More specifically, executive coaching focuses on training people to recognize unspoken signals (body language, etc) and identify emotional triggers in both themselves and the people with whom they interact. The skills and techniques learned are enormously effective in the realm of business, allowing a company to secure better contracts, have better interpersonal relationships between management and employees, and generally remove many of the obstacles that get in the way of efficient, effective workplace operation. These learned skills are also readily transferrable outside the business realm and into the home, where relationships with significant others and children are likewise improved.
Many businesses recognize the merits and advantages of executive coaching, and therefore support their management in obtaining the relevant services. Those businesses which do not recognize the value of such coaching usually do so to their own detriment.
There are times when spouses are incorporated into the executive coaching process because marital dynamics can frustrate attainment of business objectives by derailing and/or destabilizing a person's cognitive processes. This is damaging to business as the relationally anxious person operates primarily out of the limbic system which creates dissociative responses that undermine workplace efficiency, as opposed to the ideal of operating out of the brain's frontal cortex where optimal work performance and efficiency are attained.
Quite frequently, executive coaching involves identifying and attenuating entrenched organizational or personality dynamics which frustrate goal attainment. For example, a business person's anger and conflict resolution styles, often derived as survival strategies early in life, are oftentimes subconsciously repeated, leading to stagnation and non-completion of both career and relational goals. Developing strategies to eradicate these impediments or sabotage dynamics is crucial to business success, as such dysfunctional patterns tend to be repetitive and remain unresolved without external intervention.
Executive coaching may rightly be viewed as a business investment with a high rate of return, both in the short-term and the long-term. While it is difficult to examine precisely the rate of return on the investment due to the non-quantitative nature of the process, it is experientially clear that executive coaching is a valuable asset in which any company may invest.