A flawless road to what coaching clients want today
With a crisp eye, it’s as plain as day that things have changed. Organizations are hiring coaches no more for aligning a manager’s bad behaviors – which are related rather to his personal history and require a different assistance – but to understand his blind spots. It’s not about fixing anymore. It’s about growing.
As an executive coach, you help the manager to improve his answers, his communication with the team, his reaction to the stress produced by the profit-oriented culture of companies, because that stress blocks his capacity for innovation, active listening, and his resources for supporting talented people. It blocks him from seeing clearly. Through executive coaching, he should turn from a manager into an acknowledged leader.
But how can coaches reach this level?
I have recently been talking with Neena Ramanathan, PCC, the president of the International Coach Academy (ICA) branch in India who found out about coaching while being an employee, some years ago. In 2011 he opened a local ICA branch and had 57 students in the first year, all of them working within corporations.
Just like him and his students, most professionals end up wishing to become executive coaches after having been involved in their company’s training programs. Or after talking with other people who recommended them to make the step. Maybe even after joining personal development programs. And there’s also the case of professionals who want to do their job or grow their business in accordance with coaching principles. However, more and more companies are willing to hire you as an internal coach only after you got your accreditation.
It’s just that no one mentions that the process of becoming a coach can be a real pain if you end up in the wrong program. And while in India 11 out of 57 people reached the PCC level in the same year they attended the ICA program, most coaches aren’t that lucky.
A friend of mine who was on her way to becoming a coach in Turkey some time ago had been misinformed and enrolled in a program that only covered a fraction of the coaching accreditation process. She had to join several other programs in order to gather all the 126 training hours necessary for becoming a PCC.
As you may know, there are three accreditation levels:
- ACC (Accredited Certified Coach): 100 hours of practice & 60 hours of training
- PCC (Professional Certified Coach): 750 hours of practice & 126 hours of training
- MCC (Master Certified Coach): 2.500 hours of practice & 200 hours of training
Whether it’s Romania, Bulgaria or Turkey, wannabe coaches often engage in insufficient short-term coaching programs that need many follow-up classes in order to gain the accreditation. And in the meantime they pay a lot of money and invest a lot of time.
How would it be if you could join a program where you had everything in the same place: training, practice and supervision? Maybe even gain some blogging and sales abilities? This would be a school adapted to the reality of today, helping you to begin with full speed ahead and gain a global reach within one year.
Stay tuned. I’ll get back with details…
