Comp. Leadership Self-Assessment PDF - measure yourself on 7 levels of success: http://t.co/rD8DY6XA
Some executive leadership development training is now including executive coaching courses to empower upper level leadership with coaching skills as part of their tool kits. That's a good thing but what's often overlooked is that there is both science and art to coaching. The science can be taught to anyone but, just like with music or visual arts, the way that science is used has a lot to do with personal propensity.
You can give 2 people of equal experience the same number of piano lessons with the same content and document the same number of practice hours and still have one of those students become a demonstrably better piano player. While it's a good thing to include coaching methodologies and principles in CEO executive courses, it's really important not to believe that that means optimal coaching is happening on the ground.
You wouldn't ask the janitor to re-engineer the heating system just because he's been thoroughly versed in it. So why would you expect people who have been through executive leadership training programs to substitute for a highly skilled personal executive coach?
That the field of executive leadership development has opened up to including executive coaching courses indicates better general understanding of the value of coaching. We have to be careful, though, not to de-value executive coaching by requiring organizational leadership to take on the job of a dedicated personal executive coach. Such de-valuation of coaching is not prudent in terms of executive time management nor in terms of getting the results that dedicated executive coaching and consulting professionals achieve.
