Coaching is a time bound engagement between a coach and a coachee to deliver a specific goal. Increasingly organizations are using this as a tool towards developing their senior professionals and executives. This use of coaches for senior executives is called executive coaching.
More often companies get into an executive coaching program because it is a recent fad or a senior executive has asked for it. In these cases, the intervention is ill thought through, designed to be small and rarely helps make a breakthrough in an organisation. Shared below are three questions to ask your executive leadership before you start an executive coaching program.
Here are a few questions you may ask the executives before starting a coaching program
Why does the business need it?
This is the first question to ask leadership that wants to initiate an executive coaching program. Coaching is a heavy investment. This is both in terms of capital and time commitment needed by the CXOs and the executives being coached. There needs to be a fundamental change that drives the need to build a coaching program. If there is y no change in the business strategy or goals, then coaching may not be the right tool. Do ask the sponsor, what is changing in the business. What is the expected revenue the change will bring? Is it a major change that needs the executives to build a new mindset? Why can the old way of doing things not work? What would happen if we do not start a coaching program? With these inputs, evaluate if coaching program is the right intervention for the organization or will the same output be achieved with a training or a workshop?
Are the executives coachable?
Being coachable is one of the most important criteria towards success of a coaching program. Coaching is not a medicine. A coachee contributes as much as a coach to the success of a coaching program. A coachee has to work on self to deliver the results. This may not be easy, especially if the coachee is not willing to change. Individual assessment on coachability is vital for checking if the person is ready to be coached. Some of the factors in coachability check include willingness to take out time for coaching, committing to learning, willingness to apply learnings in business. This is a structured test and must be administered before investing in a coaching program.
What is success at the end of the coaching intervention?
If we do not know what we are seeking, we will never find it. Coaching works exactly like that. As a sponsor or the leader of the coaching initiative, you should be very clear of exactly what does success look like for each of the engagements. This means defining a goal, knowing what its success looks like before the intervention starts and then following up to make sure that coaching is delivering exactly to those needs. This is where you may also use the help of a coach and an organization that has mature processes to allow you to keep a track of that.
Ask these questions to your executive leadership, help them build an answer and then design a coaching program that can help you and your company grow to the next level.

Vivek Slaria is the founder of Greenlatte (www.greenlatte.co.in) and works with companies to help design and deliver large scale coaching intervention. Reach him at [email protected]