Business Coaching

Morale and retention
It's fairly obvious that staff who are empowered and supported to use their talents in the pursuit of meaningful (to them) goals are likely to be happier than if their enthusiasm is thwarted by old-school 'command and control' approaches to management. But the impact on company morale and staff retention are easier to overlook. In their classic study of the effect of management behaviours on business performance, Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman make the findings of their research crystal clear:
Our research yielded many discoveries, but the most powerful was this: Talented employees need great managers. The talented employee may join a company because of its charismatic leaders, its generous benefits, and its world-class training programs, but how long that employee stays and how productive he is while he is there is determined by his relationship with his immediate supervisor. (Break All the Rules, p.11)
Coaching offers the 'immediate supervisor' a set of principles and practical tools for managing this relationship in the most productive and satisfying way for all concerned - increasing the chances that the talented employees will hang around and do their best work in your company.
Skills and knowledge
Coaching focuses on learning on the job, ensuring that results are delivered and lessons are learned simultaneously. Over time, this results in a more highly skilled workforce who are able to take on more ambitious work and complete it to a higher standard.
Intellectual capital
In addition to developing skills and knowledge, continuous coaching will contribute to the development of the company as a learning organisation. When learning is an ongoing, integral element of an organisation it enhances not just its operational efficiency but also its 'intellectual capital' - a vital asset in a knowledge-driven economy. In their book Coaching and Mentoring, Eric Parsloe and Monica Wray present the case for the learning organisation, beginning with the premise that ‘we are moving into an era of global, information technology-driven organisations’. They argue that ‘ Storage, transfer and retrieval of information is essentially technology-driven, but application of that information is people-driven’ and that ‘ Only organizations, and individuals, that actively manage their learning processes will be successful - or indeed will survive!’ Coaching and Mentoring, p.17). Their ‘new agenda for the learning organisation’ includes ‘encouraging as many people as possible, and certainly all managers, to become coaches to ensure learning occurs in the workplace and elsewhere’ (p.22).
Jane Greene and Anthony Grant make a similar case for coaching in a knowledge economy:
We are moving from an industrial era in which wealth lay in raw materials, machinery, goods – what Karl Marx called ‘the means of production’ – into a world where wealth and power lie in ideas, imagination, knowledge and the information you control. (Solution-Focused Coaching, p.4)
They quote an article from HR Focus magazine, January 1996, stating that ‘The emergence of the knowledge-based economy requires managers to act as coaches’.
These writers present coaching as a vital approach for all companies managing learning and performance in a knowledge economy. I believe coaching becomes even more valuable in the context of the creative economy and creative industries - where 'ideas, imagination, knowledge and the information' are the lifeblood of every creative business.

13. 
    Why Coaching Matters to Creative Companies
    

Having looked at The Business Impact of Coaching, I’m now going to focus specifically on companies in the creative industries - such as advertising agencies, design studios, TV broadcasters, computer games developers - and explain why I believe coaching is vitally important to their success.
In this context I should really refer to coaching as ‘coaching’ or even coaching - creative people are often suspicious of ‘management speak’ and my research showed me that many of them put the word ‘coaching’ in that category. No problem. I’m not a huge fan of the word myself. I’m more interested in what people do than in what label we use for it.
And what I’ve noticed are lots of managers, creative directors and other leaders of creative teams using skills that are very similar to classic coaching behaviours - i.e. lots of listening, asking questions, observational feedback, defining the goal/brief and then stepping back and allowing people to find their own way of achieving it. It’s as if these managers, many of whom have never read a book on coaching, using a coaching-style approach intuitively, because they find it the most effective way to get the best out of creative people.
So why are these coaching behaviours effective at facilitating high-level creative work?