27 - Can I REALLY call myself an executive coach?

Welcome to the business of executive coaching. I'm Ellie Scarfe, an ex lawyer turned executive coach. Over the last 17 years I've coached in house, I've been an associate coach and I've run executive coaching businesses with teams of coaches around the world. My clients have ranged from global brand names to boutiques, startups and organizations doing good in the world. I now run the Impact Coach Collective, a community of executive coaches who want to level up their business skills and take action in a community of like minded peers. I'm a traveller, a reader, a mum, wife and dog parent and I know firsthand that our stories have a huge impact on our businesses. The executive coaching business is tough and I've learnt all the lessons through plenty of mistakes and also with some great mentors. This podcast is all about growing a thriving executive coaching business. You can build a coaching business that is profitable, sustainable and that supports your personal goals, whatever they are. I'll be sharing tips and ideas translated for your context as well as stories from the field with brilliant coaches and mentors. If you want to level up your executive coaching business skills, then this is the place for you. Hello and welcome to the business of executive coaching. How are you all? I wanted to start today with a bit of a request. So sometimes when I'm recording the podcast I can feel a bit like I'm talking to myself. But without fail, whenever I'm meeting new clients or I'm meeting with prospective clients or or even just coaches who I'm chatting with, a lot of you are telling me that you are listening to the podcast and we have some awesome conversations. So please, if you are game, drop me a message. So there is nothing better for me than receiving messages or meeting people who listen to the podcast. I would love to know who you are and what you value most on the podcast. So send me a message or post a review. Those things really help me get the show out there and they're so gratefully received. Or, or you can submit a question through the form in the show notes and you can hit me up on any of my social media platforms and I will get back to you and I would love to, yeah, love to meet you, love to learn more about you and you know, help in any way that I can. So today I wanted to give a bit of a life and business update because sometimes I can feel like I just really get right down to business in the podcast and I know that the ones, the podcasts that I like to listen to just have a little bit more personality and a little bit More life in them. So I want to share a little bit more. So you know, and these are just really random updates. So you may not know this about me but I love hiking and I have just started training for another long walk that I'm doing. Last year I did a 120 kilometer multi day walk which was incredible. And this year I have have just committed to a single day 35 kilometer hike which I think will be really fun. But I am out of practice, particularly with sand walking which I got quite good at last year. So it is on my agenda to ramp my training back up and particularly to get onto the sand. Today I'm recording this on a Sunday I did a really beautiful 10 kilometer which I think is about 6.6 miles for those of you who are not metric. Did a beautiful walk in the forest around where I live and because it is winter, it was stunning. So it was cool but it wasn't cold, was undulating but not exhausting. It was just perfect. There is nothing like training in the winter here. In summer it can be stinking hot and if you aren't out the door by 6am you're going to be in trouble come midday. I also discovered this week that our daughter can sing. So you know, you know your kids can, can have, have these talents. But we discovered this because she had her school choral concert where all the choirs sing and she sings in, in like a chamber choir and also her year choir and she had a solo at the start of her year, Cho, and it was short but she sang so beautifully and I had a massive proud mom moment. But I also wondered if I should have noticed this before. And to be fair, most of the singing I hear is when we are in the car belting out the soundtrack to Hamilton, right, which can sound a lot more like shouting because a lot of it's in rap format. But it did make me think a little bit about, you know, these strengths that we might have that just never get a chance to see the light of day. And I started thinking about business of course, because I have a one track mind and I was thinking about how we need to be open to the possibility as coaches that we might just excel at the business functions that we might be avoiding. And so we might be naturals at sales and marketing, we might enjoy it. Often we assume that it's going to be dreadful because we have a particular mindset or because we've heard it from other people. But I know, I know lots of coaches who are totally brilliant at sales and marketing in particular and who start to really love the business aspects of being a coach. And you know, even if we're not and we don't discover this hidden strength, you know, we get to learn it, right? We get to learn it and grow into it. So it's win, win. But I do wonder if we let ourself be open to it being smooth and more natural than we assume it's going to be. So anyway, that was just a really interesting mindset thing for me and I will certainly be being more quiet and listening to my daughter when we sing in the car. Business wise, I am loving welcoming some new members into my community, the Impact Coach Collective. So if any of the new members are listening, welcome. I am beyond excited to have you join us. If you haven't joined us but you're curious about it again, drop me a line. I'd love to have a chat. I'm also as, as I, as I grow the business and welcome more people into the Impact Coach Collective. I'm exploring lots of new things when it comes to marketing. And I do this partly to grow my own business, but I also do it because I want to make sure that the strategies that I'm sharing with the coaches in my community are ones that I've experimented with, that I'm helping them to look at different applications, things they might not have considered before. So I am definitely experimenting with advertising at the mom moment, which is, which is really interesting. I'm learning an awful lot about what does and doesn't work. I'm also building some, some new products, some fun courses I've got on the horizon, and a couple of products. And so it all seems quite busy at the moment, which is great. One thing I am in the process of building is a tool for coaches that is sort of ways to give you ideas of what to post on LinkedIn without actually, you know, providing boring stock posts. So it's prompts and it is taking me longer than I thought it would. But I've come to realize that the downside of being an optimist is that we can sometimes be extremely unrealistic with time projections. So I think I can get a lot more done in time than I actually can. But funnily enough, this does not apply when it comes to things like getting to the airport. And then I am absurdly conservative