Forbes: When it’s time for executive coaches to talk, not listen

UC management professor lays out three situations that require different coaching approaches

Circumstances in the 21st-century work environment can cause executive coaches to deviate from their typical stance and embrace a more “direct, urgent and performance-focused approach.”

Scott Dust, an associate management professor at the University of Cincinnati’s Carl H. Lindner College of Business, wrote in Forbes that there are three situations that require this “counterintuitive approach to coaching”: career crisis, interim status and organizational distress.

scott-dust

Scott Dust, an associate management professor at the Carl H. Lindner College of Business.

Dust noted that there are two prevailing assumptions regarding coaching best practices in order to maximize emotional and skill-based growth.

Coaches should focus on building trust on a gradual basis with coachees, and then aid coachees in reaching their own conclusions. However, these practices do not always mesh with the modern working world.

“In situations where the coachee is having a career crisis, they are in an interim position or the organization is in distress, coaches should take a more balanced approach whereby goal attainment and performance improvement are the primary goals,” Dust wrote. “Then, when appropriate, revert to the trust-based, relational approaches whereby knowledge gain and emotional fulfillment are instrumental processes that eventually — over longer periods of time — facilitate performance.”

Read more in Forbes.

Featured image at top courtesy of Unsplash.

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