Executive Coaching Group

The best way to empower people is through language,” says Herma M Schmitz, Principal Consultant, Executive Coaching Group (ECG). The language people use for conversing with others or even to themselves has the power to motivate or demotivate them. ECG’s intellectual property focuses on this aspect of language and modes of expression to enhance leadership performance.

Serving a wide range of clients across the globe, including Australia, China, Dubai, Germany, India, New Zealand, South Africa, U.A.E., U.K., and the U.S., ECG offers practical coaching to thousands of individuals and teams.

ECG’s strategy and methodology designed and expanded over 40 years focus on the distinctions in language—a human being’s ability to communicate privately in their head or publicly in any conversation. Most of the time, these conversations are perceptions that impact crucial decisions. ECG’s immediately applicable transformational coaching encourages executives, top leadership, and managers to investigate the impact certain conversations have on them.

Be it group or one-on-one coaching, specialized coaching for the C-Suite or tech startups, ECG’s programs are tailored to the distinct needs of an individual or organization to accelerate their performance and overall organizational growth. The company empowers clients to transform negative conversations that impede an organization’s productivity and performance into interactions that align it with a bigger future. They also foster collaboration across departments to realize future-oriented goals and promote individual accountability that elevates team gameplay.

One of the primary focuses of ECG coaching is to make people understand the differences between the different natures of language that drive an organization’s mission. For example, the language of management is path-based, while the language of leadership is declarative in nature.

While management follows defined procedures and strategies, leaders envision or declare a future and design a strategy

and structure to execute it. The ECG coach empowers leaders to identify and overcome their blind spots, self-limiting strategies, and faulty assumptions. As a result, leaders can improve their performance and demonstrate a powerful vision for the future; inspiring everyone in the organization to realize all the possibilities and reach their maximum potential.

ECG also empowers executives and organizations to determine the unproductive opinions that do not contribute to a company’s growth. In football, there is a language used on the field to move the ball forward and win the game. In the grandstand, there are different conversations—opinions, judgments, assessments, and evaluations—that do not move the ball in any direction. Similarly, in the corporate world, there are many conversations that do nothing to resolve any issue or drive the organization’s mission. ECG coaches assist in discerning these futile conversations and remodeling them to drive change.

Herma recalled a leader who had a hard time managing a new employee in his organization. The language the leader used to describe the new employee revealed a predetermined perspective. ECG trained the leader to be careful with the language and eliminate any dramatic usage from his vocabulary that could impact his perceptions. The resulting transformation empowered him to efficiently collaborate and lead his entire team.

Sometimes, self-limiting strategies and assumptions or old ways of thinking and communicating can prevent an individual from growing professionally. This needs to be replaced by causative and empowering language. ECG offered coaching to a C-level executive who heads a 900-person-department and reports directly to the global CEO of the organization. The executive used a combative style during interactions that made it difficult to have a productive conversation with him. Analyzing the root cause of his behavioral pattern, ECG found that the argumentative nature of the executive was due to the adversarial culture of his previous organization. Even after switching to the new organization, he continued with the aggressive communication. Within a few months, ECG coaches transformed the executive’s communication style into declarative language that inspired his team.

ECG follows a culture of continuous coaching within the organization to ensure the clients are better served. “As an executive coach, we practice what we preach,” concludes Herma.