1. Coaching is a relatively new field. Although Socrates launched some of the basic principles of modern coaching some 2000 years ago, it has only become well-known over the last two decades.
2. In these last 20 years, coaching has had a meteoric rise in popularity. Eighty percent of UK organisations are investing in one or more forms of coaching and the International Coaching Federation is attracting record numbers each month.
3. To this day, there is no single agreed upon definition for coaching. Some are straightforward, others are fancy.
4. My favourite coaching definition is by Tim Gallwey, author of several best-selling books on coaching in sport. It goes like this: “Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximise their own performance. It’s helping them to learn rather than teaching them”.
5. Be careful not to mix performance coaching with counselling. Coaching is work-related, proactive and focused on conscious or just below the surface things. Counselling is a whole different ball game. It’s non-work-related, rather reactive and concerned with the core beliefs of an individual. You can do more harm than good by mixing them up.
6. In his article The Very Real Dangers of Executive Coaching (Harvard Business Review), Steve Berglas pinpoints the risks – and unfortunately – the practice of unschooled coaches who enter into more psychotherapy issues with their coachee than they can competently handle.
7. Make sure you do not make the same mistake. If you suspect a work-related issue has deeper origins, call in a professional with the necessary skills. If you are on the receiving end, make sure you have a profile that fits your needs.
8. Coaching is all about unlocking future potential performance rather than evaluating and judging current performance. It’s based on the belief that individuals want to and can do a good job. If, deep down, you don’t believe this, coaching is probably not for you.
9. Performance coaching is not so much about passing on individual performance objectives, but rather a technique to take away the barriers that prevent individuals from actually taking on and delivering against these objectives.
10. Coaching is also a way of managing rather than a tool to use in a variety of situations such as planning, delegation or problem solving. It’s a different way of viewing people – a far more optimistic way than most of us are accustomed to – and results in a different way of treating them.
11. There are many coaching methods. The good ones will help you as a coach to facilitate learning rather than to direct it. Questioning techniques and active listening are your primary means to do this.
12. Everybody can become a coach. It’s a skill that requires only time and effort to develop. It’s probably harder to give up instructing than it is to learn to coach.
13. Most companies today invest in coaching to improve individual performance. But more and more companies realise there is so much more to gain if they can harvest the individual benefits to improve the overall company performance.
14. There is no single ideal way of measuring the coaching ROI for companies – although many claim to have the best.
