Strong and effective leaders within a company are what make or break the success of a business. Developing strong leadership skills within the workplace requires more than just an annual or quarterly performance review of employees. Many businesses struggle to keep their best employees engaged or help them reach their full potential.

When employees are not reaching their full potential, the business itself will never reach its full potential. Making an investment in the development of your most promising resource, your employees, will also improve retention. If you are constantly having to hire and train new employees, expenses increase, productivity and morale decrease,  stifling growth.

Business leadership coaching alleviates these issues giving way to stronger growth.

There has been a significant workplace generational culture shift over the past few years. Millennials especially view their place of employment as a source of personal and professional development. They desire to work for a company that gives them a mission-driven sense of purpose with a people-first mentality.

A Gallup study found that 87% of Millennials rate personal and professional development opportunities as essential to their work compared to 69% of non-millennials.

With Millennials making up more and more of the workforce, it is crucial to understand that they desire so much more than a place where they clock in and out, collecting a paycheck at the end of the week. They crave personal and professional development, so you need to provide that type of environment for them to avoid losing them.

What is Executive Leadership Coaching?

This is your business. You started it – either alone or with a partner. Maybe you had investors. But it is your creation. You had a vision, created a business plan, and achieved your goal of being a small business owner. That is worthy of tremendous celebration and pride in what you created!

Your natural drive to be your boss may cause some hesitation in hiring a business coach to partner with you, learn your operational “secret sauce,” and interrogate the reality of your and your team members’ personal and professional lives.

An executive business coach is not about having another tell you how to run your business  – it is a one-on-one mentorship, sounding board, and objective observation for you and your leadership team.

A business coach will:

1. Help you get clear on your company vision – where you are, where you want to be, and what it will take to get there. 

2. Ensure you have the right people on the bus – all sitting in the right seats. That means assessing if everyone is aligned with your company’s core values and mission and that they all have the skill, desire, and tools to deliver with distinction. 

3. Use the same process above to evaluate candidates for hiring by avoiding the trap of hiring “skills” without fully considering “fit.” 

4. Get your leadership team 100% on the same page with the company vision and their role in its success. 

5. Organize an action plan, including clear metrics to assess success. 

6. Improve leadership skills such as communication, organization, scaling, delegation, etc. 

7. Consistently make timely decisions that implement actions, evaluate success, and adjust habits as your business grows. 

Define a successful engagement with your Executive Leadership Coach that is tailored to fit your unique business and your organization’s individual needs. Ultimately, it is about producing repeatable and predictable outcomes independent of changing business cycles over time. When you and your team have high-quality communication, you can confront significant issues more quickly and efficiently and thus produce more positive business results over time.

Grow Your Business with Executive Business Coaching

Hiring a business coach does not mean failing as a business owner. Quite the contrary. It means you want to take your business to the next level. Everyone needs to work on themselves to become better professionals and individuals. There is wisdom, maturity, and self-awareness in recognizing that there is always room for improvement for everyone, personally and professionally.

Hiring an executive business coach before major issues hit prepares you and your team to overcome obstacles in advance because we know they will inevitably happen. It is all about finding the right business coach, the right fit for you and your business. 

Every business has the best intentions, optimism, and dreams of where they want to go. Unfortunately, 20% of small businesses fail within the first year, 50% fail within five years, and only 30% are still in business by ten years. You must be well-intentioned to survive long-term and thrive in your industry.

20% of small businesses fail within the first year, 50% fail within five years, and only 30% are still in business by ten years.

Two top 5 reasons small businesses fail are ineffective leadership and trying to do everything yourself. You must train your leadership team to be influential leaders, trust your employees, and delegate work to them. This is where an executive business coach can help you and your leadership team. A leadership development program will help your leadership team become better leaders, properly delegate work, and thus grow your business to new heights.

How to Choose Your Business Coach 

Finding the right career coach for your business may sound daunting at first. It is hard to know whether someone is a good fit for you and your business, especially when searching online. Here are a few questions you to consider to help you choose the right career coach:

1. Does the career coach offer a complimentary meeting to tell you about their services and answer any questions so you can “see” them virtually on Zoom or in person?

2. Does this career coach have professional experience in a previous leadership role?

3. What are their credentials to be an executive leadership coach? 

4. What do their previous or current clients have to say about them? Could you ask for references?

5. What is the investment of time while working together?

6. Is there an expected ROI for monetary investment?

7. Ask the career coach to explain their process: what they do monthly, what that looks like for each business they work with, and how they help leaders develop and grow professionally and individually. 

Remember, a good business coach addresses how to be a better manager of people and how to grow and evolve as a leader and individual. They will be a sounding board, offering new perspectives to help expand your way of thinking, leading to greater self-awareness, communication, work habits, and interpersonal skills. Develop your leaders, and you can expect your business to improve, your work environment to elevate,  and your employees’ productivity to increase. Success always starts at the top.

Don’t Wait Until It’s Too Late

Now is the time to hire an executive business coach for your small business. While executive leadership coaching can come in and save a failing business, the most profound impact is in getting ahead of issues before they put you in the red where recovery becomes difficult. Long term success of a business starts at the top – with the leadership team – and then permeates throughout the company. If your leadership team is not leading others properly, the business will not succeed. Investing in your leaders is investing in your small business.

Ken Kilday, CEO/founder of Leader’s Cut: The Ken Kilday Coaching Experience, is an Executive Business Coach and EOS Implementer®. He works with leaders in companies of all sizes to implement actions, evaluate success, and adjust to new, improved habits and actions to produce repeatable and predictable outcomes independent of changing business cycles. Ken is an entrepreneur who has designed, built, launched, and rejuvenated successful businesses. Contact Ken to schedule a 15-minute Meet & Greet and discover how coaching can best serve you and your business.