BUSINESS COACHING

Business coaching is booming. Many companies are now recognising the value in hiring a coach and are benefitting from having an experiencing person join their team. Think of a business coach as an outsider looking in, someone who may not yet know your business well, but who will provide impartial advice and soundbites as your business relationship grows.

The focus of coaching is to align common goals and objectives with the company vision. How we get there is the grey matter in-between that a coach will tease out over time. The success of the business becomes the coach’s success too, a measurable path that is always visible to the business owner. If there are tough questions along the way or the business comes up against some barriers to success, the coach will be able to help navigate through using the best routes available. 

Everyone can benefit from business coaching, from the top down. We can highlight many success stories where employees from all levels and grades have benefitted from our coaching programmes. In most cases, it’s a mindset shift, a change of parameters and those all too often limiting thoughts, the way you have been working for years. 

With the emphasis on skills and knowledge, individuals will see how important they are to the bigger picture and strategic vision of the business, raising confidence and boosting morale. We cannot emphasise enough how important it is to keep everyone on board during a period of business coaching and the new focus will be very noticeable.

The business case for coaching can be interpreted in different ways. By way of an example, let’s assume that Company X has a vision to achieve double digit growth inside three years. But with the resources and expertise that have internally, they cannot see how to reach their ambition. A fresh pair of eyes with a different mindset is required, without bringing a full-time position into the business. It can be very easy to be too close to your business sometimes, running the normal day to day practices and not focusing on the future growth.

A business coach will work from the floor up, understanding the objectives and vision every step of the way. This will be someone who is not afraid to hold people accountable for their part in the project in order to make it a success and someone who can take the weight of others. 

To build an impressive business case for coaching is all about linking the programme with the strategic objectives of the business and being able to prove a return on investment. No two business cases will be alike but the coach’s skills and experience required remain the same.

There is one last thing to consider. Your chosen coach will have all the experience that you need to achieve success and the other element that they will bring is connections. These contacts could be of vital importance to your business as the strategic goals and objectives emerge. It’s not about how many LinkedIn connections you have, more the quality. If your coach has been in business for 30 years, that’s potentially a significant amount of quality associates that they have worked alongside or know well. Great recommendations can be everything.

Finally, coaching should be positioned as an important cog in a much larger wheel, therefore being a fully integrated part of the mechanics of the business. Take the cog away and the machine may not operate in the way it was designed.