Executive Coaching for Results: The Definitive Guide to Developing Organizational Leaders
By Brian O Underhill, Kimcee McAnally, John J Koriath
Narrated by Richard Dalke
Audition Script
The word coach derives from 15th-century Hungary, referring to the village of Kocs, where fine transportation coaches were first constructed. The purpose of a coach was to transport people from where they were to where they wanted to go.
Similarly, executive coaches facilitate the transportation of leaders to new levels of development and effectiveness. The optimal conditions for the journey include an integrated organizational system and human resources (HR) or leadership development (LD) practitioners to facilitate the journey, a coach trained and appropriate for the job, and a leader eager (or at least willing) to be transported somewhere.
A good place to start is to set the executive coaching foundation and build from there. What is coaching? Why do coaching? Who receives coaching? We’ll take a further look into these basics in this chapter.
What Is Coaching?
Scroll through the academic, consulting, and other literature and you will find about as many definitions of executive coaching as there are coaches in the marketplace.
Here are a few examples:
The essence of executive coaching is helping leaders get unstuck from their dilemmas and assisting them to transfer their learning into results for the organization. Mary Beth O’Neil
Action coaching is a process that fosters self-awareness and that results in the motivation to change, as well as the guidance needed if change is to take place in ways that meet organizational needs.
-Dotlich and Cairo
A helping relationship formed between a client who has managerial authority and responsibility in an organization and a consultant who uses a wide variety of behavioral techniques and methods to help the client achieve a mutually identified set of goals to improve his or her professional performance and personal satisfaction and, consequently to improve the effectiveness of the client’s organization within a formally defined coaching
agreement. -Kilberg
Executive Coaching is a one-on-one training and collaborative relationship between a certified or self-proclaimed coach and an executive interested in improving him- or herself primarily in career or business related skills.
-Wikipedia, today’s leading “Web 2.0” resource for user-generated content
