The qualities of a brilliant Executive Coach - there are no others
An Executive Coach worth his salt has in his armoury the following skills ---
An outstanding intellect attuned to the corporate environment. In fact the best set the pace in the corporate environment. They lead the setting of the atmosphere and tempo.
A corporate environment has a pace, has a raison d'etre, has a rhythm, has a cadence all of its own. All corporates are the same the only difference is the tune, the fiddle is the same. The genius of the Executive Coach is to be able to extrapolate experiences in one to some or all of the others.
He teaches and imparts knowledge extremely fast. The only thing he does faster is pick up things quickly especially in the areas of power, politics and influence. The best Executive Coaches understand the confluence of all three qualities and in the best corporate operators these qualities merge and blend sublimely.
A person who is brilliant with people, who is brilliant at understanding people and corporate politics who operates brilliantly in that area. Not just passively but actively. They are resplendent but quiet achievers and extremely smooth operators.
He must have an in depth understanding of the company he is working for. He should know the P&L inside out. He should know when and where every dollar is earned and spent. He must take a process improvement (allied to accounting knowledge) view of the business. He must cut it with the best cost accountants, with the best management consultants and with the other great Executive Coaches out there.
A specialist where required in any vertical he cares to name. How? Broad business experience made local by study and contact in the industry concerned. I once hear a story about a famous politician. He was briefed about a country he knew nothing about for 10 minutes and went into a media conference announcing policies and showing himself an expert on the subject. He picked up all he knew in 10 minutes. The best Executive Coaches must have that ability. To be immediately and intimately attuned to the current needs of the organisation and the Executive he is closely working with.
A great understanding of the vertical he is working in. The challenges ahead, even the hidden ones. A generalised but through knowledge of all the major companies in that vertical and the particular (tactical) concerns of the CEOs, CIOs and CFOs in each of each of these companies. He must live and breathe the bell curve if you will of the profitability of the companies in that vertical. Those outside the bell curve should be primary targets for the business development activities of an Executive Coach specialising in that vertical.
A great business development brain otherwise he won't survive as an Executive Coach. TO thrive an Executive Coach must daily communicate with the corporates that provide his life blood. His job is to create just enough interest to have himself engaged without overcommitting himself and giving the game away. Knowledge is money. In the information age, the only thing he has to sell is himself backed up with his formidable research and presentation skills.
Profound analytical skills, preferably in the Six Sigma field. He needs these skills because his communication on a daily basis and well as his business development activities must be imbued by a business prescience and the only way to do that is by using statistics and numbers which provide the foundation for that deep knowledge.
An Executive Coach is a job. You may not work for one employer but it is a job like any other. It has responsibilities, it has accountabilities, it has deliverables, it has demands and all these exact something from us: a great effort, a great platform to deliver these services. But more than an ordinary job, this is a self driven job where you work as hard as you want the harder you work the more business you generate the more you can potentially earn. This is the great part of being an Executive Coach the earnings are potentially limitless. If you are engaged by one client for $25,000 per month, this does not mean you cannot also be engaged by another client for the same amount at the same time.
Executive coaching is not a 9-5 job where you have to go in and sit behind a desk for 8 hours each day. The job is about spending time with Executives and as much as is required to provide them with the direction and motivation for the next day or week. On that basis you can easily service 5 clients per month. You can spend the equivalent of one day a week with each and potentially earn $125,000 per month. This is for the best of the best. With each client you must be on top of your game, have done your research and the most through preparation to be able to have all the answers at the tip of your tongue but never utter them. The point of being an Executive Coach is to ensure that the client follows a journey you map out to reach the goal, get to the answer, deliver the goods, a journey you have taken. Why you and why this particular journey? Because you have also taken the very same journey and already reached the goal ahead of them, that is why it is easy for you to direct them. You have already worked out the necessary steps to get to where they want to go. You never show them how to get from A to B to D to C and finally to G all your job is to show them how to get to D and strengthen and fortify them to go the rest of the way alone but with your supreme guidance. That is why you earn $125,000 per month.
