Business Coaching

Learning on the job
Coaching deals with live work issues, not abstract or hypothetical situations. It focuses on the realities of the current situation and develops creative options that are then tried and tested. This is a good fit with the culture of many creative industries, where off-site training may be rare but there is a long tradition of learning on the job through a process of osmosis, support and challenge from peers and managers.
Influence rather than authority
Creative people are typically not impressed by fancy titles and formal authority, only by talent and results. If you want to get the best out of them, you will need to exert influence rather than rely on authority and giving orders. Coaching offers a practical approach to exerting influence and stimulating people to find creative solutions to challenges. Crucially, it it a facilitative approach, enabling you to create a space for others’ creativity - thus minimising the risk of ruffling creatives’ feathers by intruding into their territory!
Creative capital
We saw in The Business Impact of Coaching how coaching helps learning organisations increase their intellectual capital. In his book The Creative Economy, John Howkins extends this into the concept of creative capital:
It seems reasonable to treat creativity as a capital asset. It has the essential qualities. It results from investment, which the owner may increase or vary; and it is a significant input to creative products. It is a substantial component of human capital. According to George Bernard Shaw, the only sensible definition of capital was Stanley Jevon’s casual remark that it was ’spare money’. We could call intellectual capital ’spare ideas’, and creative capital ’spare creativity’. Creative capital … may have been included in some varieties of intellectual capital, but only on the edge. It needs to be fully recognized.
Describing the conditions for developing this capital, he says ‘Creative capital gains most when it is managed and made purposive … The creative manager uncovers the intellectual assets that lie hidden in companies and, ultimately, in our minds’. As the above examples show, coaching is one of the most effective means of uncovering these ‘hidden assets’ in the minds of creative workers - and therefore a vital way of increasing the value of any creative business.

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