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How Can Coaching Benefit My Organization?

What is Business Coaching?

Business coaching is an intentional relationship between two or more people that facilitates shifts in the thinking, behavior and performance of the business person. Business coaching enables the business person to be in a position to grow and achieve goals they consider important. Business coaching is an interactive process that expands business people’s effectiveness at both business and life-skills and allows them to identify obstacles that can hinder them from moving forward and attaining their goals.

If you were to observe a business coaching session over a period of time, you would see that it is a series of conversations between the Business Coach and client, moving along a predictable process through identifiable steps. The steps are: establish focus, promote discovery, determine action plan, establish next steps, and follow-up. Business coaches ask questions, listen, and make suggestions; they explore, challenge, encourage, probe, facilitate, focus, stimulate, and hold you accountable.

Coaching is:

  • Centered on the business person’s needs and wants
  • Enabling the business person to reach his/her goals
  • Short-term and specific
  • Done in person or on the phone.

The Role of Coaching in Business

Business coaching is an ideal approach to helping business owners (or executives, managers, or other business persons) improve their business as well as their personal life. Business Coaches partner with the business owner and facilitate an environment of self-discovery of key practices that result in improvements in the business as well as in the personal life of the business owner. Most business people are expert at their chosen “trade” but often not proficient at the management skills necessary to run an effective business. The Business Coach focuses the owner on those critical management skills.

What Business Coaching is not

Business Coaching is not consulting. Business Coaching does not do a report that ends up on your shelf, or make a speech to get you excited for a couple of days and subsequently leave you stranded. A Business Coach and the client meet on a regular basis (either weekly or semi-monthly) for a minimum of 12-18 months to teach the client some great business strategies, brainstorm, prepare specific strategies to move the client forward, hold the client accountable, and move the client to where they want and need to be. A good coach becomes a part of the client’s team and the client’s success becomes a part of the coach’s life and passion.