An executive coach has to spend his weekend working out his targets for the next week. Writing a brilliant proposal supported by a killer presentations is one thing (that is hard enough) but then having finding getting 5 minutes in front of a decision maker to enable that person to make a decision about the Executive Coaching proposal one way or another is another much bigger battle. One of the best ways of targeting your presentations is to single out a struggling Executive for your proposal. How would you know that? Networking and industry contacts.
Physical appearance is of major importance to an executive coach. You must exhibit shine and polish in your personal attire and grooming. In short, you must present as a brilliant package, the full deal. You also need to provide a physical platform for your performance and appearance counts for a lot. It is not everything it is the only thing. Physical fitness is extremely important as well to ensure you are at peak of your intellectual power. You will need it.
What about people employed formally as Executive Coaches in organisations sometimes called Executive Advisors. These people cannot have the level of independence from the 'party line' and the spirit of sycophancy prevalent in all large organisations by people with power and/or influence and the closer they are to the seat of power the more they are prone to sycophancy. This close adherence to the mores of the organisation makes these people absolutely useless as Executive Coaches. They do not have the fierce, aggressive even, independence and freedom of spirit and speech that is so essential to an effective Executive Coach. When someone in an organisation employed as a Corporate Advisor is five steps down in the chain of command how can they ever be credible as an Executive Coach to the CEO/MD of that organisation? It's like some lonely priest in some backwater aiming to advise the Pope on church doctrine. Absolutely ludicrous. Kings need a Mazarin or a Richelieu to advise them and an Executive Coach aims to be a Richelieu. He aims to rival in fame the CEOs/MDs of the world by the power, force, beauty and relevance of his thoughts, his coaching and his writing.
About Gilbert Labour
Mr Labour is a writer, deep thinker, consultant, adviser, speaker and presenter on the following topics: sociopathy & psychopathy in the workplace, life coaching, executive coaching and all executive health issues, project and program management, IT infra-structure management, Six Sigma, Lean techniques, process improvement and people management. He combines all these skills in a brilliant combination, for example Six Sigma and project management, to provide modern enlightened companies with truly world class advice that will set them apart from the rest and create for them a sustainable competitive advantage.
He specialises in the following industries: legal and accountancy, telecommunications, transportation and aviation, banking and finance, insurance, government, IT and outsourcing but believes that his experience in these verticals is applicable across industries, countries, languages, cultures and businesses generally.
Every single industry he specialises in (telcos, aviation, retail banking, insurance) faces fundamental challenges to continued survival and prosperity in the 21st Century and Mr Labour is well placed to provide a multi-disciplinary approach to uncovering insights for competitive advantage.
He has been extensively involved in process improvement initiatives within project organisations and in production and maintenance environments within a number of these industries. He has delivered process improvement programs that provide bottom line improvement whilst maintaining and enhancing employee morale.
He also owns and runs one of the world's most comprehensive web resources on the topic of life and executive coaching containing approximately 140 articles on life and executive coaching tips and techniques. He has been quoted in learned papers, newspaper and magazine articles. He has written a book on life coaching, Life Coaching for DODOs, which provides an introduction to life coaching for the general public.
He is an IBM accredited Independent Software Vendor (ISV) and provides software and support for coaches and coaching applications. He is an IT infrastructure specialist of 15 years standing.
He is also a pioneer in the field of coaching and project management having presented a world's first on this topic in South Africa in May, 04. His paper entitled Sane Project Management, a Life and Executive Coaching Approach has created both a new field in project management and a new area of interest for coaching and coaches and one they may benefit from in the future.
For PMISA 2006 he is preparing a paper entitled Project Management and Executive Coaching - A Synergy? which will be continuing an exploration of the connection between coaching and project management that he first developed and presented in PMISA 2004. The purpose of the paper will be to take from project management principles that are applicable in coaching situations and to take from executive coaching, principles that are equally applicable in project management situations especially those that deal with project manager performance.
