At the recent Leadership Coaching and Mentoring Annual Award Ceremony someone asked me "what is executive coaching?”

Executive coaching for corporate leaders is gaining recognition as an effective executive development tool which African corporate leadership must take advantage of.

The high potential of leadership skills in Africa can only be realised if national and private institutions on the continent embrace executive coaching as management imperative for business and social development.

For high potential individuals both in the private and public sector Executive Coaching will help unlock their leadership capacity to exceptional levels.

However, executive coaching is not only for top management but can also be used across different layers of the organisation from the C Suite to lower management levels and across individuals with differing needs.

This relatively new phenomenon in Africa is slowly gaining recognition with countries such as Rwanda making great strides in this endeavour– thanks to President Paul Kagame.

This has seen most of Rwandan Public and Private institutions attain commendable standards of performance in their execution of business and social matters.

If applied properly executive coaching will unleash the potential in individuals, leading to both individual and organisational effectiveness.

Unpacking executive coaching

Executive coaching is a professional relationship that unlocks potential, lifts engagement and enhances executives to perform at personal-best-performance (PBP) and to build team dynamics for maximum performance and enable it to function as more than the sum of its parts.

This increases motivation and professional development which are the necessary ingredients for high productivity.

Today’s executives are experiencing unprecedented change.

They are inundated with changing business models, employee discontent, high turnover rates, meetings galore, and too many emails and voice messages.

Research has proved that executive coaching is a significant and powerful contributor to addressing organizational change and talent development goals.

It is a key approach through which leadership in complex and dynamic organisations can be developed using real-life challenges.

International best-case scenarios

Further afield, IBM has more than sixty certified coaches among its ranks.

Scores of other major companies in the United States and Europe have made coaching a core part of executive development.

The belief is that, under the right circumstances, one-on-one interaction with an objective third party can provide a focus that other forms of organizational support simply cannot.

In the developed world, whereas coaching was once viewed by many as a tool to help correct underperformance, today it is becoming much more widely used in supporting high achievers.

In these cases, companies are using coaching to sharpen the skills of individuals who have been identified as future organizational leaders.

Africa lagging behind

Whilst in the first world countries executive coaching has evolved into the mainstream leadership and management development programmes, in Africa it is still to gain much recognition as a critical leadership development program.

Given the great demand in the workplace for immediate results, coaching can be the remedy that the doctor has ordered for.

By providing feedback and guidance in real time, coaching develops leaders in the context of their current jobs, without removing them from their day-to-day responsibilities.

Any company, organisation or individual who places a high value on personal development and human capital could hire an executive coach once a need is identified.

Individual and organisational needs

The needs of an organisation and its individuals at different levels will vary widely.

There are different branches of executive coaching providing interventions for leadership or transition coaching to specific needs like a high potential manager who struggles with teamwork.

Given that external coaches are independent and objective, they will bring with them unbiased intervention approaches to help struggling individuals.

This is so because they are free of corporate politics and vested interests that affect internal development programs.

Internal coaching can be used but there are guidelines governing confidentiality and conflicts of interest.

Timing  

Executives should seek coaching when they feel that a change in behaviour—either for themselves or their team members—can make a significant difference in the long-term success of the organization.

More specifically, some experts say, coaching can be particularly effective in times of change for an executive.

That includes promotions, stretch assignments, and other new challenges. While you may be confident in your abilities to take on new tasks, you may feel that an independent sounding board would be beneficial in helping you achieve a new level of performance, especially if close confidants are now reporting to you.

More so, you may recognize that succeeding in a new role requires skills that you have not needed to rely on in the past; a coach may help sharpen those skills, particularly when you need to do so in the shortest possible period.

Coaching must be systematic

Coaching works when it’s systematic and studies show that many organizations use coaching as an integrated part of a larger leadership development program.

Increasingly, outside Africa, firms incorporate "360-degree” feedback, using the results to indicate areas in which an executive might benefit from working with a coach.

Africa must embrace this new phenomenon to solve many of the leadership challenges faced by many institutions in business and social spheres.

The writer is an executive leadership coach, people management and customized corporate education trainer, a certified continuous professional development practitioner and founder of the Leadership Institute of Research & Development (LiRD), Zimbabwe. He can be contacted at robert@lird.co.zw/+263772466925.

The views expressed in this article are of the author.