Executive coaches provide a lot of necessary functions for their clients, but strategic executive coaching is a very specialized modality that offers clients a different orientation toward the solution to their problems. Instead of focusing on other legitimate and usual functions of executive coaching, including performance enhancement, review of systems, executive team leadership management, etc., strategic executive coaching focuses on understanding why people do things and helping the CEO or executive leader to get out in front of what will happen, based on that understanding. It provides a dynamic insight into what people are likely to do in various situations and why they are likely to do it, thus generating a strategy for understanding the actions of others, even potentially before they occur, and arriving at a strategic approach to dealing with business problems.

The strategic approach that evolves from understanding the what, how and why of others’ behaviors becomes a much more thoughtful and usable approach because it allows the executive to understand how his competition or adversaries in business are going and respond in a way that will be more effective for his or her particular company. Finally, strategic executive coaching allows the development of action plans which have at their basis a more sophisticated understanding of the nature of the interactions going on in particular business situations. I will be discussing strategic executive coaching more deeply in other blogs.