3 Questions to Ask Before Hiring an Executive Coach
3 Questions to Ask Before Hiring an Executive Coach
Executive coaching can be very costly to your business. Your goal from hiring an executive coach is to enhance your company's overall performance by increasing the management's ability to navigate with the company through all sorts of obstacles while minimizing their impact on the company's performance.
The cost of executive coaching is not only the fees of the person or firm that will do it. If you hire the wrong person you are risking more costs in lost revenue or damages to your business.
Below are the 3 questions that you must ask the executive coach candidate in the hiring interview.
1. Experience Relevancy
In order to make sure you are hiring the best fit for your company you need to make sure that the executive coach you are hiring has a good history with similar businesses. You can ask general questions about your field and the current business challenges, but there is one question you must ask: "Have you coached a management team (or a manager) in the field before?" Usually experienced executive coaches will have that mentioned in their resume, so you may ask about the toughest challenge the coach had while coaching in a similar company and what had he/she done about it. This will let you judge their familiarity with your field of business.
2. References
Reference letter from previous clients in your field with their contact info is what you'll ask for. Such a client would provide the best testimonial you could hope for. The reference could be a trainee who benefited from the coaching program, or a business owner who can give an estimate of how much his company benefited from this particular coach.
3. Qualifications
Executive coaching is a regulated business. The purpose of executive coaching certification is to set certain standards that all certified coaches should meet in order to qualify for coaching. Make sure you are hiring a qualified candidate who had received the proper formal training himself.