Partnering with an Executive Coach is a Strength, Not a Weakness - Doug Pardo LionPoint Coaching
Doug Pardo, veteran, C-Suite Executive Coach, and Founder of LionPoint coaching, is dedicated to helping people and teams reach their full potential. He founded LionPoint to do just that; the LionPoint team aids professionals in their pursuit of achieving ambitious goals and objectives.
The LionPoint team works as partners for their clients who are working in early stage, rapidly growing organizations. Clients who work with them are often trying to push the frontier of what their teams can achieve.
Doug outlines how asking for help and a partnership with a coach is not a sign of weakness, but a strength and something that should become more mainstream for any executive. True leaders are always looking to improve and in any context we need a coach to help us do that.
He explains how one may think to go to the people in their life or field for guidance, and while this can be beneficial, it may not be optimal. Although coworkers, partners, and bosses can support you, they all have their own objectives which can cloud their judgment and the advice that they deliver. These people also lack coaching expertise and may not have the feedback you need to be the best person or professional you can be and overcome any obstacles in your team’s way.
Much like sports coaches, executive coaches “become a designated person with whom you can create the space to work through areas of confusion. They bring a tested framework and honed expertise that is crafted specifically to help you achieve your goals.” In busy professional lives, we also rarely designate time to reflect on our actions and how to improve. Having an executive coach creates this time and enables “you to patiently and methodically diagnose problems and reflect on yourself.
Doug Pardo acknowledges that there can be a stigma attached with having an executive coach and that some clients are worried it will be a sign of lack of performance. In his years of experience working as an executive coach and running LionPoint, he has found the opposite to be true: “Preconceived notions can lead us to believe that people who seek an executive coach are in crisis or have a remedial status; this lacks a fundamental understanding of the full scope of coaching.”
The leaders who are seeking to solve issues at their root cause in their team and organization know they cannot do this alone. Leaders are “constantly hungry to understand, accept responsibility for, respond to, and design around the problems they are facing” and an executive coach only makes them more capable of this when they face challenging and ambitious goals.
Doug Pardo also points out a key distinction between an executive coach and anyone else you may encounter in a professional setting. He says “the distinct and sole objective of excellent coaches is to help our clients achieve their most ambitious goals. That is how our performance is measured — by the success of the clients we work with.” Executive coaches can only succeed if their clients do because it is the only metric for how they are measured.
Partnering with an executive coach only bolsters your success and the right partnership can be the ideal space for an executive to reflect on their actions, diagnose problems, and ensure they are enabling their teams to accomplish their lofty goals.
