Kulwant Bardh, Chartered FCIPD

You can do all of above but it’s still down to: Practice, Practice and more Practice. Coaching, like facilitation skills can be seemingly easy to understand as an apprentice in this area but yet when it comes to making actual impact and creating transformational behavioral change, it can take 10 years or more of practice under a wide range of scenarios and client diversity before you can be a coach someone comes to you for repeat business (that’s your success factor). And if you are not making transformational behavioral change or not there yet, then we are all truly still apprentices and could be wasting your client’s money and time and ultimately our own, which will then require a revisit and much deeper inner work itself.

Before jumping straight into answering this question, it’s important we first ask this question: What does Executive Management *Professionalreally mean?

While coaching credentials help as a baseline to ensure one has undergone the basic principles and competencies, I have also seen some of the best coaches who are not ICF certified or credentialed.

The GROW model is too basic a framework and although it’s taught in a lot of leadership development workshops to do fast track coaching skills, it’s simply insufficient to bring about transformation and real change in behaviours which prevent a coachee from being able to grow further and faster. The GROW model has its origins in problem solving techniques and was later adopted as a coaching model as well. Coaching today has gone way beyond that and has many modalities and forms.

This entire question and its Ai driven responses do not gel or align together unfortunately. As such, it’s not meaningful to provide a considered response. For example, do leaders actually think about well being as a way to develop their leadership skills in the first place? And what has executive coaching as a Step 1 approach help in this? Regardless. I agree and support some comments here which seems to suggest these two areas as being mutually exclusive. They serve different purposes and approaches.

Readiness alone may not suffice as first step. The question here is about a role transition from technical to a leadership one. Some technical roles still require you to demonstrate leadership especially when you lead teams, such as engineers or doctors. Depending on which management track we want to go, technical route of leadership or general management route, it’s the degree of technical expertise one needs to let go which matters greatly if you are to coach them. Even for non-technical managerial roles, one will possess some deep level core forte. This needs to “let go” higher you go up the ladder, so you don’t end up competing with your subordinates on technical or subject matter expertise.