19 Sep Executive coaches have a range of information and skills from which to draw on to carry out their jobs

Executive coaches have a range of information and skills from which to draw on to carry out their jobs. Among common skills needed are effective listening, open ended questioning, non-threatening approaches to interacting, and techniques to cushion constructive feedback. In your experience what advice can you give to cover all basis listed. When using your strategy did you receive positive or negative feedback.

Brief Solutions-Focused coaching involves using behavior therapy techniques to help a coachee find resolutions to problems themselves by simply asking appropriate and prompting questions. These techniques require them to be adapted to work with leaders (Ting. 2006).

There are two important components for a leader to think about with BSFC. The first is that drive for change can be triggered quickly and lead to different results. The second component is to make sure a leader does not assume that it will take a long time for change to happen. It is made clear that both the coach and coachee need to reassess what they consider to be required for change, as BSFC removes common past understandings.  Short coaching sessions are all that is needed to utilize this technique type (Ting. 2006).

When using BSFC, a leader needs to be more focused on changing future behavior than understanding or insight as to why ineffective behavior existed in the past. One must focus on what can be done going forward to improve the situation (Ting. 2006). This requires self-awareness on the part of the coachee to be aware if are making progress or not. This is all about the coachee relying on themselves to change behavior moving forward (Ting. 2006). 

CCL suggests that the coachee using imagery techniques to imagine the successful behavior being utilized or the ultimate successful outcome can be very helpful in developing the needed behavior (Ting. 2006). This important with goal setting, which is a fundamental part of the coaching. 

Coaches should assist in helping the coachee to reframe the problem in a context that helps to make a solution more apparent (Ting. 2006) on what they can do themselves (regardless of anyone else) to help the situation. 

One of the benefits for an organization implementing this style is that it is less relationship dependant than other types. However, Ting points out that it does require a lot of collaboration as coaches rely on the coachee’s personal self-awareness, skills to implement the solution (Ting. 2006). It also spends less time figuring out the original cause of the problem but instead looking at what can fix it going forward. This adds to the component of simplicity and often the simplest method will work best in a large and diverse setting.