In December, The Washington Post published a Business section piece titled, “4.2 million Americans Quit their jobs in October as workers continued to search for better opportunities”.  Included was a fact that “in October this made-up 2.8 percent of the workforce”

In the past, Executive Coaching has been used in part to help employees overcome weaknesses.  Some have used Coaching as a “fix” for poor communication styles, lack of emotional intelligence or failure to create a collaborative work environment.  This is a limited view.  In 2021, Executive Coaching is a valid way to develop and retain employees you are counting on.

Whether your business is slowly beginning to recover from the pandemic shutdown, or is still struggling to survive another difficult quarter, can you afford to lose mission critical talent?  It’s clear that the cost of doing nothing is the single most expensive approach to take.  Executive Coaching is a proactive step to take in this unparalleled time as an investment in talent retention and leadership development of high potential employees.

Versatile Talent Development Tool
Coaching may be the most versatile tool to retain talent and develop high potential employees into future leaders. As businesses begin to recover from the pandemic, the temptation for your high potential players to be lured away only increases. Coaching will not only help to make these employees more effective in the day to day but will also make the employee/employer relationship more “sticky”. Investing in Coaching and other leadership development initiatives on the front end of the curve will maximize ROI over the employee’s career with your organization.

Target High Potential Employees
Individuals selected for Executive Coaching should exhibit the distinctiveness of high potential contributors. Such traits include: being a visionary, goal oriented, risk taker, creative problem solver, flexible, team-oriented, good communicator, and relationship builder. Don’t make the common mistake of investing scarce resources in the wrong place. Identify high potential individuals first.

Gains Realized in Coaching High Potential Players
While there are often immediate gains realized in the first one to two months of Coaching a high potential employee, resist the temptation to cut the investment after seeing initial results. The greatest return in Coaching lies in developing leaders over the long term.  Additionally, after what is typically a heavier upfront investment of assessment and role clarification, the later months often don’t require the same amount of intense, weekly contact.  Your financial investment goes down while your returns go up!

So, what exactly are the areas from which an organization might see the most gains within the first three months of a Coaching agreement?  Some of our client companies have seen the following advances in their high potential employees:

■ The ability to develop sustainable solutions to business problems

■ Continued productivity despite increased stressors

■ Development of a forward thinking, strategic mindset

■ Improved management and coaching of direct reports and team members

■ Increased self-awareness, including consciousness of how his/her decisions impact others

■ Improved relationships and conflict management skills

■ The ability to relate to different perspectives (including cross-generational differences), and

■ Initiative and drive to finish projects.

While each of these accomplishments are significant individually, combined they set the foundation for sound decision making both short and long term.

Making Good Decisions
How many decisions does one of your leaders make each day? Hundreds. Choosing their words and expressions when communicating with team members, customer interactions, financial and product decisions, each leader makes hundreds of decisions every day. To some extent, this skill can be learned in a classroom setting but that method is only marginally effective. Real decision-making skills are learned in the real world where both high potential employees and coaches reside.

An Executive Coach will work with your key player to determine the actual process by which decisions are made in actual work situations in your organization’s environment and culture. Real solutions for the real world.

The inputs will vary for every individual. Some leaders leverage their values while others use more of a balance sheet approach. Some seek external feedback while others process internally. Personality, learned behaviors, motivators, and other factors all come into play. Over time, the individual becomes aware of how he/she makes a decision – and why some past decisions yielded more favorable results than others.  This is essential to increasing the proportion of good decisions for the future. The right coach can serve in a guiding role as a high potential employee seeks answers from within and learns to trust their own judgment.

Post-Pandemic – Executive Coaching for Resilience
Another area where Executive Coaching can make a solid contribution to leadership development is resilience.  Resilience is a psychological quality that allows some people to be knocked down by the adversities of life and come back at least as strong as before.  Beyond pandemic survival or fear of losing high potential/key employees, is your organization building a resilient workforce and leadership team?  Are your leaders capable of looking at stressful situations as chances to pivot to new opportunities?

By offering objective insights based on knowledge and experience, a Coach can boost your leader’s short and long-term capacity to deal effectively with stress.  Your key people need to be highly resilient individuals.  Coaching can help.

A Systems Thinking Approach to Leadership Coaching
Want to maximize coaching ROI? Make sure your Coach (either external consultant or internal leader) takes a systems thinking approach to their craft. While different styles of Coaching exist, we submit that a systems thinking approach is most effective.

How many problems have only one root cause, unrelated to anything surrounding it? Teams and organizations are complex. Interrelated systems and mini-systems exist surrounding each of your high potential employees. When they fail to understand that an interconnected system exists at all, the result is a tendency toward frustration and finger pointing. Effective Coaches help develop leaders who can identify and navigate organizational webs with a minimum amount of effort and maximum results for all members of the system.

Executive Coaching Makes the Difference
Whether integrating Coaching with a formal training program or utilizing it solo with high potential leaders targeted for further growth, we lobby for the inclusion of this powerful tool in your leadership development repertoire. Invest in your high potential employees now to maximize returns – immediately and down the road. In these pandemic times, your organization’s future may depend upon it.