5 benefits of using executive coaching for more internal promotions and hires
Check to see if your leadership practices include these tips!
Photo: Unsplash | Christina @ wocintechchat
One of the best things an employee can say about their workplace is envisioning a future working and growing within the company. Employees value a working partnership where the employer promotes from within the organization.
To most employees, this viewpoint represents the company's willingness to invest in its people. Besides, it fosters loyalty and engagement, primarily since employees identify the company as a partner in their professional growth.
Employees who promote internally eliminate recurrent recruiting costs and lower the expenses attached to onboarding and training. In addition, it is beneficial in that the hiring manager can identify the specific employee's strengths and weaknesses before adding to their workload.
Finally, the entire process of internal promotion and hires shortens the learning curve, ensuring business continuity immediately after filling vacancies.
In sum, promoting from within is a beneficial practice. However, the problem arises when the employee identified for the promotion lacks specific leadership skills and proper training to take on the new role. Therefore, for the promotion to benefit both the employee and the organization, you should consider executive coaching as part of your internal hiring process.
Executive Coaching Explained
An all-too-common pitfall for internal promotions and hires is that the newly appointed employee will often lack some of the knowledge and skills needed for their new roles. Therefore, when organizations decide on internal promotions and hires, it may be necessary to conduct training and development that will equip the employees for their new roles. Guidance in training and development is where leaders can use the assistance of an executive coach.
Executive coaching is a technique traditionally used by C-Suite leaders and upper-level managers for personal development to improve business performance and help achieve business goals. Today, employees who want to develop and grow professionally use coaching at all organizational levels.
In addition, a coach is often hired from outside the organization to assist with facilitating the training. Executive coaching aims to help with growth in leadership skills, improvement of communication, enhancing the employee's ability to engage with other employees, and professionally leading and supervising them.
Here are some of the benefits of executive coaching when an organization decides on promoting and hiring internally.
Photo: Unsplash | Christina @ wocintechchat
1. Improvement of Self-Confidence and Interpersonal Effectiveness
While hiring employees within the organization might be your provision to help your employees with their career mobility, they might lack the self-confidence, supervision skills, and interpersonal effectiveness to make good on the opportunity. Therefore, it would be best to engage a coach to help them improve their decision-making, conflict management, communication skills, and leadership skills. In other words, the employee may have the necessary technical skills and intelligence but needs to develop or polish their people skills.
This phenomenon of having great intellectual ability and technical skills but lacking the interpersonal and communication skills for successful advancement is a common theme in our executive coaching experience. Fortunately, we also have many cases where the employee received our coaching and preceded to advance one, two, or even three levels up in the organization. Coaching provided the support, tools, and development needed for the employee to rise, shine and achieve their true potential.
An executive coach will help your employees build deeper relationships both at work and in their personal lives (a double benefit). As an organization, you stand to benefit as these individuals will then utilize their most authentic and powerful selves. As a result, a significant increase in employee job performance, engagement, and satisfaction will occur. No longer will the new role seem too complex or ambiguous, nor will they lack interpersonal effectiveness with their team.
2. Help with Team-Cohesion
Promoting an employee within a department might result in some ill feelings amongst the other employees. This mood may result in employees not being confident in their contribution to the organization, as they might feel their talents didn't measure up to management's standards. In addition, some employees may be jealous of the promotion of their fellow team members. Alarmingly, this climate of negative feelings may cause a disconnect, especially at the helm of your team. Moving from peer to boss has definite benefits and challenges, both of which are addressed by the coaching process.
Executive coaching takes on a team from a strategic rather than a technical viewpoint. Your organization is likely to benefit as employees are empowered to be more agile and aligned, which occurs through the newly acquired skills of their coached leader. Empowering the team members will likely help you feel that your workplace is values-driven and a great place to work. As such, they will buy into the deep vision you have for the organization, helping you have a team that trusts one and other and can delegate to each other where necessary.
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3. Increased Level of Engagement
The welcoming and acceptance of an employee ensure a good beginning within an organization. While the perks of complimentary breakfast or bonuses show care, employees seek signs of foundational support within an organization to feel connected. As a result, people go to organizations where they can grow and thrive. Often, searching for a great organization begins well before the interview. It is why candidates want to join your company in the first place!
In addition to promotional opportunities, most employees join organizations for reasons that leaders find obvious and sometimes overlook:
• Salary and benefits (including training and development, and remote work)
• Company's environment and sense of belonging/community
• Company's leadership
• Values and mission
• Company's reputation
• Community involvement
Cultivating internal talent and providing the support and tools needed to grow as an employee is essential for employee retention and job satisfaction. In addition, the key to an engaged employee in the workplace is to provide a sense of community where employees want to be inspired by their leaders, participate, grow, develop, and learn.
Assessing and evaluating metrics is helpful to an organization to grow its internal talent better. An executive coach can help you assess your company's areas of engagement that affect employee development and retention. Amongst metrics you can use to determine your company's engagement level, some of the essential items to consider are:
How well, and often you engage with your employees
Looking at such factors as current employee satisfaction and retention levels.
Additionally, executive assessments may involve confidential interviews, surveys, and polls of your current workforce to determine what employees are happy with and what steps might be taken to improve engagement, satisfaction, and retention.
4. Safe Zones to Gain Perspective
For any hiring manager, choosing who gets promoted and who does not yet meet the threshold can be a daunting process. A coach provides you with a safe zone and objectivity to gain perspective on this and other sensitive issues within the organization. In addition, as a third-party participant, the coach can be free from office politics and getting involved in partisan views therein.
Overall, the coach can guide how everyone can have their perspectives accounted for without the fear of intimidation. There is a level of comfort and more significant learning when an experienced executive coach plays a crucial role in communication during this internal promotion process. As an employer or executive, you get to enjoy a more cohesive work environment that encourages productivity and more significant relationships.
Photo: Unsplash | @thoughtcatalog
5. Executive Coaches Ease Leadership Transitions
Change is never easy and can jeopardize business continuity and productivity. As the organization moves from the former leadership to one led by the promoted employee, there is bound to be friction. An executive coach can help with easing this leadership transition.
Through individual and possibly group coaching sessions, these trained professionals can help employees better grasp the evolution taking place within the team. Besides, the coach can help the promoted individual better understand their new role by learning and unlearning specific skills. Finally, coaching is an excellent leadership development tool that can highly improve the leadership skills of the emerging leader promoted into a new role.
When tailored to the organization's needs, executive coaching can help with personal, professional, skill-based, and targeted learning. Specifically, the process creates a psychologically safe environment in which the employees can then tune into greater utilization of the training and development tools provided by the organization.
Conclusion
Having high-performing executives and managers is critical to the success of any organization. Businesses that prefer hiring and promoting talent already in-house will enjoy certain advantages if the process is handled well.
To reap these benefits, executives and hiring managers need to integrate executive coaching into their current organizational and management systems. Let's talk about your next steps in developing your organization's management and leadership team. Please contact me for your free 15-minute phone consultation to discuss your situation.
