The executive education is a process of adjusting the personality of CEO or other high level manager and fit it properly into the working environment.
It is provided by executive coaches who understands that the client is an expert in the field but needs to improve pressure handling technique and skills.
In the past the formal executive education was an unknown concept.
About sixty five years ago, it was understood that officers returning from the brutal Second World War could handle almost anything. Many were given civilian executive jobs without understanding the science of a personal development in the complex corporate environment.
The effect of the poorly trained executives led to many detrimental effects within even top companies. Lack of handling personal pressures, tough approach to maintain impossible tasks, reluctance to technological changes and "deaf years" to innovative approaches are just few aspects which brought many corporations to their knees.
What's more, most of the poor decisions resulted from the personality and the insufficient pressure-handling ability.
Yet, most of the struggling executives did have the appropriate technical knowledge and the experience.
This is the reason why most corporations realised that they needed some sort of the executive education. However, there have been no school for executives.
In fact, there are no formal and even accredited courses for the executive training. Simply put, no one knows what formal executive education really is.
Dr Gavin Dagley from AHRI Executive Coaching, describes the executive education as: "... an effective intervention for executive development, particularly in the area of helping executives understanding their personal styles and response pattern and issues that arise from them...".
The statement is a bit trivial and "PhD-corny" but there is an important element in it. The executive education scholars refer to the process as the personal training in the specific environment.
Thus, they will not train banking executives on how to make decisions on the stock exchange (well, some of these CEOs should learn it too!). Nor they will provide a guidance how to handle financial corporate losses.
The executive education is to understand the personality and fit it (or change it) into the working environment. The executive coach already assumes that the client is an expert in the field but struggles to handle the pressure.
Therefore, the executive education is an intervention (on the custom-made bases) to improve the clients' response to working objectives. This includes time management, dealing with difficult workers, multitasking and so on...
Human resources, psychologists and especially the executive coaches will certainly brag on the importance of the executive education. Well, they have to, because for most of them it is their bread and butter.
However, businesses want returns for their investment. It is understood, that University-style reports will seldom provide a satisfactory answer for employers.
But, there is a problem. The executive education deals with the complex issues which are difficult to qualify.
The ideal situation is to involve other HR executives, strategically position the coaches and provide realistic outcomes and measurements. It is not good to tell the company that coaching will provide benefits (without knowing what they are).
Generally, the employers must be convinced that the executive education for their talented staff will result in the performance gains. The more objective is the predicted outcome the more is the chance to have the executive coaching contracted by the corporation.