According to Gallup research, employees don’t believe that their employer is invested in them or their development, Gallup research showed. Just 39% of employees strongly believe that someone at work cares about them, down from 47% in March 2020. And the percentage of workers who strongly believed that a colleague or manager was “encouraging their development” dropped to 30% last year from 36% in March 2020.
Jim Harter, Gallup’s chief scientist for workplace management and well-being, believes employers must change how they interact with workers to improve their engagement and satisfaction. He said that poor communication and a lack of “organization” hurt a company’s culture, especially regarding hybrid and remote work.
“I think [satisfaction] will start to stabilize when organizations start realizing that they’ve got to adjust how they manage people so that they’re in touch with them more often, so they build more predictability into their environment,” Harter said.
Beyond that, employees don’t believe that their employer is invested in them or their development, Gallup research showed. Just 39% of employees strongly believe that someone at work cares about them, down from 47% in March 2020. And the percentage of workers who strongly believed that a colleague or manager was “encouraging their development” dropped to 30% last year from 36% in March 2020.
Furthermore, only 46% of employees know what’s expected of them at work, down from 56% nearly five years ago. Harter claims that “the first and primary thing that needs to be fixed” is for employers to ensure that workers understand their responsibilities and have help in adjusting priorities if necessary, adding that people can’t be as effective without clear expectations.
5 Benefits of Executive Coaching:
1. An increase in confidence
2. Better interpersonal skills
3. Improved problem-solving and decision-making abilities
4. Work-life balance
5. Career advancement
Organizational skills
Benefits of executive coaching can be felt by the whole organization. For example, organizations often notice an increase in:
1. Employee satisfaction
2. Collaboration in the workplace
3. Communication skills
4. Clarity and perspective
5. Improved leadership skills
According to a study by Kombarakaran et al., 81% of 114 executive coaching participants reported meeting their expectations in coaching. A principal components analysis revealed five areas of improvement:
People management – managing direct reports, influencing, conflict management, giving feedback, and leadership style.
Improvements:
• Relationships with manager
• Goal setting and prioritization
• Productivity and personal engagement with work
• Communicating with others
• Increased self-awareness and responsibility
Another area we frequently hear leaders and managers requiring support in is increasing their self-awareness and responsibility.
In an article, Harvard Business Review shares the importance of leaders developing self-awareness and how acting on that self-awareness through responsibility leads to better leadership when working with a coach.
Coaching enables the leader to take different perspectives on board about how they are experienced and the links between that and great leadership.
Self-awareness is the starting block of emotional intelligence, made famous through the work of Daniel Goleman and referred to significantly in the book he co-authored, Primal Leadership. Emotional Quotient (EQ) is said to tip the scales more in leadership than Intellectual Quotient
(IQ), so increased self-awareness, combined with a desire to improve one’s leadership skills and working with an executive coach to do this, creates a lasting change in a leader that has a ripple effect that lasts way beyond the coaching itself.
Increased job satisfaction and engagement
According to research by Employment Studies, executive coaching has been associated with higher employee well-being at work, not to mention employee engagement.
Considering how a leader’s emotional well-being impacts the people they lead (neuroscience research by Dr. Tara Swart referenced in the Diary of a CEO podcast), the longer-term impact of executive coaching not only impacts the well-being and employee engagement of the leader but also the people they lead, bringing increased well-being and higher employee engagement to the organization.
Long-term personal transformation
Research conducted as part of The long-term impact of coaching in an executive MBA program discovered that when business schools were asked to select the top development activity for leadership, they said coaching/mentoring. Three themes emerged from the study:
- Coaching results in personal development by overcoming personal deficiencies
- Coaching translates into learning about leadership
- Coaching motivates sustained change
Some of the participant’s comments include:
- “Coaching opened up my eyes to my own insecurities and my own biases taught me how to be more tolerant of others.”
- “The coaching experience was valuable, personally, professionally and academically.”
- “A lot of what I focused on was a lot of personal development, and of course, that evolved into leadership development as well.”
- “The coach was able to help me translate and take some personal characteristic traits and turn that into something I could work on to communicate more effectively.”
The qualitative data supports the quantitative data findings and indicates that the results can be attributed, at least partially, to the coaching experience.
Enhanced problem-solving and decision-making
One of the challenges regularly presented to Leadership Coaches is the challenge that leaders face as they move through the transitional points of leadership, e.g., manager to leader.
A frequent leadership challenge is “How do I develop the ability to effectively analyze where we are at the moment and make some strategic decisions on where we need to focus?”
A study by Consulting Psychology Journal discovered that executive coaching helped leaders develop better problem-solving and decision-making skills. As a result of coaching, participants demonstrated an increased capacity to analyze complex issues, consider multiple perspectives, and make strategic decisions.
Coaching uses many techniques, and some of these include perception-taking and time-lining. An excellent executive coach knows the right incisive question to ask to provoke the leader’s thinking and learning so they start to develop and/or improve critical leadership skills.
Contact us today at [email protected] to learn more about how our team of credible executive coaches can support you in your development journey.