Mr Labour acknowledges that in today's highly competitive and rapidly changing business environment, a busy consultant, life coach or executive coach must evince a compelling value proposition, as much for himself as for his product and/or service.
He is able to bring a brilliant mix of both quantitative and qualitative approaches, embracing Six Sigma, Lean, project management, executive coaching, operational and line management, to bear on difficult even intractable business problems in any areas where they may exist.
He has a refreshing engaging vibrant perspective on life and business in the corporate world. He is able to engage with any company in the world, within his industry expertise and beyond, and provide an assessment of the issues and problems that management suspects exists. He can do this on a pro-active basis and confidentially.
In either case, he is able to conduct an absolutely confidential review and make recommendations based only on selected documentation and telephone interviews with key people, if the highest degree of confidentiality and secrecy is required.
He is also able to execute or be involved in the execution of these recommendations should that be required. He has previously managed large programs of work involving major restructuring, outsourcing and retrenchments.
He forecasts a greater demand for people with his combined skills in the future especially where established, staid inefficient industries and companies face head-on competition from the full blown tiger economies of China and India with their vast unlimited supply of cheap, educated and trained manpower.
Mr Labour will be holding a world's first life coaching retreat in Mauritius in November, 06. This will be a gathering of coaches and their clients from around the world in the first gathering of its type. Its purpose will be for coaches to network with other coaches and for clients to share their general coaching experience with other clients and coaches. All in the world's most beautiful holiday destination. Further details will be made available as they are finalised. This conference as yet untitled will be hosted by the Life Coaching Association of Australia (LCAA).
Executive Coaching Tips and Techniques No. 9
Process Improvement (PI)
The management consultants can show the way but it is the people on the ground who relish and welcome change who have to create the change it and there are too few of these already
An organisation with say 20-25 brilliant middle managers who are exceptional change agents can do well in the new world of 2010
Nothing causes more argument and angst in an organisation than this subject. It is perceived (perhaps rightly) as a distraction from the day to day business of the business and beside the purpose for the existence of the business. Wrong. PI is the business or one day soon there will be no business. People don't want to
do it and those that do hate it mostly.
In an organisation there are the EXECs (and senior managers) who champion and sponsor the change they want change but won't do the bottom up changes required to make it happen but they will take the credit and the reward when (if) it does. There are the middle managers where the ranks of the change agents need to come from
but there are vast vested interests at work putting a brake on change at that level, the people who are middle managers and making change happen are too few. Finally there are your day workers, your drones they have absolutely no interest in making any change happen so there is no point in looking in their ranks for the change agents.
Working in these constipated spaces are the management consultants, the laxative of the corporate world. They work at the EXEC level putting in place the program and the governance for change but they cannot make the change happen which must come from the too few middle managers who are the only ones who can make change happen by changing things
on the shop floor. An organisation with say 20-25 brilliant middle managers who are change agents can do well in the new world of 2010.
Executive Coaching contributes to and makes possible PI and PI improves the P&L, cost centre bottom line and operational KPIs. That's it sweet and simple. There is no other truer connection in the corporate world. But the problem is that the real world needs to change (operationally) for the numbers to work.
For example if you reduce your household spending budget by 10% you need to cut your consumption and costs by 10% meaning less soft drink or restaurant meals.
Process improvement must connect with and be directed by (and directs) the P&L. There is no other way to ensure PI sticks. It is not enough to improve processes and systems in a vacuum. This vacuum must be filled by the financial aspects of each process improvement effort. Having said that, a PI effort cannot be directed by a management or cost accountant at heart. They have
no imagination, no vision, no innovation in their bones. They are as dry as dessicated coconuts. For PI you need creative and innovative geniuses in the work context. These are few and far between.
