Business Coaching

Better information
If you are genuinely coaching people in a collaborative, open spirit, people will feel more confident in coming to you with vital information - including telling you the ‘bad news’ while there is still time to do something about it.


Investing time to gain time
There is no doubt that in the short term it’s often quicker to ‘take charge’ and give orders instead of coaching. That’s fine for ‘fire fighting’, but in the long term, the more you direct, the more people will rely on you for directions, and the more of your time will be swallowed up by it. If you invest time in coaching however, over time your people will require less and less direction, and you will be confident in delegating more and more to them - freeing up your time for the tasks only you can accomplish.
Comparing external and internal coaches
If we compare the advantages of using coaching consultant and having managers act as coaches, we can see that they are complementary:

The decision on which type of coach to use, or whether to use a combination of the two, will depend on the needs of the individual, team and organisation.

‘Coaching the coach’
One very common way for external and internal coaches to work together is when a coaching consultant is brought in to ‘coach the coach’ - i.e. to help a manager develop his coaching skills. This can be a very effective (and time-efficient) way of helping managers develop their skills, particularly with experienced managers who know the basics and want to refine their skills or deal with more complex people management challenges.
Another form of coaching the coach is when managers coach each other on developing their coaching skills. Coaching has the biggest impact on an organisation when it ‘cascades’ through the management ranks, with senior managers coaching juniors to be better coaches, who in turn coach their juniors (and sometimes vice-versa). At this point, coaching behaviours become the norm - part of ‘the way we do things round here’.
7. Coaching and Leadership
As a business coach myself, you won’t be surprised to hear me advocate coaching as an effective approach to leadership. But there’s there’s no one-size-fits-all approach when dealing with people, so it’s important to see coaching in context, to understand where, when and how it can be effective for leaders - and what the alternatives are.
In their well-known book Leadership and the One Minute Manager Ken Blanchard, Patricia Zigarmi and Drea Zigarmi present coaching as one of four basic leadership styles - Directing, Coaching, Supporting and Delegating. They argue that managers need to be flexible in adopting the most effective style for any given situation. In a similar spirit, Daniel Goleman wrote an article for the Harvard Business Review called ‘Leadership that Gets Results’, in which he argued that managers should utilise ‘a collection of distinct leadership styles - each in the right measure, at just the right time’. The analogy he used (no doubt familiar to corporate executives) was of a bag of golf clubs:
Over the course of a game, the pro picks and chooses clubs based on the demands of the shot. Sometimes he has to ponder his selection, but usually it is automatic. The pro senses the challenge ahead, swiftly pulls out the right tool, and elegantly puts it to work. That’s how high-impact leaders operate, too.
What makes Goleman’s article really interesting is his presentation of a research project carried out by the consulting firm Hay/McBer, into the relative effectiveness of different leadership styles. He begins by identifying six basic leadership styles:

1.