Executive Coach vs Business Coach–What is the Difference?
Choosing what type of coach you need is the first step in your journey to professional actualization and improvement.
However, it can be a tricky step, especially if you are new to the world of professional coaching, because there are so many different types of coaching services available, different coaching niches and specialties that might make it hard to choose the perfect fit.
It’s important to know exactly what each service entails and what types of clients benefit from each service in order to know what type of coaching will help you reach your goals within your personal life or professional development.
In this article, we will shine a light on two of the most widely used coaching services—business and executive coaching; dissecting the differences and similarities to give you a solid understanding of both so that you can make a more educated decision when choosing your coach.
Executive Coaching
Definition of Executive Coaching
According to the International Coaching Federation (ICF),
“Coaching is partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires. them to maximize their personal and professional potential. Coaching is a client-driven process.”
This is a broad definition but helpful when understanding the differences between different business and executive coaches.
And so, for the definition of what an executive coach offers, I would tweak it like this:
“Executive coaching is partnering with leaders [in any capacity] in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their leadership and professional potential.”
To understand the benefits of executive coaching—as we know it today—we have to know that it began to take shape in the early 1970s in the realm of company founders and high-profile executives, hence the name executive coaching.
Big companies invested in their leadership by hiring executive coaches or “counselors” to help guide and train employees in leadership positions in order to increase business growth and success.
Now, executive coaching can also be called leadership coaching because it is reserved for the world's CEOs and million-dollar executives.
Executive coaches specialize in helping individuals who want to expand their leadership potential and acquire the leadership skills necessary to grow their business and/or careers.
Executive coaches create effective leaders from all positions, industries, pay-grades, and backgrounds.
What Clients Benefit From Executive Coaching?
To give you a better idea of how an executive coach works and how they can skyrocket the growth of an entire company or expand your own leadership potential to reach your professional and personal development goals—here are some examples that depict the perfect candidates for executive coaching.
Leadership Success for New Leaders
An employee at any company—large or small— who just got promoted to a management position would greatly benefit from the help of an executive coach to be prepared for their new position while still keeping up with their job responsibilities.
Learning how to be a leader is a lot like learning how to swim when thrown out into the deep end without the right training—it’s a sink or swim situation.
Most individuals don’t know how to lead a group of people—large or small—let alone effectively use their leadership to create productive team environments and ultimately lead their division to enact growth for their company.
An executive coach will cut an individual’s time becoming “role-ready” in half and give them the tools to find their leadership style to become effective and decisive leaders.
When the CEO Grows, Everyone Grows
Every CEO needs a coach; after all, in the current business climate, half of CEOs are fired instead of stepping down consensually.
In a recent article for Forbes, CEO coaching expert Amy Jen Su puts it perfectly:
“As your role or span of control grows, you will eventually be capped by your own capacity no matter how effective or productive you are. A fundamental mindset shift must occur from I want to raise my game to realizing I raise my game by raising the game of others.”
Providing maximum leadership originates from the mindset that high performance—at any capacity—comes from the growth of your team and employees at every level.
Many coaches work with this mindset, and an executive coach will not only help you get into that mindset but help you make better decisions that directly inspire, encourage, and build up those around you.
Developing leadership skills with an executive coach will allow you to figure out your team’s communication, team’s style, and workplace culture to effectively galvanize your organization and help everyone come together to reach the same goals.
Leadership Skills to Elevate Any Situation
Executive coaching starts with your personal development in order to expand on your professional skills.
An executive coach can help you develop important skills that can be useful in any personal and professional setting that involves other people.
An executive coach will offer you unapologetically objective advice. They have no conflicting interests or biased beliefs when it comes to your company and your success.
This objective point of view can give you a 360 view of your surroundings and self-awareness to enhance and widen your perspective of any issue.
This expanded viewpoint will largely improve your decision-making skills, helping you make quicker, more informed decisions with conviction.
A widened perspective means you have the advantage of spotting blind spots, which are obstacles and challenges that you have no way of anticipating due to your focus being elsewhere or because you lack the experience to anticipate them.
