Then you’ve gotta know Jeremy Robinson. He’s one of a team of authors who wrote the book Becoming an Exceptional Executive Coach! Use your knowledge, experience and intuition to help leaders excel, which is featured in the Library of Professional Coaching, where you can access a sample chapter and then click through to buy your own copy.
Jeremy also was a featured Leading Coach on a recent Leading Coaches’ Community Mastermind call, and he share with us 29 points for being an exceptional executive coach. The first few are posted below, and you can access the rest as well as the recording from that call at the Clubhouse!
Jeremy Robinson’s top ten (well, a few more than ten):
1. Have a point of view. The coach with a hypothesis about what’s going on his Client’s life is a hundred times more useful than that coach who only asks questions.
2. Ask good questions. After that, don’t try to ask better questions. Remember better is the enemy of good.
3. The most wonderful sound of good coaching has a baseline of silence. Always be prepared to self-regulate and go silent.
4. Be prepared to punctuate meaningful remarks of your Client and yourself with silence.
5. Most coaches over talk.
6. Be clear about who the Client is– is it the person in front of you or the organization? Clarity about who the Client is makes for the best boundaries in coaching. Good boundaries make coaching possible.
7. Never argue with your Client. Never. Instead- influence.
8. Always have a teachable point of view and always be prepared to have another teachable point of view in your back pocket if the first one flops with your Client.
9. Speak the language of your Client in terms of her vocabulary. You don’t have to be a content expert in what your Client does, but you do need to know the vocabulary of your Client’s world.
10. Great coaching is about going from having a strong sense of self and big presence to no ego and completely merging with the Client- all in a nano-second.
11. Coaching is always about getting results. If you’re going for insights vs. results you’re on the wrong train.
12. Be wary of Clients who are great talkers. A lot of the talking that Clients do is propaganda. Yada YADA YADA. So what.
13. Always keep your ears and eyes on the Clients’ behavior. How is she behaving? What’s changing or not changing?