_What is Executive Coaching?
_The International Coach Federation defines executive coaching as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential. The coach’s job is to provide support to enhance the skills, resources and creativity the client already has.
How is coaching distinct from other service professions?
Professional coaching is a distinct service. It focuses on an individual and how he or she can maximize their ability to set goals, create outcomes and undertake personal change. To understand what a coach is, it can be helpful to distinguish coaching from other professions that provide personal or organizational support.
How is coaching distinct from other service professions?
Professional coaching is a distinct service. It focuses on an individual and how he or she can maximize their ability to set goals, create outcomes and undertake personal change. To understand what a coach is, it can be helpful to distinguish coaching from other professions that provide personal or organizational support.
- Therapy: Coaching is different from therapy. Coaching is a profession that supports personal and professional growth and development based on individual-initiated change in pursuit of specific actionable outcomes. These outcomes are linked to personal or professional success. Coaching is forward moving and future focused. Therapy, on the other hand, deals with healing pain, dysfunction and conflict within an individual or a relationship between two or more individuals. The focus is often on resolving difficulties arising from the past which hamper an individual's emotional functioning in the present, improving overall psychological functioning, and dealing with present life and work circumstances in more emotionally healthy ways. Therapy outcomes often include improved emotional/feeling states. While positive feelings/emotions may be a natural outcome of coaching, the primary focus is on creating actionable strategies for achieving specific goals in one's work or personal life. The emphasis in a coaching relationship is on action, accountability and follow through.
- Consulting: Consultants may be retained by individuals or organizations to obtain specialized expertise. While consulting approaches vary widely, there is often an assumption that the consultant diagnoses problems and prescribes and sometimes implements solutions. In general, the assumption with coaching is that individuals or teams are capable of generating their own solutions, with the coach supplying supportive, discovery-based approaches and frameworks.
- Mentoring: Mentoring can be thought of as guiding from one's own experience or sharing of experience in a specific area of industry or career development. It is sometimes confused with coaching. Although some coaches provide mentoring as part of their coaching, such as in mentor coaching new coaches, coaches are not typically mentors to those they coach.
- Training: Training programs are based on the acquisition of certain learning objectives as set out by the trainer or instructor. Though objectives are clarified in the coaching process, they are set by the individual or team being coached with guidance provided by the coach. Training also assumes a linear learning path which coincides with an established curriculum. Coaching is less linear without a set curriculum plan.
- Athletic Development: Though sports metaphors are often used, professional coaching is different from the traditional sports coach. The athletic coach is often seen as an expert who guides and directs the behaviour of individuals or teams based on his or her greater experience and knowledge. Professional coaches possess these qualities, but it is the experience and knowledge of the individual or team that determines the direction. Additionally, professional coaching, unlike athletic development, does not focus on behaviours that are being executed poorly or incorrectly. Instead, the focus is on identifying opportunities for development based on individual strengths and capabilities.
Tel. (613) 979-7500 | [email protected] | © Hardy Coaching Group 2012
Built by Will Powered Websites
Built by Will Powered Websites