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Once reserved for the most senior executives, coaching is becoming more pervasive throughout today’s innovative organizations. Because companies continue to do more with less, they need every employee engaged and productive; they are relying on coaches, not internal managers, to help develop talent to drive results. If you’ve decided to fly solo without a coach, you’re putting your career at a significant disadvantage. That’s because coaches help you identify and focus on what’s important, which accelerates your success.
Good coaches do:
- Create a safe environment in which people see themselves more clearly
- Identify gaps between where the client is and where the client needs or wants to be
- Discover, clarify, and align with what the client wants to achieve
- Ask for more intentional thought, action and behavior changes than the client would have asked of him or herself
- Encourage client self-discovery
- Guide the building of the structure, accountability, and support necessary to ensure sustained commitment holding the client responsible and accountable
- Elicit client-generated solutions and strategies
As coaches become integral to corporate leadership development, the expectations for return on investment are increasing. That’s why more and more companies are establishing mandatory standards for the coaches they hire. The quality, qualifications, skills, and methods of coaches once varied throughout the organization. Now, many companies are centralizing and standardizing their coaching or are at least developing guidelines to use when sourcing coaches.
Companies are also training their leaders to become coaches, integrating a coaching culture into their organizations. Businesses that want to make things happen are joining the transition, becoming less transactional and more relationship focused.
“Leader as Coach’ 14-week program respond to demand introducing into traditional ‘command and control’ sectors such as Corrections and Construction. Clients find that as a leadership style it delivers better staff engagement, innovation and productivity.”
As coaching gains momentum across all rungs of the ladder, those who embrace it – in themselves and their team members – will be in the lead.
As a coach I invite my clients to expand the workspace. Many limitations are self imposed. We are prisoners of our own minds. We wake up each morning and act out a story we have written about who we are and the role we play in our family, community, and organisation. We have a personal narrative about what is possible for us, what can be done and what cannot, and then we live our lives within that script, re-creating and solidifying the store each day. Through the intense and candid dialogue of a coaching relationship, we are able to learn about how we have been crafting these scripts and begin to see where we have placed arbitrary boundaries around ourselves.
One of the greatest values that coaching has to offer is that it demands action. Coaching beings with a conversation, but the real work starts when the Talent (coachee) goes back to his life and being to behave differently. Through this process, he learns that previous limitations no longer exits and in fact, they never did. He expands the range in which he can act, and in so doing, increases his “response-ability.”
Renato Moreira – Business Coach
Renato Moreira 