Executive Coaching
by Jeff Vengrow, Directory of CNE Solutions
You’ve read the leadership books & you’ve attended the seminars, but what you want is someone who will work with you one-on-one on your questions, your challenges, your goals. You need a COACH!
Coaching can be defined as a partnership that offers a structured, supportive, and confidential, environment for visioning, goal setting, learning, and accountability. Recognized by private businesses for decades, the nonprofit sector has more recently begun to realize that coaching can help nonprofit executives identify and develop the specific competencies needed in today’s uncertain environment for their organizations as well.
Coaching is usually provided through blocks of time, with the schedule based on the executive’s needs and goals. The coach and leader can meet in person, or often just work together through phone calls or even e-mail communication. While coaching usually extends for several months, the length of time is based on the objectives and the time required to achieve them.
Coaching is also an individual action – a one-to-one relationship – but it can impact a team and the whole organization. Now more than ever in recent history, leaders must develop a vision, think strategically, provide direction, create a goal-oriented climate, provide constructive feedback, emphasize personal accountability, and remember to celebrate success! All these are needed to create a organization culture that can adjust to the current reality.
Coaching can be beneficial by:
• Providing an objective and confidential ear
• Offering a time and place to reflect on practice
• Helping in problem solving and providing accountability
• Providing assistance with balancing work/life issues
• Increasing job satisfaction
• Improving relationships between executive directors and their boards
• Enhancing the application of training to organizational practice
• Accelerating the pace of change within organizations. (From the W.K. Kellogg Coaching and
Philanthropy (CAP)Project)
Why would one choose to work with a coach? When there is a:
• Recognition of the need to improve performance more than simply the acquisition of new knowledge or
skills
• Willingness to participate in a rigorous and honest self-appraisal
• Willingness to ask for support to improve effectiveness
• Willingness to devote the time, energy and resources to make changes over a period of months
• Willingness to trust another person and genuinely talk about strengths and challenges
CNE can help: Whether you are thinking about a coach for yourself or for a leader in another nonprofit, or if you want to develop your own coaching skills.
CNE Solutions can supply an experienced nonprofit leader as a coach for you or your organization’s executive. The coaching relationship is based upon a written agreement that includes the goals and mutual expectations for how the coaching relationship will work, including periodic progress reviews.