Executive Coaches, Your Job Is to Deliver Business Results

There is some evidence that if a leader learns how to behave differently — making faster decisions, for example, or delegating more frequently — then business results will follow. But this requires what the author calls a double leap of faith: first, that coaching will change behavior, and then that those changed behaviors will lead to results. The problem is that neither assumption is a sure thing. Coaches would do better to identify short-term opportunities to improve outcomes — individual output or a particular metric reflecting the unit’s performance, for example. These might require development of specific behaviors, but instead of working on them in theory or in isolation, the individual can focus on them in the context of achieving specific results. In the author’s experience as a coach, this more direct method has a better chance of achieving improved performance — and has the added benefit of providing positive reinforcement for the individual being coached since they quickly see success as a result of their changed behaviors.