How a coach can help you create and execute a vision for your life and career.
By Pete Mercer
Leadership development is a critical process for growth – the best leaders are shaped by their experiences and surroundings. That tension between your experience and surroundings is where the best development happens, but it helps to have someone walking you through how to utilize these developments.
That’s where a coach comes in. An effective coach can help you to work through your skillset and prioritize your personal and professional goals. The coach is usually an individual who has experience developing leaders and has the ability to see the untapped potential in everyone they work with.
Repertoire Magazine recently spoke to Aaron Keyes, an executive coach at Novus Global, about how coaching can empower people to become better leaders and better define their vision for what’s possible. Novus Global is a coaching firm based in California that works with Fortune 500 companies, professional athletes, world renowned artists and multimillionaire business leaders.
Empowering leaders, closing the gap
Keyes has been coaching leaders for 17 years, spending the last two years coaching in a full-time role. After 15 years of coaching leaders, creatives, songwriters, and pastors in a ministry setting, Keyes has pivoted his career to working one-on-one with leaders through Novus Global.
While professional development certainly plays a role in his coaching sessions with his clients, Keyes is much more interested in helping the people he works with to tap into their potential. He said, “We’re not asking people how you win or how you be the best – we’re asking what you are capable of. What’s the potential? What’s possible?”
Novus uses three major tenets in their coaching framework: everyone is capable of more than they think, your teams are capable of exponentially more than you think, and most people have the tendency to get in their own way, without a little assistance. Within those tenets, Novus then focuses on three core areas in executive coaching: vision, mindset, and strategy.
In the first couple of coaching calls, Keyes will get to know his clients and develop an idea of what they are looking for. Simply put, he’s looking to better understand what they really want.
He said, “It’s amazing how many people will work very hard, get to the end of the road, and realize they didn’t even want it – they were just on autopilot. Usually, people’s visions are just way too small. They’re playing it safe. What a lot of our coaching is doing is helping people identify the gap between where they are and what they want.”
From there, he works to adjust the mindset of each client. According to Keyes, “mindsets are the things that we realize along the way.” As the vision and gap are defined, problems with implementation start to come up. These problems are likely also affecting them in plenty of other areas as well, creating blind spots to what might be simple solutions. “A coach can help you to see what it’s like to be on the other side of you,” Keyes said.
Once the mindset shift takes place, Keyes works on building a strategy to help close that gap. This stage is all about finding the best way to move forward. For Keyes and his team, they are working to encourage people to chase what they most desire. The future is coming anyway, why not make it one that you want? His clients will set goals for where they want to be and what they want to do in the next 12 months, but it usually doesn’t even take that long to see progress.
He said, “Often in four months, they’ve already exceeded their 12-month goal. They haven’t had someone pushing them like a coach can.”
Leading from where you are
One of the most powerful things about leadership is that you don’t necessarily need to have a title to be effective. Sure, there are plenty of ways to implement change and influence those around you from the c-suite or director levels of an organization, but it’s not about the position you hold at your company.
“Authority is not a prerequisite for leadership, but a byproduct of leadership,” Keyes said. “Even someone who’s just a volunteer on their team that is actively showing integrity, making big commitments, keeping their word, and demonstrating character and competency, will begin to influence their surroundings.”
It’s all about ownership – if you can only affect 1% of what’s going on in your organization (or even your personal circumstances), it’s important to own 100% of that 1% as much as you can. No matter what position you hold at your company, you deserve to feel empowered and equipped to fulfill those responsibilities and excel at your job.
Many organizations want to inspire their sales teams to drive creativity and efficiency within the organization. From Keyes’ perspective, this approach might be misguided.
“People are driven. I don’t think it’s a lack of inspiration – I think it’s a lack of empowerment. One thing that doesn’t work is just ‘inspiring’ people. I’ve been to plenty of sales meetings where we’re just celebrating the top 10 people this month, and we’ll do it again next month. ‘Go get them team, you can do it!’ You might not be able to do it. You might need some tools. Everyone has their own strengths and weaknesses.”
Embracing feedback
One of the main components of the coaching relationship is getting feedback. It doesn’t work if it’s not honest, but just because it’s honest doesn’t mean it’s pleasant to hear. Very few of us like getting feedback, but it’s what this whole idea of coaching hinges on.
It’s an incredibly vulnerable spot to be in, especially when you’re in the middle of getting feedback. Keyes said, “I’m not there to be kind, I’m there to give them what no one else is giving them.”
The key here is to keep an open mind to whatever feedback your coach is bringing to your attention. The reason you’ve hired this person is to bring to your attention those areas that might need work and polishing. It requires a lot of trust that your coach is working to ensure that you can become better. Leave your ego at the door. There’s no progress without discomfort – it’s all a part of the process.
“Hypersensitivity to criticism is only going to hinder you – it’s not going to help you at all. We’ll walk with people through these discoveries, and they choose if they want to change. You can be hyper-defensive and easily offended if you want, but is that going to get you where you want to go? It seems to me that it hasn’t yet.”
What to look for in a coach
For Keyes, there are several components that make up an effective and proactive coach. Here are some of the qualities you should look for:
- Consistency – For anything to improve, you need consistency. With coaching, this means consistent meetings to establish a rhythm. Getting into a rhythm allows you to establish a regular cadence of feedback as you continue to develop as a leader. Keyes has regular meetings with his clients two to three times a month, giving them the time they need to implement his insights and discuss what worked and what didn’t.
- Authority – In this sense, authority means an ability to deliver insights and feedback with significant impact. When you’re looking for a coach, you don’t need someone who’s going to walk on eggshells and protect your emotions – you need someone who will tell you the truth. “A coach doesn’t tell you what to do, they help you see what you are doing that you don’t know you are doing. Authority matters, and it’s hard to fake.
- Investment – Keyes argued that at the end of the day, investing in coaching is an investment in your future. There needs to be stakes for coaching to be effective. He said, “People need to put themselves on the hook. They need to put some skin in the game so that they show up ready to get every drop of value out of that call.”