It must be directed by a PI professional trained in the Six Sigma methodology. Why? Because at the heart of process improvement is the reduction of defects to an infinitesimal figure and removing waste within the process which is underlying to and underneath the financials associated with the process. The process is fuelled by finance but it is the people involved at the technical, operational
and project management level of the process that can change it.
Can it rightly be said that after PI the same business exists as it did before? No I would say, what now exists is probably a more efficient organisation needing new management and senior staff. The former managers and senior staff simply won't cut it in the new organisation. That much is crystal clear. They will oversee the carnage but will not be there to pick up the 'pieces'. A new management
team needs to be brought in, fresh and without the scars of the cuts made to the former organisation and the associated residual pain and ill feeling that lingers after any major re-structure.
PI will cause fear (of the unknown) and pain (when the unknown becomes known) and it affects someone deeply on a personal level.
About Gilbert Labour. Mr Labour is founding President of the Life Coaching Association of Australia (LCAA). In pursuit of his worldwide life and executive coaching activities he is hosting an Executive Coaching Retreat (ECR) and Workshop in Mauritius in June, 05. This has not been affected by the recent events in South-East Asia.
Life Coaching Tips and Techniques No. 10
Obesity and the roller coaster ride from nadir to zenith and back
There are five journeys in obesity, which one are you on now?
Why are there obese people when there are people starving in the world? Is obesity a medical problem rather than
one of lack of self-control or perhaps even one using food for sexual/sensual gratification for masking (?) the real problems?
How successful is someone who is 250 kilos at 'masking' or hiding the problem?
The five journeys is obesity are -
Getting there becoming obese, this is the easiest journey of all and happens almost without you knowing. This journey is on the road to death.
Staying there at a steady weight, this is a hard journey because the tendency is to put on more weight not less. This journey is a slow death.
The next journey is one into hell and that is on the road to putting on more and more weight. This is the last journey these people even embark on.
This journey ends in death.
The penultimate journey and the one with the most difficulty starting is the road back away from obesity. The enormous journey back is not the problem
but the first step back, the first gram lost. This journey is not a journey of weight loss but a journey to lose the fears and problems that the weight gain had
temporarily put on the back burner. This second last journey is the life coaching journey and has much less to do with weight loss, exercise and fitness and more to do with
facing problems in their real intensity and fury perhaps for the first time since the decision taken to embark on the first journey.
The last journey and that is to keep the weight at the target weight after the massive task of weight loss because again the tendency is to put the weight back on
even faster than before and much much faster than it was lost. For every gram lost a kilo is put on.
Work with a life coach who understands your weight problem is not a weight problem but a personal problem posing, impersonating a weight problem. Someone who knows which
journey you are on and can make sure you either move to the next healthy journey or stay at the healthy journey you're on.
New Life Coaching Service Model - All Inclusive Platinum Service
Product Features
One new low totally all inclusive monthly fee ($400 AUS) - currently this is $500 AUS. Saving $100 AUS per month.
No contracts whatsoever, pay as you go month by month. Start when you want, stop when you want. No questions asked.
No need to furnish more than your first name. No notes taken during any sessions and no personal identifying details asked for, required or noted down.
Coaching can take place exclusively by phone and/or internet but it is preferred that an initial one on one session take place but this is not essential.
All inclusive, no exclusions, all services available (as per below).
Paid once a month at the beginning of the month (non refundable if cancelled during month).
Entitled to the full range of services (one on one, SMS, Mobile, Phone, ICQ, MSN Messenger, MS Netmeeting) on an as required basis. But does not
include CD and video conferencing products.
Use as much of the service as you require but please note as coaching is a relationship which requires and places responsibility on you to complete
agreed upon tasks, there will be regular scheduled feedback and catchup sessions. These are usually by phone or ICQ.
Clearly articulated and set goals such as embarking on a new career, changing careers, developing new small business, creating small business growth,
preparation for retirement, developing additional income in/for retirement.
