Critical Questions To Ask When Selecting An Executive Coach

If you are looking to inspire, educate, engage and boost your team to another level, an executive coach can help.  The right executive coach. Just like no two businesses are the same, no two coaches are the same.  Coaching your team can be a powerful tool when the right person is selected for the job.  

When selecting an executive coach, you will want to interview them, just like you would any prospective candidate for a job you are trying to fill.  They are also trying to fill a position, and they need to be the right fit for your team and culture in order to make an impact.  

At MVision Consulting, we have been coaching businesses for over two decades, and we believe that executive coaching can be a powerful tool for your business and team, so we’ve curated a list of questions to ask when selecting an executive coach.  

After you’ve finished reading, we suggest you read our other blog, How To Prepare For Executive Coaching, to get the most out of your experience. 

Question 1: What Is Your Experience?

Shouldn’t this be the first question you ask in an interview? It is crucial to gain insight into what kind of teams, companies, and programs they have coached and for how long. This question should lead them to explain WHY they got into coaching in the first place and how coaching has helped shape their lives and, ultimately, their careers. 

They should be ready with a list or resume highlighting their executive, team and leadership coaching experience and some referrals to further prove their knowledge and value. 

Question 2: Will You Take Time To Understand My Business Culture And Team Dynamic?

You wouldn’t stand up on stage and give a speech about something that you aren’t completely prepared to discuss, would you? Executive coaches will have guidelines and processes that they follow, but each session should be personalized to the team they are working with. They should focus on team coaching compared to individualized coaching sessions.  It is their job to research and understand YOUR culture and find out if their message and teachings mesh with your business. From that, they can tailor your team’s sessions to follow along with your vision, mission, and values. 

Question 3: What Happens During A Typical Coaching Session? (What Is the Process?)

You want to make sure that your team is going to be actively engaged and participating or at least actively listening during the sessions. For example, if an executive coach comes with a PowerPoint presentation and sessions consisting of speeches, your team isn’t going to retain as much as they would if they were actively involved in the session. 

Ask them to give you an example of what they do during the sessions or if they have previous sessions they can show you. 

Do they have a schedule of how they run their sessions with breaks for questions, open dialogue, and more? Again, the goal of the session is for your team to be actively engaged and retain the information they are learning in order to adapt it to their workflow processes. 

Want To Learn More About Selecting An Executive Coach? See MVision Consulting

As we said above, we here at MVision Consulting have been working with businesses large and small for over two decades.  Founder of MVision Consulting, Dr. Marc Camras, has worked with Fortune 500 and 1000 companies as well as some of the largest nonprofit organizations in the world.  
If you are interested in setting up an executive coaching session or would like to learn more about how we can help engage and inspire your team, schedule a discovery call today!

We also encourage you to read our other blogs like Managing Difficult People for more insight and educational tools.