Executive coaches and career coaches are useful and beneficial for companies as well as individuals. Their time is important, therefore you can expect to pay for their services with some earning upwards of $3,500 per hour. Despite the high price tag, their services are invaluable for a number of reasons. Majority of executive coaches are hired to work for a period of seven to twelve months, and within that time frame their job involves many vital things for individuals and businesses. Read below to see some of the more important things executive coaches do, and how they help on an individual basis as well as a corporate environment basis.

Comfort Zone

Stepping outside of your comfort zone is something that an executive coach will force you to do, but this is not a bad thing. It is actually an incredibly good step for those focused on their career. Executive coaching helps you see things from a different point of view, and sometimes that is a broader picture compared to the narrow mind frame your comfort zone keeps you in. The job of a career coach is to advise you in areas where your talents can be of use, including new areas that may intimidate you. Sometimes within an environment people’s skills are noticed that can be used elsewhere, although they may not realize it. Organizational development consultants can help these individuals realize these talents and skills, and help them grow so they can be used elsewhere within the corporation.

Open Mind

When acquiring services from an executive coach it is important to keep an open mind from the get go. This means an honest opinion of your skills and an honest appraisal of where you stand with your strengths and weaknesses. Without this honesty, you will find it hard to take constructive criticism from others. Consider your strengths and weaknesses when it comes to leadership and work ethic. Consider areas where you can improve. This will help you and the executive coach work more as a team, compared to working against each other. Your executive coach will help you become more aware of downfalls which can ultimately derail your career choices and cause other problems. Working together with your coach and having an open mind helps both parties work for the same goal.

Recognize Strengths and Weakness in Others

Another important part of a coach’s duties is to help you see others that you work with in a different manner. Just as you begin to see your strengths and weaknesses, and work through the weaknesses to help gather more strengths, you begin to do the same with others. You begin to see where they excel and where they don’t. This simple act could be the difference between keeping good employees and building on their strengths, or loosing them because their strengths are overlooked by their weaknesses. Your coach will have certain skills that they use to evaluate those around them, and enlighten you on their insight, so that you can begin to use those same skills. Eventually throughout the course of your coaching you will be able to independently use these skills to form your own judgement and see others strengths, just as your coach showed you to do.

Considering all that involved it’s easy to see why this is not a quick task and why majority of coaches stick around for a while. Just remember, in order for executive coaching to be effective you must remember some things. Executive coaching does not mean your coach will offer answers to your problems. Executive coaching does not mean your coach will do the work. They are there to observe, ask questions and hold you accountable for your decisions. Once their job is done, the individual can successfully maneuver on their own with confidence they didn’t have before. Confidence in employees leads to more productive work, and confidence in leaders gives peace of mind to employees. Executive coaches may stick around for a quite while, but the benefits felt even after they leave will stick with a company, a team and an individual for a while.