In the past week, I met three people who consider themselves coaches. One person is a psychic turned personal coach, the second is a bookkeeper turned business coach, and the third is an administrative assistant turned operations coach.

 

What do they all have in common?

 

They have zero coaching experience.

 

We’re living in a world where anyone can be a coach by simply calling themselves a coach. There are literally no barriers to entry.

 

In my last post, I offered one possibility to setting yourself apart and scaling your business. Today’s post continues on the same theme, and will show you how technology can be a differentiator and an accelerator to growing your executive coaching business.

 

If you want to keep up with your tech savvy clients, you have to move away from email, word documents, excel spreadsheets and other random and inconsistent methods of communication and measurement. Your clients will expect more. If they don’t today, they will tomorrow. Busy leaders will demand to be easily onboarded and to have a smooth, consistent process throughout the entire engagement.

 

Bottom line – it’s in your best interest to move your coaching process to the cloud. I don’t mean the conversations themselves (Although a hybrid model is a possibility. More on that in a later post). I’m (mostly) referring to all of the support processes around the coaching conversations.

 

Coachmetrix can help and here’s how.

 

STEP 1: ASSESS

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Early in most executive coaching engagements is an assessment process to help leaders understand the important perspectives others have of them. It may involve an online 360, verbal/confidential interviews and other assessments. One way Coachmetrix can help in the earliest phases of a project is to build a standard “welcome kit.” We’ve had great success with this, and it helps facilitate the onboarding process for our clients. Part of the welcome kit could include your coaching agreements, client information sheets and templates to gather rater information to administer the 360 process. This process has worked so well that it takes us almost no time to get a client up and running. And, when we are working with multiple coaches and coachees on the same project, Coachmetrix enables them to all have a comparable and consistent experience.

 

STEP 2: REFLECT

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After the data is gathered, there’s the interpretation session (or two) where the coachee receives her information and reflects on the data within. This is often one of the most rewarding and rich experiences coachees report at the end of their coaching engagement. It helps them better understand how well their perspective is aligned with others. With Coachmetrix, we created a standard 360 reflection process that is just one resource in a library of documents and media that we store and share with our Participants right from Coachmetrix. We’ve found this type of fieldwork between coaching sessions helps participants see their data from multiple perspectives and move through the change process faster.

 

STEP 3: PLAN

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We know through research that when everything is a priority, nothing is a priority at all. We also know that when action plans are paper-based, they rarely get done and there is zero transparency between the coach and coachee. Coachmetrix’s online action planning feature helps the coachee get focused on the areas that will make the biggest impact on their leadership effectiveness. The coach can also comment online between coaching sessions to add reinforcement and accountability. And, the coachee can upload video, images, documents and more to support the plan.

 

STEP 4: CALIBRATE

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We know that a coachee’s manager plays a critical role in helping a coachee make and sustain behavior change. To that end, it’s important that the goals that the coachee works on are aligned with where her manager thinks she should work and with what’s important to the organization. Coachmetrix allows the coachee or coach to share the coachee’s action plan with anyone – creating more transparency, accountability AND alignment.

 

STEP 5: LEARN, MEASURE, COACH

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Step 5 is where the magic happens. It’s where a coachee makes meaningful and measurable change. Instead of just receiving “before and after” feedback, Coachmetrix enables your coachees to receive ongoing pulse feedback and feedforward so that they always have a “pulse” about the important perceptions that others have about their leadership. Essentially, step 5 enables the coachee to understand if he or she is changing – not just from a self perspective, but from the perspective of others (and by the way, that’s really the only perspective that matters).

 

How to Apply These Tools in Your Coaching Business

 

The process above isn’t that different than most executive coaching engagements.  

 

The above process, however, does make it smoother for the coachee, more efficient for the coach and proves that your coaching really works — which most coaches can’t or don’t do!

 

How will you set yourself apart from the psychic turned personal coach, the bookkeeper turned business coach, and the administrative assistant turned operations coach?

 

Check-out Coachmetrix. Your first project is on us!

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