Setting effective executive coaching goals: A pathway to leadership excellence

Executive coaching helps leaders level up critical skills so the organizations they are leading meet and exceed their goals. However, the success of executive coaching hinges on setting clear, effective goals. Coaching sessions can lack direction without well-defined objectives, leading to limited impact.

“When you work with an executive coach, the coach has one goal — making sure you succeed,” says Dave Collins, a Vistage speaker and CEO of Oak and Reeds. “That can be refreshing because it gives you the freedom to get feedback from someone who does not have a direct relationship to your performance and the space to look at things differently.”

One-on-one executive coaching sessions and peer group experiences support CEOs in leveling up their skills for greater organizational and professional outcomes. But success in both cases depends upon setting effective coaching goals.

“I never want to set goals for someone,” says Vistage Master Chair Chris Quinn. “I want goals to come from them. Like math homework, I want them to show me ‘their work.’ I question and prod them to get someone to think out loud, share their logic and help them see any holes in their logic.”

Understanding executive coaching goals

Executive coaching goals are tailored to an individual’s specific challenges, strengths and organizational priorities.

Definition and importance

Setting effective executive coaching goals is critical for tracking and measuring progress toward intended outcomes. Collins adds that well-defined goals keep sessions on track and enable a client to share wins with leadership.

“Often, coaching clients want to talk about something that is not on the list of goals, and while it’s well-intentioned, coaching isn’t therapy,” he says. “We have to accomplish a couple of skill-building things and solve a couple of problems, and goals steer the conversation back to what they want to achieve.”

Specific goals drive measurable improvements because there is a clear path for measuring outcomes. An unclear goal is, “I want to become a better leader.”

A specific goal sounds more like, “I want to improve team communication by holding weekly feedback sessions.” The specificity allows for reflection and tracking.

Differentiating goals from plans

There is a clear distinction between setting goals and creating plans. Goals are the “what,” and plans are the “how.” Goals define what you want to achieve, while plans set the actions and timelines to achieve stated objectives.

Common executive coaching goals

Setting effective executive coaching goals is essential to enhancing your leadership and driving measurable improvement in your company.

“The way I say, ‘It is the CEO who sets the ceiling for the company,’” says Quinn. “The company is not going to go further than the CEO can take them.”

CEOs can choose to work on several skills with an executive coach. These are just a few of the most common areas where executive coaches receive requests for help.

Enhancing leadership skills

Developing strategic thinking and decision-making abilities is a common skill executives seek when working with a coach.

Improving communication

Fostering effective interpersonal and organizational communication is another reason executives hire a coach. Whether for building presentation skills or building relationships with employees, improving communication skills can dramatically influence a leader’s success.

Building emotional intelligence (EQ)

Executives with high EQ can navigate complex interpersonal relationships, communicate clearly and inspire trust across the organization. Self-awareness helps leaders recognize their strengths and blind spots, while self-regulation allows them to manage stress and make thoughtful decisions under pressure.

High EQ combined with self-awareness supports a positive workplace culture where teams can accomplish and exceed expectations, making it a common goal in executive coaching.

Promoting work-life balance

Leaders frequently experience intense demands that can lead to burnout, reduced productivity and strained personal relationships. Executives must make critical decisions, manage teams and drive business growth, often at the expense of their well-being. Executive coaching helps leaders discover strategies to manage professional responsibilities alongside personal well-being.

Setting SMART goals in executive coaching

Collins and Quinn agree that SMART goals offer a valuable framework for determining what you want to achieve through coaching. A structured framework that enables executives to focus their efforts, track progress, and measure success.

Specific

Clearly defining the desired outcomes provides a direction that keeps the coaching focused on engagement and being impactful.

An executive coach may ask questions like those listed below to help you get specific.

• What will the future look like when you do/achieve X?
• How will X impact your organization/your skills as a leader?
• What will it feel like to achieve this goal, and how does it align with my values?
• What’s holding you back from taking the next step?
• If there were no limitations, what would you do differently?

Measurable

Establishing criteria to track progress and success is critical to understanding whether coaching is moving you forward. Determining how progress will be measured can be tricky because each person may have differing definitions of progress, such as improving confidence when handling workplace conflict.

“How do you measure that?” Collins says. “You can get 10 answers from 10 people. It doesn’t matter what the answer is. What matters is that we agree on how we’ll measure it in a coaching arrangement. It could be how you feel or the number of conflicts you enter or exit.”

Achievable

Setting Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals (BHAGs) is essential for pushing boundaries, but setting realistic and attainable goals that act as stepping stones to those BHAGs provides greater results. Quinn compares executive goal setting to deciding to join the gym. You hit it hard for the first five days, but you give up in the second week because you overexerted yourself and are deflated.

“It’s good to have aspirations, but we need to make sure you can crawl, walk, then run depending on how big the changes are that you’re seeking,” he says. “Behavioral change is pretty embedded, and some are reinforced because they were successful and take time to relearn.”

