Executive Coaching Step 5: Evaluation
My name is Sari van Poelje. I’m an executive coach, team coach and expert in business agility. On the one hand I have schools where I teach coaches and consultants to become kick ass intervention experts. And on the other hand, I help businesses, family, businesses, startups, to grow, and to thrive in these turbulent times.
We’re talking about executive coaching. We went through a general model, contact, contract, problem definition and interventions. Now we’re at the fifth step in this iterative cycle of coaching – evaluation.
Patricia Clarkson, really helped us figure out what kind of criteria you use for your evaluation. There are other models, such as the ICF, the International Coaching Federation with a set of criteria that makes good coaching. The EMCC, the European Mentoring and Coaching Council has criteria too. But I’ll share this one with you because I think it’s to the point.
What do I look at when I want to figure out if it’s been a good executive coaching process?
- Contract realisation: The most obvious one is: did we realise the contract, the agreement we made at the beginning of the coaching together?
- Key issues identified: In key issues identified you look underneath the surface of the immediate problem, to see what the obstacles are to solving these problems yourself. The executives who come to me, are successful people, but they’re stuck. We are looking for the recurring patterns they get stuck in.
- Reduction of harm: The third evaluation criteria that I use is reduction of potential harm. In a previous blog I mentioned the guy who didn’t sleep, didn’t eat, didn’t do sports and wasn’t taking care of himself. Part of your evaluation criteria should be whether you have managed to reduce potential harm to the client, to his team and to the environment.
- Professional and personal development: The fourth one is have I helped this person to develop not only professionally, but personally. When you are an executive leader, you are your own instrument. You can learn techniques and methods, but it’s your relationship with the people in your team and your environment that makes you successful or not. Personal development is an integral part of your professional development and executive coaching.
- Coach models process: When I contract, I want to be the change they want to achieve. So when someone says to me, for instance, I’m lonely in the organisational change process. I want to model the potential of creating partnership during the coaching process, as a model for the client to create more partnerships in their organisation.
- Respectful and equal relationship: In TA we call that an okay/okay relationship. Within the coaching experience we stay in an equal relationship, where we both respected each other as a person. People come to me and I value them as equals. I don’t get above them, I don’t go below them, I’m at the same level.
I invite you to create an evaluation form and to send this to your clients. Check to see if you’re already on the right track with these criteria. And when you’ve done that, let me know I’d love to hear your experiences with this. Good luck in your executive coaching process.
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