Both angel investors and investors engaged in venture capital funding provide various kinds of business coaching to their invested companies on tactical business issues such as finance, marketing, and production. In our experience, this kind of executive business coaching, though useful, is not the most important kind of executive coaching needed in most cases. Since in our observation most business failures are in fact a failure of leadership, the kind of executive coaching needed is in the area of leadership itself. This includes issues such as the relationship between key executives, delegation, trust, communication, accountability, creative collaboration within the executive team, the ability to pivot rapidly, and the selection of additional executive team members – team building and effective teamwork at the executive level. This is the kind of coaching provided by Intelliversity.
Angel investors and investors engaged in venture capital funding who do not have this executive coaching ability within their firm should look to outside trusted sources or outside executive coaches to provide executive coaching services. It’s very important however that outside executive coaches or executive coaching services be sensitive to the priorities of the investors and the board of directors, which is not always the case. It’s also important that outside coaching services make the clear distinction between executive business coaching on tactical issues, and executive leadership coaching on interpersonal and team issues. It’s too easy to slip back into standard executive business coaching as urgent issues arise, rather than continuing to supply executive leadership coaching, allowing the leadership team to discover their own answers to business issues.