and you can usually find me there an hour before I need to be. Anyway, so that is an update on me, life and business. But onto today. So today's episode really comes out of conversations I've been having with Coaches who have opted out of considering executive coaching as their direction because of misperceptions about what executive coaching actually is. And specifically they are concerned that they don't have the right to call themselves an executive coach. Or in some cases they really don't like the term executive coach. And so they don't want to be given that label. And to start with, I'm going to be abundantly clear, you do not have to be coaching people sitting in the C suite. And by that I mean CEOs, CFOs, COOs, CHROs, CIOs, CTOs, any of the Cs. You don't have to be in an executive level position, you don't have to be coaching those people in order to be an executive coach. So I believe that what we call or what we know as an executive coach is also interchangeably called a leadership coach, corporate coach, an organizational coach, sometimes a career coach, although that can, that can be slightly different. And in my opinion, and in my experience, the market treats particularly executive and leadership coaches as largely the same thing. So to me, the key distinguishing factor of what makes someone an executive coach or a leadership coach is all about the context in which they work, rather than who they work with. And that means that primarily they work with clients in organizations. And this can include clients in companies, in for purpose organizations, in governmental bodies, in quasi governmental organizations. But that is the number one thing. If you work with coaches in a corporate setting, then you can call yourself an executive coach. You don't need to worry about the level of the person that you're coaching. And if you are starting out, I would say that executive coach remains an appropriate title or label if you have corporate or organizational experience yourself and you intend to work with clients in that context. So even if you haven't got many paying clients yet, if that's what you're working towards as a business, then executive coach is the appropriate title for you. But what else distinguishes an executive coach from other types of coaches, for example, life coaches? I think that executive coaches often work with leaders or people who aspire to leadership. This is not exclusively the case, and I have worked with individual contributors sometimes, but generally, even with those people, they tend to be deep subject matter experts and leaders in their field of expertise. So I think leadership or aspirations of leadership or a position of leadership, even if it's not a formal hierarchical leadership, I think that tends to be where most executive coaches will, will lead to. Now, it doesn't mean you're always working on their leadership skills, not at all. And I'll talk about that in a moment. But those are the characteristics of the coaches from a positional perspective and it's not like it's just necessarily at the top of an organization either. And I also believe that executive coaches are, although they will bring many and varied perspectives to what they do, they usually take an evidence based approach to coaching. So there is coaching as the skill set and the expertise rather than having any specific subject matter that they are bringing. So you know, and I compare this to like specific subject matter coaches who are generally mentors and who do a bit more. It's more an advice giving process. So for example, you might have a, like a, a coach in a particular software and that person is really mentoring or training. And you know, I think a little bit I would, that's how I would describe the work that I do with executive coaches now. Because when I'm coaching or mentoring executive coaches, I prefer to use the term mentoring because I'm usually sharing advice and ideas and models and tools. And you know, although I do sometimes use the term business coach because that's what's accepted in the market. It is really a mentoring process and in some cases it's training as well. So to be clear, I don't think it's the case that an executive coach only works with executives at the C suite or close to. For me, it is all about the organizational context rather than a position in the hierarchy. And I think it's important to say that the work we do as executive coaches is not limited in subject matter, as I said, to work or leadership topics. So we are still as executive coaches coaching a whole person, albeit in their organizational context. And that means that we're going to meet them where they're at. So it is not a requirement to be an executive coach that we only coach on executive work topics. No, we're going to coach the person depending on whatever they need. I do want to acknowledge my growing agreement with some folks who don't like the language executive coach because I think the word executive can feel unnecessarily exclusive in this context and particularly excluding coaches who fall outside this narrow sort of C suite or C suite plus one sort of bracket. And it can sound a little elitist. I think that sort of executive coach term, and maybe on balance leadership coaches are better, is better language to use, but it's also not perfect. And the reason that I continue to use the term executive coach and I recommend that my, my clients do, or at least that they combine it, is because this is the language that the customers who, the clients who engage us use. Right. They are referring to executive coaches. And so that is what I will match until they change. Because it's not really about the label, it's about the substance of what they want. And if it helps them to understand what we offer by using that language, then that's what I'll do. But I'm going to hold these labels lightly and I'm going to see when this changes, if this changes. And that means keeping a little bit in touch with what, with what the market is saying. So do drop me a line as I mentioned. Let me know what you think about this topic. Do you have any discomfort calling yourself an executive coach, or are you able to own it and be really proud of it? I hope that, I hope that's the case, but I am also really keen to hear if you're feeling any sort of discomfort about that, and hopefully that's something we can talk about or work through. Have a wonderful week and I'll be back online next week. See ya. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Business of Executive Coaching. If you found it helpful, please share it with a colleague or friend on LinkedIn. And don't forget to tag me so I can say thanks. I would be tremendously grateful also if you would leave a review on Apple Podcasts. More reviews means more people can find us. This episode was brought to you by the Impact Coach Collective, where executive coaches grow their businesses in a community of peers with business education, mentoring, deal clinics and more. If you'd like to contact me or work with me further, all my free resources, courses and more info on the Impact Coach Collective can be found@elliscarf.com have a brilliant week and I look forward to talking to you again soon.