Coaching for Career Impact and Fulfillment
I. Coaching for Career Path Clarity
Having a well defined and ambitious career path is a cornerstone of fulfillment. Career clarity focuses our energy and fuels success; in its absence both talent and drive can wither. This clarity is vital not only when considering a dramatically different career path, but also whenever making important decisions regarding a current position.
Achieving career clarity can involve three distinct processes.
Defining the Mission: The coachee’s core needs are explored and clarified. The range of intrinsic and extrinsic needs are identified and weighed relative to one another. Elements considered include cognitive style, skill strengths, field of interests, human dynamics, physical environment, financial compensation and spiritual values.
Focusing through Research: The coaching collaboration then targets career research. Coach and coachee cut through the miasma of industry and job options to determine the top career alternatives. Together they draw on leading references, online resources, executive search, the social network and information interviews.
Career Project Management: Coaching then emphasizes pragmatic action planning – formalizing long-term goals, pressing next steps, and contingency strategies. Both the next job and the long-term game can be pursued systematically and at an accelerated pace.
II. Coaching for Accelerated Career Advancement
To advance to the top tier of one’s company and profession – to greater pay, greater authority, and greater challenge – is a battle fought on multiple fronts. Exceptional executive careers follow multiple paths of differentiation, each of which can be advanced through coaching.
Skill Differentiation is about building clusters of technical and leadership competencies that definitively support organizational growth and competitive advantage.
Performance Differentiation means skills must pay off. Coaching focuses on raising short-term results as well as long-term organizational impact on the levels of strategy, innovation, and culture.
Networking Differentiation targets wider and deeper relationships within layers of the organization and among industry influentials, as well within the extended personal, managerial and institutional pools.
Brand Projection Differentiation is not about bluster or push. This coaching process allows stakeholders to naturally come to value and promote the leader’s professional gifts, accomplishments, and potential.
Frank’s Coaching for Accelerated Career Advancement process begins with a Comprehensive Career Brand Analysis that evaluates the professional’s current brand on seven key variables. In each variable it distinguishes between identity, self-perception, and perception by others. The process continues with a pragmatic Career Brand Plan and customized Career Brand Tracking. These tools help ensure that brand development is rapid and on target.
III. Coaching for Work-Life Integration
Each of our lives is a complex system. When its components fall out of alignment we may experience stress, burn-out, decreased effectiveness, or a more diffuse sense of discontent. Restoring fulfillment to the system of one’s life requires more than a collection of platitudes or simplistic prescriptions for “balance”. The Executive Work-Life Integration Process offers a comprehensive approach to clarity and positive change. Work-Life Integration is a highly customized process that incorporates five strategies:
- Raising Core Self-Awareness
- Resetting Life Goals
- Redistributing Life Resources
- Improving Daily Productivity
- Managing Stress and Cultivating Flow
Work-Life Integration is as much about external shifts in our professional and personal lives as about the inner game: how we process the highs, the lows, the demands, the disorder, and the rapid change of modern lives.
