Creativity Following on from Commitment, because the coach is a facilitator, asking questions, listening and giving feedback in order to stimulate the coachee's thinking, it is a highly creative process. Not in an abstract, fuzzy way, but in challenging people to come up with ideas that are new, useful and practical - and then to put them into action and see them through. For more on coaching and creativity see the chapters on How Coaching Creates Creative Flow and Why Coaching Matters to Creative Businesses. Empowerment When people are given the opportunity to pursue meaningful goals using their own ingenuity and initiative, this results in high levels of empowerment within an organisation. There are obvious benefits to the team members being empowered in this way - in terms of using their skills and talents to the full and gaining the satisfaction, recognition and rewards of doing so. And having these people work at full capacity obviously benefits the organisation too. But it is not so commonly noticed that delegating responsibility and empowering people has huge benefits for the managers themselves - when they can genuinely empower people, managers are able to free up their time and energy from micromanaging and use it for the 'big picture' thinking and action that is crucial to the company’s success.
Accountability Commitment, creativity and empowerment are all very well, but if left unchecked they can create more problems than they solve. Coaching balances these freedoms with a strong emphasis on accountability: goal-setting, questioning, listening, giving feedback and reviewing progress all enable managers to monitor progress, detect problems and help people to correct mistakes, solve problems and deal with unexpected outcomes. This ensures that good intentions and creative freedoms deliver tangible results.
Performance improvements Because coaching balances creative empowerment with rigorous monitoring of results, it can have a big impact on performance. Other reasons for its success in raising performance are the facts that it is highly focused on the day-to-day realities of work, and the typical format is one-to-one - so it is very flexible in adapting to the specific needs of the individual and the situation.
When these individual improvements are multiplied and co-ordinated by 'cascading' coaching throughout the company (i.e. so that managers are coaching each other throughout the levels of the organisation) then the impact on performance can be dramatic.
