Executive Coaching

Innovative Leadership International LLC

Offers Executive Coaching Services

For over 16 years, the master coaches of ILI have provided executive coaching and leadership development services in over 135 organizations worldwide. Let us know how we can help you!

General Definition:

According to the 2009 Sherpa Executive Coaching Survey, “Executive coaching means regular meetings between a business leader and a trained facilitator, designed to produce positive changes in business behavior in a limited time frame.” Executive coaching, often called Business Coaching or Leadership Coaching, is a powerful system of specific conversations directed by a highly trained professional. Basically, coaching is executive, professional, leadership, or career development, delivered on a one-to-one basis. Team coaching is when the coach facilitates coaching results with a team or group, usually an intact leadership team. Coaching is a relationship of support and partnership between a Coach and a high-level individual or team in an organization. The relationship is typically sponsored by the organization with multiple stakeholders, because the executive or team being coached typically has high levels of responsibility and broad scope of impact. The focus of coaching is both organizational and personal development, typically around leadership results. Outcomes are observable and measurable, and match organizational objectives and performance requirements. Recently, Forbes Magazine posted an article online written by Douglas McKenna, which I found to be a provocative, yet solid explanation of when and why to hire an executive coach: Check it out here: http://www.suzipomerantz.com/executiveexcellence/when-to-hire-an-executive-coach/

Process:

Coaching uses a process of inquiry and personal discovery to build the executive’s level of awareness and responsibility, and provides the client with structure, support and feedback. Executives set goals for the outcomes they intend to achieve, and use a coach to motivate them, to keep them focused and on track, to identify limiting beliefs and other self-imposed roadblocks, to inspire them to excel, to enhance their personal or professional growth and development, and to provide partnership for their ultimate success. Your coach carefully observes your performance from the sidelines to help you determine those actions or non-actions, which define your current performance ability. We utilize our expertise in Appreciative Inquiry, Emotional Intelligence, Ontology and Somatic understanding to improve leadership capacity in the individual executive and leadership bench strength in the organization.

Methodology:

Masterful coaches empower people to identify how behaviors, thought systems, and ways of being produce unintended results and consequences and to transform these systems into more effective or more powerful choices. Armed with this knowledge, clients use the coaching relationship to fundamentally shift their frames of reference, thereby producing winning results in the targeted areas. A coach is a visionary, a change agent, and a leader who enables others to exceed past performance and tackle their challenges with freedom, creativity, choice, and power. Coaching is continuous, individual, change-management, performance improvement rather than a one-time effort, quick fix, or training session.

Results:

Coaching is often used as executive intervention to help executives change, improve their performance, and develop as leaders. Executives, managers, supervisors and team leaders find that they must guide and lead their people and projects with little or no preparation or support. In many organizations politics guide a leader’s decisions and actions more than vision. Business leaders thrive in the action-based, commitment-oriented partnership that coaching provides. Here are a few recent examples of what ILI coaching has helped leaders achieve:

Team presentation coaching of the leaders of a large healthcare construction company competing for an $80 million hospital building contract
Leadership team coaching for the team of scientists/program directors who co-lead a public research consortium within NIH
Business development coaching for an executive coach who doubled his six-figure revenues after one year of coaching
Team and executive coaching for the development and growth of the nationally acclaimed DuPont Legal Model, which cut outside legal expenses by 48% producing bottom-line savings in excess of $50 million.
Executive and leadership team coaching for the strategic design and enhanced communication between the owners and partners of a law firm. Transformed command-control style of leadership to a collaborative, facilitative leadership model resulting in enhanced partner communication, and improving employee and partner engagement by 89%.
Executive coaching for leaders of a government contractor/ leadership development firm to articulate and achieve their vision and accomplish “that long-sought-after clarity” about the future growth of their business, which contributed to expanding into two new target market segments while doubling their number of associates.
There are more! Just ask us if you don’t see your size organization or industry represented above.

Service:

Executive coaching is provided both in-person and via telephone, as designed jointly by the client and the coach. Coaching, which is not therapy or counseling, may address interpersonal savvy, career transition, communication or leadership strategies, executive presence, internal branding, navigation of the political landscape, improving visibility, specific personal projects, business successes, performance and productivity, or general conditions in the client’s role or profession. Likewise, coaching is not consulting, and while your coach may have expertise to share with you in a particular area, the goal of coaching is to partner with you to create your own results, solutions, and actions.

Typically in a six-month coaching engagement for a senior executive, the process involves meeting in-person for a foundation session, which is usually 1.5 to 2 hours. The outcome of that initial meeting is a set of clarified goals, a strategy for the engagement, the clarification of roles, purpose, intended outcomes, and details about the process.

Our system includes a customized series of interviews to collect 360 data, which is then provided as frank and candid feedback delivered to the executive in the context of their goals. This 360 provides much more detailed, specific, actionable feedback than the more commercial assessments on the market now.

The goals and feedback are aggregated into a behavioral action plan (development plan) that over the course of the coaching engagement will cause a breakthrough in the intended areas.

We typically will guide the executive to socialize the action plan with a boss or coaching sponsor to ensure support and buy-in. At the end of the engagement we also involve the boss or sponsor in a results debrief process.

We can do a combination of face-to-face meetings and phone work, depending on the executive’s goals and challenges. Usually it works out to 3-4 sessions per month. Phone sessions are typically an hour, in-person sessions are 90 minutes to 2 hours, depending on the work we’re doing. For example, if executive presence or presentation skills need improvement, we will meet more often in person. If it is more about interpersonal savvy or communication skills, we may do some shadow coaching in person and the rest by phone.

We’ve used this process repeatedly with many senior executives and have been consistently rated at the highest ratings in evaluations.

Mini Bio:

Suzi Pomerantz, MT, MCC is an award-winning executive coach, facilitator, and author with over 16 years experience coaching and teaching leaders and teams in over 135 organizations internationally across Government Agencies and private sector clients, including seven companies on the Fortune 100 list and 7 corporate law departments. Suzi specializes in the intersection between leadership and business development and helps executives, teams and high performing, high-potential future leaders to clarify their vision and exceed prior performance. She was one of the first executive coaches to receive the Master credential from the International Coach Federation over 11 years ago and is considered a thought leader in the coaching industry.

Suzi’s strength lies in helping leaders and organizations find clarity within chaos. Her no-nonsense approach is professional, strategic, conversational, analytical and results-oriented. She provides executive coaching, team coaching, and emerging leader coaching in organizations to assist executives and their teams with setting strategic direction, managing talent, and developing leadership bench strength. She also develops leaders in teambuilding, sales, planning and conducting effective meetings, and facilitating change. She helps organizations develop and retain leadership capacity by coaching leaders in executive presence, presentation skills, personal power, communication, and vision work.

She has taught executive coaches as guest faculty at over a dozen top coach training institutions worldwide, and has spoken at industry conferences including the ICF annual conference and at Linkage. She serves on multiple international Boards of Directors and Advisory Boards in the coaching industry, and has authored 25 publications about coaching, ethics, and business development, including her book Seal the Deal. She received the 2007 Woman of Achievement Award from Business and Professional Women with the Commission for Women. In 2008 the ICCO Board of Directors established a legacy award: the Suzi Pomerantz Award for Stewardship will be given annually. More about Suzi Pomerantz can be found in a full biographical statement online at http://www.suzipomerantz.com/about-2/