Part of what makes an effective leader is the ability to solve problems before they arise, and an executive coach has both skills and experience to spot those blind spots.
Furthermore, the objectivity that executive coaches offer makes them the perfect sounding board for encouraging creative thinking, strategizing a game plan or leadership team shift, overcoming obstacles, and planning for your personal and professional future.
Business Coaching
Definition of Business Coaching
On the other hand, we have business coaching. Thinking back to the ICF’s coaching definition, this is how we would tweak it to define business coaching:
“Executive coaching is partnering with entrepreneurs and business owners [in any capacity] in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their business and professional potential.”
Again, this is a broad definition, but because entrepreneurs and business owners come from a wide range of backgrounds and industries, business owners can help a broad range of different clients including leaders.
However, it differs from executive coaching because while it can help someone become a better leader along the way, that is not the focus.
A business coach specifically focuses on the success of an individual through inciting the growth of their business.
A business coach works one-on-one with their clients, assessing their strengths and weaknesses, figuring out what tools they need to reach their goals, and what obstacles are holding them back.
While at the same time, a business coach employs their business skills by taking a comprehensive and synoptic view of their business owner 's operation in order to strategize and implement an action plan that will ensure expedited business growth and success.
What Clients Benefit From Business Coaching?
The list of profiles of clients that could greatly benefit from business coaching would go on and on—too long to fit into one article. We did, however, condense the list into a few examples that would demonstrate how far-reaching and broad business coaching can be.
Revamping Small Business Owners
Being a successful business owner has always been a hard job; and this past year has doubled down on most small businesses. If a business didn’t adapt to the changes brought on by the pandemic and the modern, ever-changing business landscape, it doesn’t have a chance at weathering the storm—despite previously demonstrated success.
Instead of taking a blind stab at improving different areas of your business, a business coach utilizes tools that will take off that blindfold and personally guide you through the process of:
Implement Technological Advances into Your Business
Filling in Marketing Gaps
Being Efficient with Your Time and Resources
Focus on and Strengthen Your Existing Client Base
Business coaching will help you understand successful business practices so that you can continue to succeed on your own after your business coach is no longer working with you one-on-one.
Guidance and Accountability for Entrepreneurs
Although entrepreneurs still have to think about investors, clients, or partners, they essentially act as their own boss when managing their time and resources.
During your strategic planning session (or sessions), a business coach will evaluate your skills, assess where you are and where you want to be, measure success, help you set goals, and ultimately create a game plan to reach those goals.
A business coach will ask you critical questions, provide a clear picture of your progress, hold you accountable, and make sure you produce results that are aligned with your goals.
A business coach will also help you create boundaries to separate work, recreation, and rest—achieving personal improvement goals along the way.
Increasing Profits and Growing a Startup
At the end of the day, increasing profits and growing your business is the number one goal of any business owner or startup founder.
And if your main goal is to figure out how to do this, hiring a business coach is the next step for you.
IBISWorld industry statistics say that business coaches are consistently rising in popularity because of their evident ability to increase profits. In fact, as of 2021, corporate profits from business-related coaching are consistently increasing.
As the leader of a startup, your job is to constantly experiment in order to enact change and trigger growth.
A business coach is the best partner to help you test and retest the best marketing solutions, sales strategies, and product enhancements to land on the best possible solutions for your customers and to create organizational success.
A business coach will be intimately involved to push you forward, point out blind spots, act as a sounding board, build on your strengths, and reduce your weaknesses—that’s why a business coach can be one of the most valuable investments you can make as an entrepreneur and startup founder.
Bottom Line
Business and executive coaching have incredible potential to help individuals reach their goals and attain success—the way to choose which service is right for you is by figuring out what those goals are and what kind of success you want to attain.
Executive and business coaches take different paths and approaches to help their clients reach holistic personal and professional growth.
The bottom line is that both coaches want their clients to succeed and will work tirelessly to help that happen.