These services include small business development coaching, product development and promotion, and press release preparation.
Payment and services commences in the calendar month of first payment and lasts till the end of the next month, then regular monthy payments commence on the 1st of each month thereafter (for example) ---
Paid 1 month on 15th of July - $400
Payment due on 1st August - Nil
Payment due on 1st September - $400
Payment and services terminates at the end of the calendar month of the last payment as follows (for example) ---
Payment made on 1st October - $400
Decision to cancel made 4th October and notice to do so received on that day or any day within the month
No refund policy but services available until 31st October if required
No further payments then required due to cancellation
The Platinum Life Coaching Product is now the only life coaching product available aside from
tailored programs and the featured programs.
50% Discount for bona fide students. The fee for students is $200 per month.
You will receive an exceptional level of service and care from one of the best life coaches practicing today.
Coaching Programs
555 Program
The 555 Program is complementary to the 333 Program and is part of a family of programs called The Numbered Series, a simplification of a plethora of products, services and programs into
a number of specifically targeted set of programs that target a very specific audience with a limited amount of time and resources to devote to a life and executive coaching program. The programs
covers a set of goals over a set period for a specific (one time only) fee.
The key goals of the 555 Program is to be able to run 5k in 5 months, to solve 5 life coaching issues or problems in 5 months and to investigate and resolve 5 executive coaching problems
in 5 months.
Life Coaching Portal Programs
Beyond the existing Diamond program being run on the portal, a series of additional programs are being developed to be run for specific audiences and which have very clear targets and goals.
These include the following.
The 555 Program
Gilbert Labour, will personally run this program. It will probably take in the region of 10 suitable people and run for 5 months. The program is multi-faceted and covers three main streams a fitness stream, a life coaching stream
dealing with personal issues and an executive stream to supercharge your work, business and corporate environment.
The first stream is a fitness element. The goal is to be able to run 5k (non stop) in five months and be able to lose 5 kilos in the process. This is a modest achievement and is considered a healthy approach to fitness generally.
I am a former fitness instructor and dance teacher and can provide guidance in this area. You will need a clearance from your doctor if you're over 45.
The second stream is a life coaching element. The goal of the life coaching is to investigate a number of current personal issues and focus on 5 for resolution in 5 months. One to be resolved or at least worked on each month.
The third stream is an executive coaching element. The goal of this element is to come up with five goals or issues to be dealt with in the 5 months of the program. These could involve working towards a promotion, changing jobs, changing careers,
leaving the corporate environment and developing a small business. For the hard core executives and other corporate thrivers and survivors there will be a number of areas that include executive interview training and executive decision making that can be covered.
There are many others and these can be chosen based on your current goals. The aim of this stream is canvass all the possibilities and focus on only 5 and work through each one.
The cost of the program varies. To take part on a one-on-one basis with Gilbert Labour will cost $5000. To take part in a group setting will cost $2000. Individual programs can start at anytime considered suitable.
To provide this program on a company wide basis (more than 10 people), please call Gilbert Labour for a quote.
Please call Gilbert Labour on 0409 223 436 if you would like to take part. Further information on the 555 Program is available from the portal.
General Information
I also do a small amount of pro-bono work in the area of life coaching. I belong to the Life Coaching Pro Bono Group (LCPBG), a group of life coaches I am putting together to do this type of work for people in need but who may not be able to afford the services of a full fee life coach. We make allowances for your circumstances and also on the understanding that once you're back on your
feet, your capacity to contribute to your life coaching will also improve.
Generally speaking, we will set clear goals, we will put in place plans to attain those goals, we will execute the plan effectively. We will monitor and survey the results and ensure our goals are met. In most cases, we will envelope what we are trying to achieve into a coaching programme.
I operate flexibly taking into account the needs of the client as we progress with the programme.
Please call me on my mobile (0409 223 436) for a confidential discussion to begin the journey of self discovery.
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