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Welcome to the Big Question Seminar with Suzi Pomerantz.

The seminar followed an appeal for coaches to share their most pressing questions about executive coaching.
We explored questions in these six areas:

• Leadership
• Coaching Effectiveness
• Growing A Coaching Business
• Communicating Benefits
• Positioning Coaching
• The Future Of Coaching

You’ll hear examples of the questions that coaches asked, Suzi’s thoughts on the issues, and a lively discussion with seminar participants.

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Love that we are a community of forward-thinkers!  Here were the questions that came in on the topic of the future of our profession:

Part 6:  The Future of Coaching:

1.  As the population ages, and many aging board members leave the boards of non profits, what are we doing to teach younger professionals about participating in such worthy organizations?

2.  Is coaching anything like managing a baseball team? (This question actually came from a NY Yankees email address…)

3.  If all the coaching clients of the world used vision boards as they are currently designed (i.e., promoting unlimited abundance of material stuff), and manifested all that stuff, given the negative impact on the environment that would have, would we coaches feel we had done more good or harm for the world?

4.  Does the future growth of coaching lay in teams of coaches centered around a few supermarketers?

5.  At conferences, seminars and workshops, we frequently talk about taking the coaching profession to the next level.  Why don’t we discuss what we mean by the next level for coaches and organizations? Before we can get there, we should know where we are going.

6.  While many report that business/executive coaching is a growing field, why would I believe that if the evidence I see is that coaching is shrinking as a field?  I was an internal coach at a Fortune 50 for 12 years…they recently laid off most internal coaches and none of the major players are hiring coaches at this time.  Do only a few big name business coaches and coaching firms get most of the clients?

7.  What’s the biggest possibility for the future of business/executive coaching, given everything that’s going on, given how the profession has been growing and the nature of it so far, and given that for the most part we are a bunch of independent people doing whatever we do in the safe bubble of our coaching conversations?

Several folks asked questions about how to grow their already successful coaching businesses to the next level.

Part 5:  Growing a Coaching Business

1.  What’s the best way to market and grow a business/executive coaching business?

2.  What are ways to leverage my time as a coach to be able to serve more people, to make it more affordable for clients, and to earn money for the time expended?

3.  How can a company create a viral word of mouth marketing program? Is there an organic or word of mouth practices that can be deployed?

4.  Is paying  Google for ad words, buying email lists, and other conventional marketing techniques the only way to create awareness?

5.  Many great coaches are not cut out to market themselves or own a business, and for them a team approach is ideal.  What will it take to create and sustain those teams of coaches and let them thrive?

6.  What other business models exist out there for coaches to grow a business that leverages their coaching expertise but breaks away from the time-for-money model?

7.  How do coaches get clients and who is growing in the business and how? Is it only by referrals?

This one is by far the favorite category, not surprisingly, of this group of leading coaches who posted questions.  Let’s engage in conversation via the comments box below!

Part 4:  Leadership

1.  The most compelling work is in developing coach-like leaders who keep the money where it belongs so they can make a greater contribution as can everyone below them.  How do we enable that in a big way?

2.  In a world where business rules are changing, a coach-like mindset inspires innovation.  Pixar is a great example.  How do we make a business case for this?

3.  My client asks, “I am President of the company and I believe strongly in the power of coaching.  At the same time, I believe in the power of leading.  How do I be a leader/coach?”

4.  How to ignite leadership in individuals when the current circumstances of life have them strictly in survival mode?

5.  Can people learn to be great leaders?

6.  How can we have many leaders for differentiation of client needs and broadening the scope of leadership within our profession?

7.  How can we further distinguish the profession of executive coaching and have it be so important in organizations that they can’t operate without it?

8.  How does a coach get across to business executives the concept that it’s all about people? It’s not about business.

9.  How will coaching help organizations implement ethical and sustainable leadership and growth?

10.  How can we help leaders of companies treat their employees as human beings who are entitled to continuous development and support of their well-being which  may lead to a business environment of cooperation, personal commitment, and greater creativity, productivity, and profitability?

11.  How do I unlearn the learning I had about coaching?

12.  How to maintain focus on goals/business in a fragmented world with mutiple social networking activities, friends, family and clients/ prospects with whom we want to maintain/build relationships when it seems to get harder and harder?

13.  If, independently of the organization’s existing metrics, a coach were asked to rank the top three qualities that should be developed in a leader, what would these be?

There were quite a few questions in this category of the effectiveness or impact of coaching.  As always, your comments and reactions are invited and encouraged! 

Part 3:  Coaching Effectiveness:

1.  How might we consistently add value to creating a sustainable culture of collaboration in the business world?

2.  Can coaches help a large sales team create a business plan using an approach of Objective-Vision-Strategy-Execution format with SWOT built into the execution?

3.  How to keep performing month after month with a mass based product mix of established brands?

4.   How is coaching going to be integrated (or serve as an integrator) going forward as complexity goes beyond one person’s/executive’s capability to handle it?

