Executive Coaching

Executive Coaching is historically reserved for senior leaders within an organization to improve their leadership and personal performance. Research conducted by Dr. Vivian Smith-Del Toro indicated that Executive Coaching is used as a development tool or prerequisite for the C-Suite. Executive coaching can enable the executive to have a “thinking space” and a sounding board to think through issues and generate new innovative ideas. Executive Coaching can be a catalyst for personal growth of the executive and can be transformational for them and the organization. The Executive Coach and the Executive will collaborate and create a career strategy to define their purpose or what is important to them personally and professionally. It is fair to say that the fee rates for Executive Coaching is often much higher than for other types of coaching, which tends to reflect the seniority of the clients and that it is often taking place within the corporate environment.

Business Coaching

The Business Coach provides support, feedback and advice to Business Owners, Entrepreneurs, and their team to enable them to improve their personal performance in the business setting. One might also describe business coaching as the activity performed by managers within a business to help their people develop, increase job satisfaction and learn new skills.  A business coach might provide some mentoring to a coachee, in the form of sharing their own business experience.

Life Coaching

Life Coaching has a focus on the development of the individual and may incorporate psychology, neuroscience, sociology, adult development and career development. In other words, the facets that influence how a human lives their life and accomplishes their own personal desires and dreams. It can be associated more with therapy and counselling than any other type of coaching described above.   There are likely to be a different set of qualifications that a life coach has compared to say, a business coach. They will be more holistic, psychology based and could include Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

Career Coaching

A Career Coach in this area is focused on the individual’s career or career development. Career Coaches are likely to draw upon a wider range of skills including advising, consulting and mentoring, and may use some type of psychometric tools to help the individual get additional insight into their career preferences or how their personality impacts on their career choices. Sometimes recruitment companies provide this type of coaching as an added value service to their clients.

Leadership Coaching

This is aimed at helping leaders to improve their leadership capabilities. This type of coaching is often used at the enterprise level.  The coach(s) often have previous experience in a senior leadership position within a corporate organization and therefore understands the organizational and corporate cultural issues that can impact on someone in a senior leadership position. Leadership Coaching have a blend of business experience, understanding of psychology and organizational culture and systems, as these three issues often have an influence on the issues that a leaders face.

Team Coaching

According to Philippe Rosinski, the role of the coach is helping a team achieve superior performance while also helping team members create more fulfilling lives for themselves and others. This means the coach acts as the catalyst for the team to address not only what they do, but how they do it. It may also incorporate facilitation and consulting skills.  It can also be defined as “enabling a team to function at more than the sum of its parts, by clarifying its mission and improving its external and internal relationships. It is different therefore from coaching team leaders on how to lead their teams, or coaching individuals in a group setting.” (Hawkins and Smith, 2006) This type of coaching is becoming more popular within organizations.

Systemic Coaching

This area of coaching is becoming more popular, similar to team coaching, because the focus in more about organizational change and the entities that operate within it.   According to Wikipedia, systemic coaching is a form of counseling that employs constructivism conversation, aimed at human problem resolution. Systemic coaching recognizes that in order for two or more persons to interact effectively in a social system, any one individual or group of individuals within that system, each as an element of the whole, may require or benefit from coaching aimed at restoring equilibrium or creating a new alignments. It is also associated with work on Constellations and is derived from work in the field of family therapy. Systemic coaches are focused on professional interfaces and the quality of the collaboration, not the individual relationships themselves (Cordain, 2008).