I recently had a chat with one of our long-term clients about coaching and the reasons they decided to enter into coaching and they have so far received from it. What they said was…..
“The first thing to say is that the most important thing a founder needs to benefit from business coaching is a desire to be coached. It’s easy to be busy running my business, but I need to want to improve me and my business. That takes an ability and desire to pause from my typical day to day tasks and acknowledge that I have both the time and the desire to improve from the guidance and make changes. I needed to remind myself that the coach had something that I wanted: the skills that I need to accomplish my goals, and the results to demonstrate his success.
The initial element of opening up about my weaknesses, my lack of knowledge or skills in certain areas to a coach is difficult. To be effective, I needed to be open and honest with my coach. Without that honesty and openness, my coach would not have an accurate picture of me and my business.
I can’t even count all of the ways that I am benefiting from leadership coaching. I’ve achieved my initial goal of growing my business from pre revenue to revenue, from 5 staff to 24 staff. Together we’ve identified more goals and the steps that it will take to accomplish them. My COO and I have built direction for the business, a vision and a clear strategy. Our alignment has improved the efficiency and efficacy of the business.
Through executive coaching, I have improved my leadership skills in incremental steps.
I am grateful for the accountability that my coach provides. My day is filled with meetings and I’m busy running my business. But it’s difficult to take time to work on my business and to strategically analyze and develop plans for growing it. At the end of each coaching session, we always set goals between us. At our meeting the following month, he asks me to share the progress I’ve made with the goals we set.
You might be thinking, as I did just over a year ago, that “I don’t have the time or money to meet with an executive coach.” But I’m so glad that I found an executive coach who’s already experienced the ups and downs of growing businesses, knows the necessary leadership skills, and is helping me along the path to strategically build my business with integrity and working smarter.
I encourage you to find a leadership coach. Every leader can benefit in countless ways from the experience and encouragement of a leadership coach.”