Executive Coaching Is Associated with Higher Performance and It’s a Way to Retain Female Talent
Women need role models to learn to more effectively integrate career aspirations with personal goals. Women also want to find meaning in their work and have a strong desire to align their values with it, and this is where coaching and career development can truly be a benefit. Executive coaching is finding its place within American corporate culture as a highly effective way to build the infrastructure for growth and long term success in a talent-dependent economy. And executive coaching is associated with higher individual performance, and companies that employ it are more likely to say that their organizations are performing well.
The American Management Association (AMA) recently reported, “We expect that coaching will become one of the keys to developing and retaining scarce talent in the future, and we think companies that learn to leverage it well will have a significant competitive advantage in the global marketplace.” 6
And the AMA went on to reveal that it had recently studied executive coaching on a global scale and reported that coaching is used by about half of today’s companies, and among those who say their organizations don’t yet have coaching programs, 37% in North America said programs will be implemented in the future.7
Women leaders are intelligent, visionary and committed and the key to any organization’s future success. It is time to close the leadership gap. Women need customized executive coaching to learn proven strategies and tactics to successfully navigate the male dominated culture of corporate America.
Executive Coaching will help ambitious and talented women:
Where We Go from Here
First, we bring more awareness to the situation:
And then we move on and make the most of a lesson well-learned. We begin with putting in place more progressive organizational leadership models and practices.
However, this challenge is even bigger than corporate success and leadership models. This is also about raising the next generation of girl and boy leaders. Parents, teachers and coaches must be the role models who embrace the strengths and talents of both females and males and encourage each to be their best. It’s time to stop sending messages that girls and boys have to conform to a societal set of norms and rules that puts girls and boys in a box. It is our societal responsibility to broaden support, empower both girls and boys to build a healthy self-esteem, self-confidence and respect for each other by valuing who they are at a young age.
Here is an amazing pool of untapped potential, new ideas and possibilities. Establishing a coaching program within your ranks—for both genders, but especially women, sooner than later—will only raise your organization’s ability to compete and prosper in a highly competitive global marketplace. Other organizations will do this and those who neglect it will be left behind.
Regardless, talented and ambitious women are brilliant, bold and resilient. They will continue to find their way to success, as they do now by creating possibilities whether that means going to a new company or becoming entrepreneurs. Who knows? The talent you let slip away could become one of your toughest competitors.
With commitment and perseverance, small steps forward make big changes. We can change this–and we will–by working together as a unified team to make the world a better, more productive place. And in the end, it’s really about maximizing our talent and potential, living a happy, healthy and fulfilled life and becoming a role model for future generations.
1Rachel Soares, Baye Cobb, Ellen Lebow, Allyson Regis, Hannah Winsten, and Veronica Wojnas, 2011 Catalyst Census: Fortune 500 Women Executive Officers and Top Earners, December 2011.
2Greg Pellegrino, Sally D’Amato, and Anne Weisberg, The gender dividend: Making the business case for investing in women, (Deloitte, 2011) 11.
3Ibid, 7.
4Herminia Ibarra, Nancy M. Carter, and Christine Silva, Why Men Still Get More Promotions Than Women, (Harvard Business Review, 2010)
5Women on Power, (Stanford Graduate School of Business, 2010)
6American Management Association, Coaching: A Global Study of Successful Practices, (2008), vii.
7Ibid, vi.