Service Snapshot: Coaching

Enabling the individual being coached to improve their performance and sustain that improvement over time.

Challenge

There isn’t anybody who can’t benefit from a coach. Anyone who wants to improve their performance recognises this. All the world’s best athletes, even though they are at the very top of their professions, have coaches.

Why? If they are already better than everyone else in the world, why do they think they need a coach? What can the coach tell them or show them?

But coaches don’t have to be better than their client at what the client does; they don’t have to know more; they don’t have to have all the skills; and they don’t have to have all the answers. What they have to do is help their client achieve a higher level of performance.

Solution

Coaching is not therapy, it’s not counselling and it’s not consulting. Coaching is about helping people change in order to perform better. It’s the client who changes, not the coach, and it’s the client whose performance improves, not the coach’s.

One of the core principles of behaviour change is that the start point for change is acknowledgement of current behaviour – i.e. understanding what one is doing, how that behaviour is perceived, and what its consequences are.
You can’t improve your performance until you understand what you are currently doing and what its impact is. All good coaching begins there. Coaching is not: 

• Telling someone else to change unwanted actions.

• Giving tips and instructions about how to do things.

• Supporting someone else in reaching his or her goals.

Coaching is enabling someone to improve how they are doing something in both the short and long-term. It rests strongly on an AT (“Ask Them”) approach to performance improvement, rather than a TT (“Tell Them”) approach.

The coach's primary reason for being is to enable the individual being coached to improve their performance and sustain that improvement.

Coaching is a way of interacting with people that not only leaves them more competent, but also more satisfied with their work so that they are better able to contribute to their organization and able to find more meaning in their work.

Benefits

The advantages of effective coaching are:

• Long-term excellent performance, the ability to self-correct and the ability to keep looking for and finding ways to perform better.
• The willingness and the ability to keep looking for, and finding ways to, perform better means that well-coached people are always looking for ways to do their job better. They practice more, they experiment on the job, they observe what others are doing, and they try to learn what will make a difference.
• Effective coaching results in people being able to produce more successful and effective performance repeatedly over a longer period of time.