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Abstract
In order to stay competitive, Human Resources Organizational Development (HROD) requires tools to support the workforce to enhance learning and high performance. This study assists the field in discovering effective methods in the executive coaching process to aid an organizational leaders growth and performance. Executive coaching has become a current global phenomenon, which aims to improve organization leaders performance. Eighty-five percent of executive coaches use one of the five top assessment tools when working with a client (Sherpa, 2014). The purpose of this study was to understand how executive coaches learn from and use these assessment tools in the coaching process. In this qualitative research study, a semi-structured interview protocol was used with a sample of 15 expert executive coaches. The interviews of the participants and field notes were analyzed using a thematic analysis method to understand how the executive coaches learned from and used assessment tools with their clients. The five main themes that emerged within the findings were: (1) willing to engage in continuing education to master skills; (2) building trust between the coach and client; (3) establishing the foundation for the coaching relationship; (4) turning up the volume to produce results; and (5) ensuring accountability to cultivate change. This study uncovered two conclusions: (1) the trigger to the learning cycle in the coaching process is the context-specific data retrieved from the assessment tool; and (2) executive coaches use assessment data to turn up the volume with their clients and enact relationship-based interventions. A new relation-based, context-specific coaching model emerged. The model materialized from the executive coach and client creating a working partnership in which both parties invest time, effort, and skills in the learning and development of goals for the client using the data from the assessment tool. Grounded in informal learning, this model proposes that learning happens within the framework of the coaching relationship and the context-specific data for the coaching process comes from the assessment tool data results.