Gavin R. Dagley
(In conjunction with the Australian Human Resources Institute)

Objectives: Human resources (HR) professionals responsible for purchasing executive coaching services represent a unique research resource as independent and invested observers of coaching practices. The research objective was to explore this group’s knowledge to better understand what differentiates the work of exceptional coaches.

Design: The study was a survey design.

Methods: Twenty experienced executive coaching purchasers completed 90-minute structured interviews based around a 40-item questionnaire regarding their experiences of locating and working with exceptional coaches. Saturation testing and a post-analysis survey provided support for the emergent themes.

Results: Purchasers defined a ‘great outcome’ from coaching as ‘behaviour change.’ Descriptions of executive-coachees’ experiences grouped around themes of engagement, deeper conversations, insight and responsibility, and positive growth. The exceptional coaching capabilities that facilitated these experiences were: credibility, empathy and respect, holding the professional self, diagnostic skill and insight, approach flexibility and range, working to the business context, a philosophy of personal responsibility, and skilful challenging.

Conclusions: Themes resolved into a process model of exceptional executive coaching that incorporated environmental, executive, and task characteristics as other influential factors. Discussion focused on the remedial implications of using behaviour change as the outcome definition. Despite this implication, executives nevertheless seemed to experience executive coaching as positive and, at times, transformational. The work of exceptional coaches may be at its most distinctive when the required behaviour change is particularly demanding, and when outcomes are based on transformational change.

Keywords: executive coaching, coach capabilities, practices, attributes, factors influencing outcomes.

Full article: Volume 5, Issue 1 pages 63 - 80