5.  Are you working with executive teams as an integrator with companies over 1 billion and are you in higher levels of capacity?

6.  What suggestions do you have to help me help my clients get “in state” so they can achieve better/more/any results that will be realized through the priceless information I provide them?

7.  How to bring focus to an organization?

8.  How to simplify goal setting?

9.  How to replace tons of KPIs nobody understands by compelling goal to everybody in the organization?

10.  How do we consistently and effectively challenge all of our clients to adopt their own dynamically changing and ever-transformative goals?

11.  Has anyone found a way to do laser coaching (creating an “ah-hah” in 15 minutes or less) and make a good living at it?

12.  How do we maintain one of the unique coaching essentials of ’staying in the questions’ and ’staying curious’? To me, this is one of the most valued and critical  distinctions of the coaching profession.

13.  What do you provide clients with that makes the largest difference in their life, business, and world?

14.  How will coaching integrate into business thinking?

15.  How do we get a leader to ask himself, “is there a better decision I can make here, knowing what I now know, if I talk to my coach before making this decision?”  In this instance, attending to your decision making being part of your business thinking.

16.  What is the biggest need of clients?

17.  The biggest question I ask my clients is, “What do you want?”

18.  I ask clients, “What else do you want to achieve in your life?  What’s stopping you from achieving it?”

19.  When is a directive vs. non-directive style most effective in executive coaching?

20.  For those who have experience coaching here and in other cultures, do you sense a greater willingness in other cultures to accepting help from a coach? (How would you compare the notion of “I can do this myself” vs. willingness to open oneself to being coached across cultures?)

21.  Best practices in both creating opportunity and maintaining balance in the tension that exists between 1 on 1 executive coaching and organizational consulting. I find many times in working with executives on their development, organzational dysfunctions become apparent. What is the role of the coach in this dynamic?

In this second installment of the BIG questions we received, there were a number of questions grouped in the category of ROI or business benefit.  Please be sure to add your comments and reactions in the comment section below!

Part 2: ROI and Business Benefit

1.  Do I need a coach to improve my business? Will a coach really be beneficial in my business?

2.  If I am an employee right now, but I am interested in taking over the business eventually, would coaching help me make an effective plan for that?

3.  What is the most effective way to connect with leaders in organizations to share the power of coaching conversations to effect culture change?

4.  How can we help untapped potential clients see the benefits of coaching as a way to strengthen their business and manage stress precisely because the economic environment is so unstable and stressful rather than as a nice-to-have extra when things calm down?

5.  How does one effectively promote the value of coaching when immediacy has become expected?  How do you slow the company down and motivate the client to see that each small step is a victory when managing expectations and promoting ROI?

6.  What evidence do we have, or do we need to acquire, to definitively prove the ROI that our clients receive from business/executive coaching?

7.  How to unfreeze organizations to get them to move forward with coaching for development initiatives?

8.  How can we help leaders make the compelling business case for the return on this investment in these most challenging times?

9.  How are we, coaches, going to figure out how to substantiate the results of our work? McKinsey & Co did this for the consulting industry with strategy techniques. How are we going to do it?

As you know, we ran an ‘ask campaign’ inviting leading coaches to post their one BIG question about business coaching.  We were blown away with the results…nearly 60 questions came pouring in, and we have analyzed and categorized them in order to be able to present them to you here, as well as on today’s Big Question Seminar.  Rather than simply load all 50+ questions into one blog post, we have divided them up by category, and each category of similarly-typed questions will be posted together on one blog post.  For simplicity’s sake, we have only posted the questions without the authors’ commentary.  Your thoughts and reactions are invited!  Let’s get some dialogue going on these in the comment box below!

Part 1:  Positioning

1.  Is the term “business coaching” too broad?  How can we break down and define meaningful fields of coaching that have to do with social and organizational aspects beyond life coaching?

2.  In the natural contraction of business, should coaching be considered a luxury, or is coaching crucial aide to helping companies out of a slump?  Do we, as sellers of the service, need to know when a company should appropriately cut coaching and when they should add it?

3.  When during a recession does an organization really need coaching?

4.  Does executive coaching have much of a future as more and more folks get into it and it becomes more and more of a commodity?

5.  Do I really want to coach clients if I am not working inside their culture and connected with strategic issues?

6.  How do you tell a coach from a charlatan, teacher, guru, priest, shrink, partner, friend when you really need one?

7.  How do we keep the term “executive coaching” from being expanded to the point of meaningless in the marketplace?

8.  How to educate buyers on the difference of executive coaching from therapy, managing and consulting?

9. How do we turn around the market perception that coaches fix people?

10.  If nearly everyone in any advisory capacity calls themselves a coach today, what value is there to calling yourself a coach?

11.  What is the difference between coaching and mentoring?

12.  Business is going through a transformation and will not be as it was after this recession is over.  How do we reposition ourselves to meet hte needs of a “different” marketplace?  What adjustments do we need to make for future success?

(If this is your first time visiting the Leading Coaches’ Center, Welcome! We’d love to have you join us!)