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Who needs a personal coach?

Maybe you do--whether you know it or not?
New job. New employer. And new headaches when staffers resist your new approaches. How can you champion enough change to justify your hiring -- without rocking the boat so much that you endanger your career prospects?

Leaders in new positions often fail for a few common reasons: due to unclear or outsized expectations, a failure to build partnerships with key stakeholders, a failure to learn the company, industry or the job itself fast enough, a failure to determine the process for gaining commitments from direct reports and a failure to recognize and manage the impact of change on people.

Onboarding coaching of the newly recruited or promoted executive can turnaround this high rate of failure.

FORTUNE magazine reports that one reader said, "I went into the coaching experience kicking and screaming, at the insistence of my then-boss. And what an eye-opener it turned out to be. I won't even go into the grim details of bad management habits I had unthinkingly developed in my 14-year career up to that point--but I will say that since I was 'cured' by 12 weeks of pretty intense coaching, I've been promoted three times."

What makes a good executive coach?

High-Level Business Experience

For the relationship to work, Coach John Agno believes the executive and the coach must be peers. To be able to provide appropriate guidance, the coach should have not only worked in the corporate world, but also have held senior line positions.

Interpersonal Competencies
The coach must be adept at handling all sorts of complex, touchy interpersonal dynamics, at sizing up a situation quickly and dealing with a wide range of personalities. Good listening skills are critical.

Integrity
Executive coaching often involves discussing not only sensitive personal issues, but also high-level, strategic and confidential information. Honesty and the ability not to betray a confidence are essential.

Political Savvy
To be effective, executives must be able to navigate the tricky political waters of their organization. A competent coach needs to be up to helping him or her do that.

Flexibility and Creativity
You never quite know what's going to happen when lots of egos, ambitions and agendas collide. And that calls for the ability to turn on a dime, to come up with new solutions when necessary---or---to be able to discard ideas when they seem ineffective. At the same time, the coach should be comfortable with ambiguity, fast change and lots of uncertainty.

Tough Love
Ultimately, coaching is all about achieving real, bottom-line results. The coach needs to be able to confront tough issues, hold people accountable and demand tangible outcomes.

Comfort at the Top
Unless the coach can relate to upper management--and understands the expectations of boards and shareholders--he or she won't be able to grasp the subtleties of each coaching situation.

Organizational Insight
The goal of executive coaching is to strengthen a person's performance as it relates to both individual and corporate objectives.

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