The Great Manager:

Executives are the star performers and like any star performers, they benefit greatly from coaching.

A Coach can provide the mirror, the feedback, and the chance to look at themselves and make adjustments. Athletes will correct 80% of their mis-takes if they study video of themselves – they need the assistance of video to understand what they need to do, and then take the action from the inside out. Executive Coaching allows you to have someone whose sole focus is your success and growth, someone who will hold the mirror for you and work with you to interpret what you are both seeing and what you don’t see.

The job of the executive can be a lonely one, often with little help and no way to objectively see themselves in action. Strengths-based executive coaching provides the antidote to all three.

Executives are expected to get critical tasks accomplished through other people. In this effort they have multiple management responsibilities.

First, they must manage themselves well. They must place themselves in positions that play to their strengths. They must know and utilize their strong suits. They must know the strengths they lack and surround themselves with the complementary talents they know they need to be effective.

Second, they must manage their direct reports and senior leadership teams well. Effective working relationships are born of self-mastery which always begins with increased self-awareness. They are matured by learning how others need to be treated in order to be maximally productive.

Lastly, executives must always “manage up”. Failure to accurately assess, understand, and inform the powers that one depends on has led to the downfall of many very talented executives.

The Strengths-Based Executive Coaching is a tightly focused coaching program designed to provide guidance for all of the above, based on objective assessments of an individual’s actual hard-wired strengths and needs.

It includes not only clear knowledge of one’s strengths, but also of the specific activities that create full engagement and the key elements of a high performance work environment. Clarity about these individual strengths, interests and motivators is then developed into the ability to comfortably articulate them to others, and the willingness to honor them when making decisions.

This is mission critical for managing one’s self–whether making a career change, moving up in position, taking on new management responsibilities, developing a functional team or improving existing relationships and work situations.

Strengths-based coaching has been a very successful element of professional development at companies such as Dell and Apple, as well as currently being part of the Executive Coaching at the University of Texas MBA Program.

People tend to work for their manager more than they work for a company–the manager is that key to the kind of workplace in which a person works.

Applying new Management Skills:

Anyone who has had the good fortune to have what they would call a ‘great manager’ will probably tell you that that manager didn’t do things the usual way. And in fact, the Gallup Organization did an extensive study on the subject only to find out that very consistently the most productive managers violated conventional wisdom and broke a lot of rules–hence their book, “First, Break All the Rules”.

A great manager knows what the key elements of a high performance workplace are and how to get them established. They know how to select talent, focus and motivate that talent, and develop that talent. They know how to develop the functionality of the team. They know how to run productive, compelling, and energizing meetings.

The focus of this step of the program is the development of leaders who consistently do a superb job of managing the human capital in their charge–increasing the value of the asset and increasing the productivity of the asset.

The Manager’s Matrix