The Executive Coaching Models You Need to Know in 2021
When an executive coach employs an effective leadership coaching model within their coaching sessions, it will increase revenue for their client’s business, boost leadership and employee performance within their organization, and improve their client’s life and those around them.
According to Jay Wolf, a Forbes Coaches Council Member and all-star New York-based executive performance coach says that.
“The coaching process is an investment in the development of an organization’s most important asset — its human capital. And an effective leadership coaching model is needed for organizational success on a wider scale”
Executive Coaching has always been an alternate form of development; it has always steered away from the norm, challenging outdated ways of improving professional performance with innovative techniques and perspectives.
In order to help their clients, executive coaches use effective and practical executive coaching models that will get their clients the coaching outcomes they paid for.
What Is a Good Executive Coaching Model?
A coaching model is the process of how you’re going to get your client from point A (where you are) to point B (where you want to be).
In the simplest terms: as an executive coach, your job is to help your clients make big (and small) changes in their professional and personal lives—a coaching model is how you go about strategizing and encouraging those changes.
A coaching model is the groundwork that will guide a coaching journey and a tangible framework to offer clients; it shows how your executive coaching services will help them reach their goals.
How Do You Structure a Coaching Session?
With a good coaching model.
Successful executive coaches follow carefully constructed coaching models that they implement into their overall strategy as well as their day-to-day sessions.
Some coaches create coaching models of their own while others use models that have worked faultlessly for other executive coaches across the years; some coaches layer several coaching models into their sessions while other use one model to encompass their coaching services.
There are many different types of models out there for different types of coaching services, as well as a variety of models that adhere to varying coaching principles and ideologies.
So, what might work for a specific personality type or profession might not work for someone in a different boat.
It’s up to the individual coach to determine their desired coaching model (or models) according to their coaching style, coaching skills, niche, and clientele.
However, it is important for an executive coach to focus on developing their client’s core leadership values no matter your coaching method. The cornerstone of every coaching session should touch on developing and maintaining these core skills.
4 Executive Coaching Models You Need to Know
Being aware of the most effective leadership coaching models is the best way to determine how your executive coaching services can take you or your clients from where they are to where they want to be.
To make it easy for you, we created a guide that details the most innovative and effective executive coaching models in 2021:
Action Centered Leadership Model
John Adair’s Action Centered Leadership Model is simple and effective enough to use as a business coaching model as well as an executive coaching model for all levels of leadership.
This model focuses on the upkeep of three areas that a leader should divide their time developing, although sometimes, depending on certain circumstances, one area might need more attention than the others.
Three Key Responsibility Areas:
Task Achievement-This involves your client's role as leader to get their team closer to their objective by identifying the goal, creating strategies to attain it, allocating tools and resources, etc.
Team Formation/Upkeep-A team must work as a unified entity. You build a team up by setting team standards, monitoring conflict, encouraging good communication, giving constructive criticism, etc.
Individual Development-A team is successful when each unit is positively contributing. A leader’s job is to address each team member's personal needs so that their motivation and direction are aligned with the team as a whole. It’s important to dedicate time and resources to team individuals.
This coaching model is flexible enough to be implemented into any type of leadership; executive coaches can use this model with leaders like managers, CEOs, or team leaders from organizations—big or small.
2. Victim vs. Player Framework
This framework is derived from a world-renown executive coach Fred Kofman. He wrote about this theory extensively in his book Conscious Business, and it has taken off as a method that executive coaches everywhere have now reworked into their sessions.
The Victim/Player approach can be used when tackling any challenging situation—big or small.
According to Kofman, there are two vectors in any situation—the set of causes that are in your control and those that are out of your control.
When something occurs, a client can either think, “this happened to me,” or choose to see how they influenced whatever occurred.
Victim—“I was late to the meeting because of traffic.”
Player—“I was late to the meeting because I did not wake up or get ready on time.”
The first phrase list causes that are out of your control—deeming you innocent but at the same time incompetent.
The latter is a set of causes that are in your control which accepts your culpability in the situation but enables you to act differently, empowering you to improve and realize the power you have over your life.
Challenge Vs. Responseability
In Kofman’s words: “If you don’t feel you are part of the problem, you cannot be a part of the solution.”
A coach’s job is to help their clients choose to take responsibility in the situation and focus on what they can control in order to proactively reach a solution.
Ask your client these questions:
How did you contribute to creating the situation?
What can you do now?
What can you learn from this?
Choosing to see a problem as something that “happened to you” only disempowers you and stalls your progression.
When you show a client how they took part in the situation or problem to overcome, they can use that in the future to not commit the same mistake or proactively make a different choice.
3. GROW Model
The GROW Model is one of, if not the, most popular coaching models out there. It's problem-solving and goal-setting approach is used by business and executive coaches alike.
GROW is a coaching technique originally developed in the 1980s by executive coaching pioneer Sir John Whitmore.
It’s an all-encompassing framework designed to guide your overall coaching structure, individual coaching sessions, and as a tool your clients can use on their own in their daily lives moving forward.
The GROW Model stands for:
Goal—First, you begin by setting a realistic short or long-term goal.
Reality—Determine where you presently stand in relation to your goal.
Options—Exploring options and establishing the different routes available to reach your objective.
Way Forward—Elect your desired route and create an action plan that will lead you to your goal and desired outcomes.
The acronyms are the coaching tools that push you step-by-step to follow through on immediate aspirations or big picture objectives.
During the coaching process, a coach's role is to help their client answer these questions independently by asking open-ended questions, listening, and exploring a client’s vision together.
A coach should act as a sounding board and brainstorming partner for the coachee to let them arrive at the answers and reach their goals themselves.
4. Calendar Driven vs. Event-Driven Coaching Sessions
Dick Grote, an internationally celebrated executive coach, wrote for the Harvard Business Review that when coaches structure their sessions, they should employ either one of these two coach scheduling models:
Calendar Driven
Consistent, scheduled, formal meetings that should become part of the client's routine. Increasing the frequency of the coaching also increases the coaching’s success; it’s effective to schedule your next meeting at the end of every sit-down.
Grote says to ask this question at the beginning of every calendar-driven session:
“What were the major events that have taken place since the last time we sat down like this?”
It’s also helpful to ask the client a few days before your meeting to send you a list of possible topics they want to cover when you meet so that you can both mentally prepare.
Event-Driven
These sessions are not previously scheduled on your calendar but are more spur-of-the-moment and arise when an event in your client's life demands a session.
These sessions focus on the event or activity that inspired them and revolve around adequate “teachable moments.”
Bottom Line
While a client needs the help of an executive coach to enact professional change and improvement, an executive coach needs a coaching model to guide them as they help their client.
A business coaching model can make or break an executive coach; if you aren’t implementing and following a coaching model that isn’t effective or doesn’t fit your client’s personality and needs—neither of you will get very far.
As executive coaching grows more and becomes, more accessible, new and exciting coaching tools are created and constantly improve and revolutionize the coaching industry.
What effective coaching models have you or your coach used in the past that we might not be aware of? Share your experiences below:
