When Does Coaching Work Best?
Focus your efforts on those business leaders that will benefit your organisation the most
As a talent development tool, coaching plays an important role in improving the business performance of senior managers. Sometimes this means tackling problems with underperformance; more often, coaching enables promising executives to build on good performance and reach new heights.
Coaching should not be seen as a cure-all for every performance issue. Rather it is a type of intervention that is much more likely to deliver value for your business when the circumstances are right.
Coaching and performance issues
Some companies use coaching as a remedial tool to address general issues of underperformance or conflict. In our experience, this approach is fraught with risk, especially if there is a possibility that the manager in question may lose their job if things don’t improve. You will find that such interventions are rarely successful when used as a last ditch attempt to turn around poor performance.
Why is this? When a manager is being coached under such circumstances, it is likely that they will be feeling under threat. This makes it very difficult to develop new insights and ways of behaving. Rather than focusing on their strengths, coachees become defensive or start looking for emotional support from their coach.
Coaching for leadership development
A more beneficial use of coaching is to focus on improving one or two specific skills that might be holding back a manager’s performance. This is often required when the manager has been recently promoted to a senior role where different types of skills are more important. Coaching can really help to drive performance by developing emotional intelligence, collaboration, team leadership and stronger partnerships.
The more specific you can be about the areas that need to be improved, the more likely you are to succeed. While this type of coaching is focused on delivering improvement at a personal level, there are clear links to the business benefits too.
Coaching to drive business change
However, by far the greatest potential to that can be gained from coaching will come from nurturing your ‘stars’ or high performers. This is where an investment in coaching starts to generate significant value for your business. Not only are these promising executives already highly skilled, they also have the ability to affect real change.
Coaching enables these executives to spend less time on daily priorities and focus more clearly on the strategic future of their business. As one client put it to me, “if only I could stop and think for a couple of hours, I know that I would work out ways we could make more money.” At this level, coaching is definitely focused on the results that can be achieved for your business.
Despite the potential benefits of ‘making the best better’, many companies overlook their most talented executives as candidates for coaching. Perhaps such leaders are considered too busy or too senior to need any support.
Yet in an increasingly competitive world, effective leadership is essential in driving change. Without the right leadership development, business opportunities are lost – and even worse, your most talented leaders feel undervalued and may seek new challenges elsewhere.
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About Cote Consultants
Cote Consultants is a coaching, leadership and performance improvement firm based in central London. We work with any organisation that wants to drive sustainable growth in performance and capital through the personal and professional development of its most promising leaders and teams.
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Posted in: Executive coaching