Relevant

For the greatest impact, goals should align with organizational objectives and an individual’s personal development needs. Coaching goals connected to the company’s strategic vision and aligned with personal development contribute to business success and sustainable behavioral changes that enhance leadership capabilities.

Time-bound

Specifying deadlines to achieve the goals is essential to the process. Quinn notes that if you set a goal that’s a year out, it’s too far into the future to be meaningful today. Having year-end goals is vital to seeing the relationship between growth and outcomes. However, 90-day sprints and shorter coaching engagements create the leading indicators that allow you to measure if you’re on the right track.

“I start by having CEOs reverse engineer year-end goals,” Quinn says. “If X is the end of the year, I push on them to know what they are going to do in Q1 to know where they should be.”

Collins adds that one-to-one coaching engagements should be time-bound — his last four to six months.

“You don’t want coaching to turn into therapy,” says Collins. “I don’t want to have a coaching client, especially executive coaching, for five years. If we haven’t figured something out in a few months, it won’t happen. You’re not going to overhaul an entire personality in four months. That’s okay because that’s not how learning happens. It is intense. Then you need to let it dissipate, see what sticks and then come back maybe in a couple of years.”

Developing an executive coaching plan

The process an executive coach uses to develop a plan for engagement varies from coach to coach. How a coach creates a plan also depends on who is “hiring” the coach — an organization or an individual. Generally, most coaches follow a similar structure that includes assessment, goal setting, action steps, measurement, evaluation and feedback.

Initial assessment

The first step in establishing an executive coaching engagement is evaluating an executive’s current competencies and identifying areas for improvement.

This step can include one or more of these components:

• Self-reflection
• 360-degree feedback
• Behavioral and personality assessments such as DISC, StrengthsFinder, EQ assessments, etc.

“Everybody who comes into Vistage under the Quinn Coaching Collective takes the Predictive Index,” Quinn says. “It’s a behavioral assessment to know their natural behaviors, and then how they’re stretching those behaviors plus or minus in the role they’re in to help build self-awareness.”

Goal-setting

The goal-setting process is collaborative. A coach helps executives establish clear, actionable goals. When an organization hires an external coach, the coach also considers the organization’s goals.

“Sometimes I’m brought into an organization because the one hiring a coach and the one being coached aren’t communicating well,” says Collins. “I ask both individually, ‘What are your goals for coaching? I synthesize all the notes and share those with both parties. Once we get agreement and a clear set of goals, we have an agenda for our meetings.”

Action steps

A comprehensive coaching plan includes specific activities and strategies to achieve the goals. The overarching goal is broken down into actionable steps with clear deadlines, and specific strategies for progress are identified.

Monitoring progress

Regularly reviewing progress helps ensure that work toward goals remains on track and, if not, allows for necessary adjustments. Reflecting on shifts in behaviors, skills and challenges to continue moving forward is part of advancing toward the desired goal.

Evaluation and feedback

Evaluation and feedback help ensure that the executive coaching process remains focused, adaptable and aligned with individual and organizational objectives. Reviewing goals and action steps to achieve them gauges how much progress is being made and where opportunities for growth remain. Both the coach and the client share feedback on what is working and where additional support or resources are needed to advance the stated outcomes.

Examples of executive coaching goals

Executives hire coaches to level up various skills, from leadership development to communication, emotional intelligence and decision-making. Here are two examples of common goals.

Enhancing decision-making skills

When Collins meets with a client who wants to improve strategic decision-making to increase productivity, he sees a direct link to boosting delegating skills.

“I always put delegation and decision-making together because when you delegate a bunch of things that you’ve had on your plate for a long time, you have more mental energy to make a good decision on critical things,” Collins says. “I also ask clients who want to improve decision-making who is accountable for the end result. Nine out of 10 times, it’s not clear. Decision-making gets clouded by four or five people who think they’re ultimately accountable.”

Collins uses the RACI diagram to help clients determine who is “where the buck stops.” The matrix defines who is responsible for what by categorizing roles into four components: Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and Informed.

Developing high-performing teams

Many times, executives seek out coaching to foster team collaboration and achieve project milestones ahead of deadlines. Quinn says when a leader joins his Vistage group with this goal, he encourages them to take their foot off the gas and step on the brake.

“Developing teams is broad, and rather than think of it like checking the box, we make them be more conscious about deploying people in a way that’s kind of going to leverage their natural strengths,” Quinn says. “You have to be intentional with development, and it must link back to the business and their role.”

Achieving leadership excellence with Vistage

Setting effective executive coaching goals drives meaningful progress and measurable success. By aligning individual objectives with business priorities, coaching becomes a strategic tool for personal and organizational growth.

Vistage supports leaders in defining and achieving their coaching objectives and looking to discover new heights by guiding CEOs. If you’re an accomplished leader ready to start the next chapter of your life, consider executive coaching. It could be the capstone of an exceptional career.

Related Resources

The 8 Principles of Executive Coaching

Foundations of Executive Coaching

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