Reflections from my first Executive Coaching Session
I first heard of executive coaching during the UNLEASH+ 2020 Program as we partnered with an organization to enhance the leadership potential of our talents and their teams in the cohort. While the program was extended to UNLEASH Innovation lab team as well, I couldn’t make much use of it as I had enrolled in some other learning program at that time.
Additionally, I couldn’t understand multiple nuances of the topic “Executive Coaching”
- What is Executive Coaching?
- What happens in Executive Coaching?
- What are the benefits of Executive Coaching?
- Do I need Executive Coaching?
Coincidentally, in the second half of 2020, I was catching up with Aishwarya Goel and she mentioned she has started Peak Performer, a tech platform that provides executive coaching to employees, both emerging and established leaders, of enterprises and growth-stage startups. It is structured as a 6-month program with 9 sessions with an executive coach that you select from their wonderful pool of executive coaches but before I go further I want to address the elephant in the room “What exactly is Executive Coaching?”
An executive coach is a qualified professional that works with individuals (usually executives, but often high-potential employees) to help them gain self-awareness, clarify goals, achieve their development objectives, unlock their potential, and act as a sounding board. — The Balance Careers
As a next step, she encouraged me to sign-up but the procrastination got the better of me and I kept pushing it. However, as the UNLEASH+ program was coming to an end in February 2021, UNLEASH Innovation lab team got great feedback on the leadership component of the program. Moreover, I got extremely curious about Executive Coaching and spoke with Aishwarya again. Also, it came at the right time, as I decided to move on from UNLEASH and take my next professional adventure and wanted to focus on my areas of improvement and a few other things that I was feeling stuck with. However, this time I made sure I had a “Call for Action” so I filled up the Executive Coaching Registration Form, asked my colleagues and reporting manager at UNLEASH Innovation lab to fill the 360-degree feedback, and selected the coach I wanted to work with. Finally, it was time for my first-ever Executive Coaching session.
I did not go with any preconceived notions as I had never done this before. Instead, my curiosity fuelled me to prepare several questions related to Executive Coaching, what I wanted to achieve at the end of an hour-long session, and what more can I learn about myself / my uneasiness of feeling stuck.
- How is it different from Mentoring?
- How much overlap does it have with Career Coaching, Life Coaching, Relationship Coaching, and Business Coaching or it just focusses on the professional sphere?
- How does it differ from all the coaching areas that I mention above, especially Career Coaching?
- Who can become an Executive Coach? In other words, what are the pre-requisites to becoming an Executive Coach?
- Do the coachee and coach need to have some amount of industry overlap?
- How do cultural differences impact the quality of coaching one receives?
My coach listened very patiently to all my questions and took a lot of time to answer each of these questions in as many details as I wanted, allowing for follow-up questions as well. Then we shifted focus to think for a minute about
- Why I am here?
- What problem area/uneasiness of feeling stuck was bothering me?
After this, we did a mock coaching session, and some of the probing questions helped me uncover and learn new things about myself that I never thought of before.
Some of the probing questions and other activities that we covered
- What I was feeling when I was responding to these questions?
- Self-reflection of the responses
Based on my wonderful experience I would recommend anyone feeling stuck/facing problems at the workplace to consider signing up for an Executive Coaching session.