What separates effective executive coaching from expensive conversations

While characteristics like active listening, facilitating learning, and earning trust and respect are important in an executive coach, progress can still be non-existent if your coach doesn’t do one essential thing: teach.

Just like a sports coach is an expert at their game, an executive coach should be an expert at leadership and a source of new skills and tactics to improve capacity and performance.

If you’ve worked with a coach for months and made little progress – even with a good working relationship – it’s likely because your coach isn’t teaching.

Coaching vs mentoring vs facilitating

Executive coaches that fail to teach typically do so because they lack leadership expertise. Instead, they end up acting as mentors or facilitators.

Imagine that you’ve recently been promoted to CEO in your organisation. While your track-record will have got you to this position, the role will require you to develop competence in a variety of situations, and a change of mindset and increased sophistication of behaviour to navigate them.

A coach who is acting as a mentor in this context will tend to focus on sharing wisdom and guidance from their own experiences. This can be useful, but if they are not also drawing on expert leadership advice, then it restricts you to learning from their lived experience, which is only a partial solution.

On the other hand, a coach who takes a facilitative approach will guide you on a learning journey where you make your own discoveries. However, without appropriate input when needed, this can force you to teach yourself based on your own knowledge and experience.

Neither of these approaches by themselves can provide the full breadth of development needed for you to be effective in your role. Instead, an effective executive coach will help you navigate the new experiences and advise and instruct you on the mindsets and behaviours you need. While they will draw on coaching and facilitating techniques, their primary role is to be a leadership teacher.

Signs that your coach is mentoring, not teaching:

• They do more talking than you and sessions focus more on their career than yours.
• Sessions lack structure or don’t focus enough on business performance and goals.
• You start to feel dependent on them for decisions instead of growing your own abilities.
• They stop asking questions and jump straight to dictating a solution.

 Signs that your coach is facilitating, not teaching:

• Your sessions stay surface-level instead of investigating what’s driving your behaviours or attitudes.
• They rarely challenge or push you to develop a leadership mindset or behaviours outside your comfort zone.
• You leave sessions with no new skills or approaches to apply to your current challenges.

Coaching for leadership development

So, what does effective executive coaching for leadership development look like?

Where a facilitator will ask what you think you can do better and a mentor will tell you how they did it, an expert teaching coach will:

• Identify what you could do better,
• Explain what good looks like and where to use it, and
• Help you to prepare, practice and reflect on the mindsets and behaviours you’re learning.

In practice, this often looks like spending half of a coaching session focused on commercial decisions, actions and advice, and the other half focused on skill building. This ensures your sessions are practical and disciplined, and that progress is measurable.

If you’re failing to make progress in your coaching sessions, it may not be your fault. You may be stuck with a coach who isn’t doing enough teaching. If your coach isn’t an expert on leadership and isn’t helping to develop your capabilities, then it’s time to consider an alternative. Browse Sterling Black’s list of expert board, CEO and C-Suite coaches here.