Leadership Development and Executive Coaching
Individual and Collective Leadership Development Programs for Your C-Suite Executives and Senior Leaders
You’ve made it! Congratulations!
Your experience, skills, and years in the game have supported you to climb to the top of the corporate ladder.
You’ve earned an executive role and you and a small group of your peers hold the ultimate responsibility for creating outcomes that matter in your organization.
However, now that you’ve arrived as a senior leader, you may be noticing some subtle changes.
Which of the following have you experienced?
People you’ve had relationships with for years, seem a bit stiffer than before. You might even notice a guardedness or cautiousness when they speak with you. But why? You’re the same person as before. Surely it’s just your imagination.
You’ve learned that good leaders ask a lot of questions, yet sometimes you notice that people seem to be searching for the answer they think you want to hear, rather than what they actually think. Similarly, you’re starting to wonder what they are keeping to themselves that might be really useful for you to know.
The words you speak magically turn into directives, even though you thought the point of the meeting was to brainstorm together. You feel like you need to be careful about where and when to think out loud.
There’s an unspoken expectation that you know what is best, almost as if the title bestowed instant wisdom and authority upon you. Now they’re all looking to you as the one who knows. It feels uncomfortable though, because you don’t… always.
It’s lonely at the top.
You need a place where you can put things on the table and take a closer look at them, speaking frankly and sorting out your thoughts without a risk of being misunderstood. Every senior leader should have a seasoned executive coach as a partner in finding this strategic clarity.
As well, you recognize that the mastery over your previous subject matter and operational roles that helped you land here, must be augmented with new strengths and qualities now that you’re responsible for a much broader scope of work.
Wise executives consciously create a company culture where people feel comfortable to bring forward their expertise to contribute to creating the very best results together.
Anjali Leadership helps you do this.
Through our partnership, you will create an environment primed to boost confidence across the organization, build trust amongst peers, and align efforts for initiatives to take off and make a profound impact on the success of the organization and future generations.
We’re ready to make this a reality with you!
WHAT OUR CLIENTS SAY ABOUT THEIR EXPERIENCE WITH ANJALI LEADERSHIP:
Our Clients Include:
Individual and Collective Leadership Development, customized for your unique situation.
When we work with your executive team, we typically start with a Leadership Culture Audit to identify the unique patterns of behavior that underpin your company culture.
This pinpoints a potent collective leadership development pathway that your executive team can follow.
Our individual leadership development work begins with a 360-degree leadership assessment for each executive team member.
We use the Leadership Circle Profile™, which we consider to be the best 360 instrument in the world.
Our founder, Shahmeen Sadiq, MCC, spent 11 years certifying and mentoring coaches in the use of this instrument and is one of a few global masters in this field.
Are you ready to discuss a customized plan for your organization?
Frequently Asked Questions about Executive Coaching and Leadership Development
What is Executive Coaching?
Executive coaching is a service to help leaders who occupy the most senior roles in organizations to become more effective in working with their colleagues, direct reports, customers and teams, so that the organization can achieve better results.
What can Executive Coaching do for a leader?
An executive coach is a skilled partner who works closely with a leader to help them:
– articulate and move towards business outcomes or goals more easily
– overcome obstacles that the leader inevitably will experience along the way
– navigate difficult conversations and situations more gracefully
– develop broader systems awareness in order to respond competently to external forces and influence change and growth across the organization
– leverage existing strengths optimally
– expand competency range beyond existing strengths
How much does Executive Coaching cost?
The investment for competent executive coaching from a seasoned, certified practitioner differs depending upon your location. For North American markets, budget at least $20-40K per year for each executive receiving the service, depending upon the scope of the engagement.
Who pays for Executive Coaching?
Typically the organization pays for executive coaching.
Over the years we’ve seen this investment being pieced together from various learning & development or professional development budgets.
In times where many organizations cannot demonstrate a return on investment for their coaching dollars, we recommend a conscious and strategic approach to this work:
– Think about leadership development as an essential ingredient to your strategic advantage.
– Find a leadership development provider that uses a sound developmental framework that scales to the collective level, with clear Directionality. This provider should demonstrate that they understands that this work has to be coordinated and sequenced from the top levels of the organization, then through the ranks, in order to make and sustain a meaningful improvement.
– Make a multi-year commitment to the work. Embodied and integrated leadership transformation is different from spouting back concepts and theories that are taught in standalone courses or workshops. It is long-term work that must begin at the top of the house if you truly want your entire organization to benefit.
– Allocate a line item in your annual budget for leadership development to provide stability for this strategic investment.
How do I know I need Executive Coaching?
Executive coaching is especially useful when:
– You have been newly promoted into a senior leadership role
– Your organization is facing significant change systemically (regulatory, industry-wide, societal, etc.) or in the immediate environment (merger, acquisition, workforce reductions)
– You’ve been given feedback about some changes you need to make to your leadership and haven’t been able to successfully move the needle yourself (common things our clients have heard include the need need to develop more ‘executive presence’, or emotional intelligence, or system awareness)
What's the return on investment for leadership development?
There are various ways to quantify a return on investment. We’ve listed some common measures below, but it will largely depend upon what your organization is trying to solve for:
– meeting or exceeding revenue and performance goals
– reduced turnover of your highest performers
– accelerated innovation in your market
– improved corporate reputation
– improved ease of operations
How does Executive Coaching work?
A typical executive coaching engagement lasts one year. It begins with a leadership assessment to give you data about how the people you work with (bosses, peers, direct reports and others) experience your leadership. This feeds into a development plan that you and your coach will use to guide your work together. Most leaders like to set a regular appointment with their coach every two weeks.
What happens in a typical Executive Coaching session?
You bring the topic and situation you’d like to work on to the session, including reflections on any experiments you and your coach came up at a previous session. Coaching is a co-creative conversation that helps you to utilize your natural gifts and strengths for maximum effectiveness, AND helps you stretch into new areas of competency that are required for the role, rank and scope you are responsible for. You leave the session with insights generated through that conversation and ideally with another experiment to run between this session and the next one.
My coach asks me a lot of questions but never tells me what they think. Is that how this is supposed to work?
No.
Most of the well-known coach training and certification institutions teach that coaching is a co-creative process of helping the client find their truth, their best path forward, and their highest satisfaction and success. Coaches are trained to ask powerful questions that lead clients to new insights and possibilities, while suspending the (all so common) urge to jump in with advice or suggestions.
However, questions alone do not constitute a robust corporate leadership development or executive coaching program!
The best leadership development coaching offers all that depth along with something we call Directionality.
Directionality means there is a path that the coach can articulate for your particular situation, that will help you move from where you are now, to a way of leading that is better in some way. They may even offer suggestions for experiments that you are free to decide whether or not to use.
We believe Directionality is an essential element to any credible leadership development engagement.