Our Approach To Your Success
How to Choose an Executive Coach
Choosing the right Executive Coach is akin to choosing an investment partner. It is worthwhile to understand their beliefs and approach. Helping you understand our beliefs and approach is why wI put more content on our website than most coaching practices we've seen.
What is Executive Coaching?
The International Coaching Federation defines it as "partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential."
The International Coaching Community states that "It [coaching] unlocks a person’s potential to maximize their performance. Coaching helps them to learn rather than teaching them."
In plain English, it is a partnership in which the coach helps their client achieve their goals. Coaches become integrated thought partners whose sole purpose is to help the client succeed.
Coaches can help this process by building awareness in the client, pointing out blindspots, providing accountability, asking probing questions, and providing encouragement.
Coaching is forward-looking and vision/goal-oriented. It is about improving from today forward.
Coaching does not require subject matter expertise.
How Does Advising Differ From Executive Coaching?
"Advising" refers to offering recommendations for a specific situation. Advising is more prescriptive and directive. Advising requires subject matter expertise or relevant experience.
How Is Executive Coaching Different From Therapy?
In simple terms, therapy or counseling focuses on one's past (e.g., addressing trauma, family-of-origin issues, abuse, addiction, etc.). Coaching deals more with behavioral change and action-oriented progress. Executive Coaching is NOT therapy or counseling.
The Nexus Initiative only provides coaching services and does not provide, nor is it qualitifed to provide, therapy or counseling services. The Nexus Initiative follows ICF guidelines for when to refer clients to mental health professionals.
Our Beliefs about Executive Coaching
- We are committed to continuous improvement. It's core to who we are. Our clients can count on us to stay curious and up-to-date with the latest thinking and thought leaders. As a result, we will share books, approaches, or insights we have uncovered. We don't profess to know everything; however, We try to get smarter and wiser every day. We can't imagine living another way.
- We believe complexity frequently causes confusion and gets in the way of success. We are systems thinkers who aim to break things down into components to improve clarity, make things more accessible and actionable, and improve results.
Our Approach To Executive Coaching
- As a coach, we push our clients to be purposeful in their approach to all areas of their lives. The benefits of coaching are holistic, and if your focus is professional, you will likely find the benefits transfer to your personal life and vice versa. It's challenging, focused, and rewarding.
- We believe the coaching methodology, which helps empower you to develop your capabilities and effectiveness from within, will benefit our client's growth best. Our method is to help clients generate new approaches and perspectives rather than providing advice or answers, which may or may not apply to a specific situation. Coaching is highly outcome-driven work, where we help move people from new point A to new point B repeatedly. We have a purposeful Outcome Mindset.
- We believe coaching prepares our clients to handle whatever comes their way on a sustainable basis. Effective coaching increases capacity in a way that an advisory approach, offering a set of prescriptions or scripts, may not. We teach my clients to fish rather than handing them one.
- We bring all of ourselves to a coaching engagement. If a situation arises in which we need to put on our advisory hat and leverage our experience (operations, life, situational, entrepreneurial, etc.), we are willing to do so. This will likely involve pointing out considerations, implications, or pros/cons of taking a specific action to give the client a wide(r) angle lens to view a situation and better understand the impact.
- Throughout an engagement, we use a variety of techniques and frameworks, including coaching models such as the GROW model (Goals, Reality, Options, Will), ICF frameworks, Center for Executive Coaching frameworks, Active Listening, Appreciative Inquiry, Emotional Intelligence Assessments (Genos), 360 assessments, ProfileXT Assessments (Job Fit), deep questioning, etc. These approaches and frameworks reduce the time to actual change. They are a means to an end rather than ends themselves.
- As a coach, we can be a confidant, sparring partner, sounding board, cheerleader, go-to person, member of your private board of directors, thought-provocateur, or someone to give you a firm nudge. No matter which posture we take, we remain invested in your success.
- We are strongly biased toward measurement and metrics to know if and how we have moved the needle. This is important to providing you with a return on your investment in yourself and us.
- We subscribe to the Center of Executive Coaching's guidance that a coaching engagement should easily provide a 5-10X return on your investment. If it doesn't, alternative paths to achieving one's goals are likely better.
- We are committed to the ICF's Code of Ethics.