Everyone needs a coach, including people who are coaches. Regardless of your achievements, if you do not regularly work with a coach, I can say with certainty that you are missing opportunities to improve.
A coach’s role is to help you achieve greater success using less effort and less time. The primary reason clients hire a coach for themselves or their business is that they want to capture potential. Potential is the gap between where a client wants to be and present circumstances. For example, a business may be growing at 10% but has the potential to grow at 50%. Another example might be a junior partner at a law firm who wants to become an equity partner. The most common issue I encounter is someone who wants to maintain their current level of professional success and have more time to spend with their families.
The top tangible benefits our clients receive from coaching are:
These benefits extend to the rest of the client’s organization, family, customers, friends, and communities.
One consequence of not building coaching and other succession, retention, and development strategies into your business is continued loss of potential productivity from staff. Depending on which study one reads, a full 60% to 75% of employees are not fully engaged in their jobs. These studies include highly successful companies. Imagine how much potential is being left on the table on an annual basis, and how well these companies could do if they would get another 10% or more of their employees fully engaged.
Another consequence of not having a coach is that many people act out other people’s definitions of success instead of taking enough time to figure out what their own goals are. They spend most of their time responding to goals established for them by bosses, customers, vendors, friends, families, children, and so on. As a result, many people’s most prominent goal is making it through the day and hopefully waking up the next. An example that most parents can relate to is that their lives outside of work seem to revolve around their children’s activities. Coaching helps clients address goal clarification questions.
Some other important trends supporting the need for coaching are:
In simple terms, the coach has programs, processes, tools, and expertise that are used to help clients identify and address blind spots. Have you ever watched someone else do things that from your vantage point make little or no sense? You might have caught yourself saying things like: “Our people cannot see the forest for the trees.” or “That person is burying himself.” The realty is that all of us have a continuous series of blind spots. A coach brings these blind spots to the forefront through the process of asking questions.
A coach is 100% committed to your success. Coaches achieve their own success by enabling you to achieve your goals. The coach has a unique relationship with a client that no internal mentor, training program, friend, external advisor, fellow executive (inside or outside the firm), or employee has
The coach provides a safe space for wide open discussion. The coach is not there to tell you the one way to do things. Instead, the coach is 100% committed to helping you to discover the right actions to achieve your goals. With this in mind, it is easy to check your ego at the door. Everything is focused on creating and implementing the right strategy for your unique circumstances.
At Activate Group, we are trained to use the Resources Associates Coaching Academy’s coaching model which has five components:
Let us go through an example of coaching at work. Please keep in mind that the example below took half an hour to process with the client, and I have purposely simplified the scenario.
A senior executive (Mr. Jones) created a new position within his team and promoted one of his top senior managers (Ms. Smith) to fill this mission-critical position. One month later, Mr. Jones mentioned to his coach that he made a mistake by selecting Ms. Smith and is having second thoughts about her.
After processing the above situation further, Mr. Jones realized that he never really figured out exactly what he wanted from the position. Worse, Ms. Smith had not been transitioned out of her old role, which still took up 80% to 90% of her time. In the end, Mr. Jones’ new goal was to maximize the effectiveness of the new position.
There were several possible actions:
Mr. Jones decided to be 100% committed to providing an environment that would be conducive to Ms. Smith’s success.
After considering different plans to of action, the following was decided:
Coaching is a very interactive, pragmatic approach to achieve more goals, with less effort and faster. All employees, including ourselves, have blind spots. Failure to see and address those blind spots causes lost sales, lower employee engagement, higher turnover, and lots of frustration.
Review our website to understand how an executive coach or business coach can help you increase the success of your career and business or contact Howard Shore at 305.722.7213.