, strengths, weaknesses, and how people work together. As a result of organizational coaching, you can implement strategies that support all kinds of people, which helps them — and you — thrive.

Because you're tracking performance consistently and providing feedback, you can identify when progress isn't happening. You can coach for success or be confident it's time to part ways. And every employee in the company will see this consistency.

Investing in organizational coaching in and of itself shows that you consider the time and talent of your people precious. They feel valued and supported because they are. And you're positioning yourself for growth. Organizational morale is scalable, transferrable, and contagious.

4. Decreased Employee Turnover

One thing leads to another. Your employees develop a deeper connection to you and the company. They feel inseparable from its success. They become more confident in your leadership and their place within the company.

This sense of belonging means they're always thinking about whether they're truly giving their best. They want your company to succeed. They bring you new ideas from their perspectives, and they feel engaged.

Companies with engaged employees have less than half of the turnover of those who don't. 77% of industry-leading companies say they focus on employee experience and, as a result, have less turnover.

Leadership coaching helps you become this kind of leader. You have chosen to build authentic employee loyalty to reduce turnover. You've built a culture of accountability from the top down. You don't overwork and burn out your best talent, everyone contributes, and everyone's engaged. This is what highly engaged talent looks like — and it happens from the InsideOut.

A coach will hold you accountable for the commitment you've made to your people and support your leadership by example; this is the kind of successful company most leaders dream of.

5. Decreased Employee Sick Time

People who feel overworked and undervalued get sick more often. Some of it is definitely psychological, but this stress also wears on the body, lowering employees’ immune defenses and increasing the number of illnesses among staff.

Studies show that having good employee support programs can reduce presenteeism or what we're now calling "quiet quitting." Quiet quitting behavior costs the U.S. economy $160 billion a year.

At the same time, it reduces people coming into the office and getting others sick. This saves employers $1.8 billion a year in office-spread illnesses and reduces productivity-killing and stressful unplanned absences. Not to mention, it lowers employer healthcare costs.

Of course, office-spread sickness isn't as much of an issue if your team is remote, but remote teams have their own set of obstacles to overcome. Organizational coaching can certainly help here as well.

6. Carries Over to Achievement of Personal Goals

We'd be missing out on a big reason for executive coaching if we didn't mention how leadership coaching can help you with personal goals as well. Professional growth is part of personal growth. Plus, by working on yourself, you can uncover personality traits and insights you didn't recognize in yourself before.

You can apply many of the strategies you use on the job to meet goals related to:

• Personal time management
  
  
• Home projects and organization
  
  
• Personal finances
  
  
• Relationships
  
  
• Health
  
  
• Mental and emotional wellness
  
  
• Hobbies
  
  
• Volunteer work

Leadership coaching professionals are here to support your decision-making, whether that's at work or home. They know if home life isn't good, you won't be able to be there for your business.

Once you see how much you can improve your organization through executive coaching, you'll want to work on personal development. And because you're less stressed at work, you'll feel you have the time to dedicate to it.

7. It Creates Balance

As a leader, it's so easy to let your passion for your company create tunnel vision. You want to succeed so badly that every waking hour can become devoted to business, even when you're supposedly spending time with the kids, your friends, or even yourself.

If you're not giving those areas of your life the attention and time they deserve, they can quickly just stop being a part of your life. It's great to have a vision and motivation, to be a doer and an innovator. But it's also important to focus on all the other areas that make up your life. There needs to be a healthy balance, but how?

Great coaching helps you and your team achieve balance in life as a whole. Your personal life no longer feels like it's competing with your professional time. With coaching, you become more accountable to yourself and work more effectively in all aspects of life.

• Invest in your health: Your health is, by far, your most important asset. Keep your mind sharp and body functioning well and you can do almost anything. You might now find you have the time to join a gym, take an exercise class, or learn to cook healthy meals at home.
  
  
• Invest in your skills: You can put some time into learning a new skill. Maybe you want to take some online courses or complete a degree you started. Remember, being the best leader isn't always about learning more but about doing more with what you already know.
  
  
• Go on a much-needed vacation: How long has it been since you took a real vacation? One where you weren't also on-call for work? Never taking time off can leave you worn out and burned out. Through leadership coaching, you learn to delegate more effectively, so real vacations become a possibility for you and your family.
  
  
• Make time for quality time: Besides vacations, you can now spend quality time with people who matter to you.
  
  
• Rediscover life outside the workplace: Because of this new-found balance, you feel less stressed and in a better place professionally and emotionally to meet your life goals.

Now, imagine this happening throughout your whole organization. How much happier and more productive would everyone be?

GROW: The Foundation of InsideOut Development Executive Coaching

This concept of executive coaching is based on the GROW^® model. Everyone has the potential to perform beyond their own expectations. The GROW^® model helps you unlock this potential in yourself through better, faster decision-making.

It's a results-focused approach that helps people at all levels in an organization take responsibility for the results that their actions or inactions get. By doing so, individuals learn to coach themselves to perform at their best and to take that a step further to challenge their inner self by constantly asking if this really is the best they could be doing.

By asking what more can be done, solutions instead of complaints are created, making the workplace and each individual that makes up the workplace far more effective and productive (both personally and professionally) than could be done alone.

Want to dip your toes into executive coaching? Our eBook, Two Ways to Your Leadership Focus, is a great place to start.