Executive Leadership Coaching Firm

What is coaching?

Having a coach is having a facilitator at the weekly meeting you have with yourself. A coach is a thought partner, someone to help you clarify and focus on the things that are important to you, things that you do not yet have. Often a coach helps you sort through and reduce the white noise in your life. Sometimes a coach offers a nudge, helping you move from ‘stuck’ to ‘unstuck’.

Through coaching, clients can expect to find fresh perspectives on their professional and personal possibilities, challenges and opportunities. The coaching relationship will help enhance thinking, focus on the important things, make important needed changes, improve decision-making skills and identify ways to improve interpersonal effectiveness in business, family, community and spiritual relationships. Successful coaching clients find better, faster results in business productivity, higher levels of satisfaction with their life and work, and faster achievement of the things that are truly important in their lives.

What can I expect from 1-on-1 coaching?

Each coaching relationship is unique and completely focused on the success of the individual. That means our absolute commitment to them as a person and a leader, helping them clarify exactly what success will look like from their own perspective.

The E4 process fosters a crystal clear understanding of a client’s challenges and opportunities, AND how to address them. They learn to clarify their goals, assess alternatives, evaluate risks, and stretch their limits.

The work is rigorous, but the growth is extremely satisfying. Best of all, the effort is applied to real world situations, unlike a training program or workshop. Our clients don’t just learn new skills; they become a person that others recognize as having certainty about where they are headed. And they learn to help others do the same.

Who hires a coach?

An excellent candidate for coaching is a person who is already successful but wants to move toward an even more desirable future; they are quite functional, generally mentally healthy and they want a thought partner who will be patient with them, listen to them, understand them, trust them, allow them to try things on for size without necessarily buying everything, encourage them, exercise tough love when needed, hold them accountable, and someone to celebrate success with them.

How is coaching conducted?

While the majority of our one-on-one coaching is conducted over the phone, in-person sessions can be arranged by special request. In each session your coach will listen, ask questions, contribute observations, and help you apply practical tools and techniques to clarify and focus on your vision, goals, strategies, plans and solutions.

In addition to your scheduled sessions, you have unlimited access to us via E-mail, when needed.

Group coaching sessions are held either at the client’s business location or by telephone much like a conference call. Sessions are typically 60 minutes or more in length and can be scheduled as frequently as once a week. Groups are comprised of individuals from the same company, people in the same industry, or those with a common goal or agenda.

How is a coach different from a consultant, trainer, mentor or counselor?

Coaching is one of a small number of approaches that are productive, depending upon the client’s need. Larry Hayes Partners works hand-in-hand with any of these other professionals, if a need for any of them is identified:

1. Consultants – Consultants play a very specific role as a subject matter expert in a given field. Consistent with the client’s goals, the consultant will provide recommendations and solutions; they may perform competitive analysis (benchmarking) or perform various business analyses or empirical research. (Some coaches are also consultants. Be sure to ask if yours is going to recommend answers and solutions as an expert in your field of business. By all means, get one if that’s what you need.)
2. Educators, trainers and teachers – These professionals, as subject matter experts, are needed when the coaching client is lacking a particular knowledge or skill set that can be acquired by attending a training program. Typically, the value from these professionals is gained in the classroom, but the trainer is not present during the implementation phase of the new knowledge or skills. The coach and client pick up where the classroom leaves off and work on the implementation and polish of the new knowledge and skills. (Coaches may be subject matter experts; however being the ‘teacher’ is not the focus of coaching.)
3. Mentors – This profession goes way back to ancient Greece (referenced in Homer’s Odyssey). A mentor is usually older, wiser and more experienced than the coaching client, and imparts their learned wisdom to the client. The client seeks guidance and advice from the mentor, in formal and informal ways. Remember, the mentor lived in a different time and place than the client, and their wisdom may or may not be applicable to the client’s current circumstances. (Coaches may be wise, they may be older (or not), but choose to stay in their role of focusing the client on developing their own possibilities instead of ‘imparting wisdom’.)
4. Counselors and Therapists – This profession focuses on events, experiences, learned fears and negative feelings from the past that are holding the client back today. A therapist helps a dysfunctional person become functional. (A coach works with an already functional client to accelerate their achievement of exceptional success.)

What happens in a coaching session?

Ultimately you control the coaching session agenda. You are encouraged to review your accomplishments since our last session and consider if you have any immediate challenges or a longer term goal that requires focus. The intent of all sessions is to assess where you are in the moment and then provide what you need to move forward and accomplish your goals.

What does it cost?

Your investment in coaching will include Time, Effort and Money

1. Time – coaching produces results through a series of conversations, some longer, some shorter. Typically the shortest coaching engagement that will produce results will unfold over weekly conversations during a 6-month period. Depending on the client’s goals and aspirations for growth, a year is sometimes more realistic. Many of our clients have ongoing relationships with us.
2. Effort – At the end of each coaching session comes the question “What do you want to get done before we meet next week”? This means that between our coaching appointments you will have things to do, ideas to develop, actions to try, conversations to conduct, decisions to make, etc. The time needed for this work will vary week to week, and should be acknowledged as necessary for the coaching process to succeed.
3. Money – Your coach is only another member of the important team of professionals who support your success, including your attorney, accountant, financial advisor, etc. The fee you pay your coach is an investment in yourself and your future. Fees vary by duration of engagement and will be discussed at the time of contracting.
   • A note on expenses – from time to time, additional expenses may be needed. There are assessment tools that may enhance the coaching process, which have a minimal cost and are paid by the client. Depending upon location and the nature of the engagement, necessary travel expenses incurred by the coach will be paid by the client, including but not limited to airline, hotel, meals, mileage, parking, etc., upon mutual agreement.