This is the definitive guide to choosing a CEO Coach. Every great athlete in the world has a coach. In fact, here’s a little secret—every great CEO has a coach as well, you just don’t know about them. Once you decide a CEO coach is right for you, the question is, ‘how do I choose the right one for me?’
I will share best practices in choosing a CEO coach. In fact, I had to go through this myself. While I was a CEO for 25 years, I had a coach for 17 of those years. I wish I had this guide when I was going about trying to find the right one.
What Will a Great CEO Coach Do for You as the CEO of a Company?
A great coach will first help you achieve your ambitious goals, both on the job and in the rest of your life. A big part of the coach’s role is to help you decide what is important, help you to determine where you’re going to focus your effort and your energy.
Your CEO Coach Will Help Create Clarity
You see, the CEO invariably has too much on their plate. In order to achieve your ambitious goals, you need a need to counterintuitively narrow down the number of things you’re focused on. This is what a great coach is going to help you do.
Another thing they’re going to help you do is put the oxygen mask on first. CEOs surprisingly don’t always take care of themselves, but a coach is going to help you take care of yourself so you can take care of everything in your life. A CEO Coach is going to help you work with the people on your team, by adjusting your style, to optimize the results of working with your team. A CEO coach is going to help you communicate with great clarity. Every person in your company needs great clarity from the CEO on exactly what are we doing? A CEO coach will help you get there.
Your CEO Coach Will Help You Create Structure and Alignment on Your Team
Another element of being a great CEO that a CEO coach will help you with is alignment. Helping you create alignment amongst all your team members, so that they are focused and doing the best thing they can be doing to help achieve the company goals. A great CEO coach will help you with talent acquisition and talent development.
Your CEO Coach Will Help You Understand Your Blind Spots
Maybe the most important thing for any CEO, a CEO Coach is also going to help you understand your blind spots. We all have them. We all have strengths. We have weaknesses, but a CEO coach is going to help you understand what might happen. If you continue down the particular path you’re on right now, they’ve been there before. They’ve seen the movie before, and they can share with you a potential outcome going in one direction and suggest to you that that’s maybe not the right path that maybe you need to be going in this direction. This is what you really need from a CEO coach. Someone who can advise you about the key decisions you need to make.
Your CEO Coach Will Help You Recognize Your Strengths and Weaknesses
You also need to know more about your strengths and weaknesses. You may have a pretty good idea today, but a CEO coach will help you delve more deeply into your strengths so that you can leverage those and your weaknesses so you can hire against those weaknesses.
Ultimately, a great CEO coach is going to help you make better decisions. Another aspect of what’s important in choosing a great CEO coach is that that coach is going to help you be better. They’re going to push you to be better.
Your CEO Coach Will Help You Scale Your Business Effectively
One of the biggest challenges in being a CEO is scaling. When a company is scaling the CEO, unlike any other position in the company has to change. There are new skills, new insights, new ways of leading, managing that the CEO needs to go through. And the CEO coach is going to push you in that direction, enable you to change more quickly, to be more effective.
Your CEO Coach will Help You Focus
Another really important factor in choosing the CEO coach is asking, will they help you focus? One of the greatest challenges is that there is too much to do. You can’t do it all. This is often very frustrating for CEOs. A CEO coach will help you not only choose where to focus but understand how to focus and focus the rest of the organization for the greatest impact. It’s a really, really big challenge for CEOs to narrow down what they’re going to work on and focus on execution and then come back later and revisit that when it’s time to revisit that, but not to get caught up in all the things that they’re trying to get done.
Your CEO Coach Will Help You Thrive as the CEO
Finally, I believe this is one of the more important aspects of choosing a coach is, are they going to help you enjoy the journey? You see, it turns out that CEOs put massive pressure on themselves to perform. They put out a plan, they get it blessed by the board. And then as we all know what happened with plans, the plan suddenly isn’t working exactly as we wanted it to. We are behind at the very beginning of the quarter against a plan that’s only a quarter long.
This pressure causes many CEOs not to enjoy the role, to feel like they’re always behind. They feel like they’re always struggling to feel like they’re always having to justify what they’re doing to the board and to their other constituents because they feel like they’re not performing at their best. What I recommend is that you work with a coach that’s going to help you enjoy the journey. They are going to help you understand how to deal with the tensions and the pressures and the stress of being a CEO so that you actually like your job, want to continue doing it, and do it in the context of balance because every CEO is going to put all that pressure on themselves, which is okay. As long as we can put it in a world where there’s balance, I encourage you to think hard about who is the right CEO coach for you, get to know a CEO coach, and see if they’re a good fit for you or not.
Thank you very much. My name is Glenn Gow. This has been the definitive guide to choosing a CEO coach.
Contact CEO Coach Glenn Gow Today!
My name is Glenn Gow, CEO Coach. I love coaching CEOs and want to help make you an even better CEO. Let’s decide if we are a fit for each other. Schedule a time to talk with me at calendly.com/glenngow. I look forward to speaking with you soon.
