Executive coaching for talent management

Executive coaching seeks to develop one of the essential resources in a company: human talent. Undoubtedly, by managing talent, you improve its retention and attract profiles oriented to excellence. 

This professional development process assists executives in achieving positive and lasting changes in their leadership. Think that having qualified and motivated teams boost your company’s productivity, improving its results and competitiveness.

Knowing what it is and how it can help you manage talent is crucial for optimally analyzing the options for investment in your company’s human capital.  

What is executive coaching?

Executive coaching is the process of accompaniment carried out by a professional coach (also known as an executive functioning coach) to a company’s executive so they can develop their potential and achieve pre-established goals which, in turn, respond to organizational objectives.

This type of coaching, specialized in the business sector, is characterized by personalized attention that becomes a lever of cultural transformation within the company, promoting effective leadership. 

In executive coaching, the person who evaluates the process ( is not only the coachee or the person who receives the coaching but also the designated person from Human Resources – HR – and the head of the company. HH. – and the boss of the person being coached. 

Executive coaching and talent management

Executive coaching is one of the tools you can use in your company to manage and retain talent, as it detects and enhances it, achieving high-performance teams. 

This system offers strategic advantages that benefit the entire organization, such as improving the level of integration and responsibility of the employee who participates in the “training” and the company itself. 

Executive coaching offers added benefits: 

• Improves time management by making the individual more effective. 
• It enhances conscious, inspirational, and conflict-resolution-oriented leadership.    
• Facilitates the acquisition of new skills and perspectives. 
• Optimizes communication by eliminating ambiguities and confusion, creating spaces and opportunities for dialogue. 
• Increases business opportunities thanks to more motivated and better-prepared executives. 

In short, executive coaching fosters the empowerment of your organization’s talent and improves your employer branding, which promotes talent attraction.

Executive coaching provides tools to your leaders through a 4-phase structure to make the process successful. 

Gathering initial information

First, the executive career coach must gather all the necessary information to design the action plan. 

In that sense, 360 evaluations can be a good starting point to detect the strengths and weaknesses of the executive, as well as to establish ways to improve performance. 

Constructive exchange 

You must understand that executive coaching is not an evaluation but a process of supporting the person to detect their weaknesses and turn problems into opportunities.  

The process requires an exchange that allows you to reach new conclusions thanks to a change of perspectives.

Frequency of sessions

It is necessary to clearly mark a periodicity in the sessions in order to make progress towards the established objectives. It is of utmost importance that these objectives be specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timely, i.e. SMART objectives that respond to specific deadlines.

Effectiveness evaluation

The outcome of the process is measured through management indicators – known as KPIs – which are associated with pre-established objectives and related to the person’s performance measures in their job. 

At the end of the coaching, the executive functioning coach may also use a 360 evaluation to compare the final results with the initial ones.

Executive coaching techniques

As you have been discovering, executive coaching establishes an individualized relationship between the coach and the coachee that favors the exchange so that the latter can develop his or her skills on his or her own. 

To do this, the executive functioning coach can use some of the techniques that we share below: 

• Active listening. Necessary for the person to feel understood and to create bonds of trust between both participants.
• Repetition. The repetition of some of the coachee’s sentences helps to rethink the statement and thus be able to evaluate it from another perspective. The coach can also do this by summarizing the employee’s words or asking them to do it.
• Lifeline. A technique that asks the person to present his or her personal and professional life as a line of important events. Through questions about their doubts, emotions or feelings, a functional analysis of the behavior is carried out. Thanks to this process, stimuli, responses, and consequences are schematized. 
• Reinforcement of positive behaviors. It is a technique that allows the person to become aware of their strengths. 
• Counter-hypotheses. They are a means that facilitates the exploration of other perspectives as well as brainstorming. 
• Brainstorming.  
• Use of maieutics. A Socratic technique that, through the formulation of questions, guides the person to discover concepts that were latent in his mind, but of which he was unaware. 

In many occasions, resorting to executive coaching can be problematic due to the need for more time or spaces conducive to its proper development. 

Thanks to new technologies, this technique can be developed in an online environment as long as you can offer safe spaces that respect the privacy of your employees. 

Our proctoring products can help you. Request your free demo and discover professional and secure solutions to maximize talent in your company.