What Difference Does Coaching Make?

This is the question that we are often asked. Coaching makes all the difference between mediocre performance and achievements and outstanding achievements.

It is most evident in sports. Every Olympic athlete, every top-flight tennis player, every professional golf player uses a coach to fine tune their performance, identify bad habits and address every psychological and emotional imbalance that stops them performing better and better. Andy Murray is a good example of what can happen when they have a good coach; whilst another player at Wimbledon this year demonstrated how a top player can self-sabotage themselves out of the tournament because they didn’t have a coach!

In the arena of work, people always benefit from coaching. Whether it’s their manager doing the coaching or an external coach, people thrive when they are coached well. They will perform better, be more strongly engaged, energised and grow in their skills. One example was the ROI for one business leader we worked with, was to increase their new business by 1250% of the initial investment. And it need not always be one-to-one coaching – we are seeing more group coaching programmes – that lead teams of people into greater engagement, cohesiveness, commitment and exceptional performance. In a group coaching programme, the increased sales of the marketing and sales team created 12,000 percent over the cost of the six-month coaching investment.

If people are important for the delivery of your services, providing coaching to them is the fastest route to expediting your business’s revenues and profits. Developing valuable people is key to igniting their innate talents and enabling them to perform at their best. You may not see this – what you will be identifying – are some of the needs you need to see addressed. Such as:

• Need to improve their communication skills, increase their personal profile and personal presence.
• Need to learn strategic influencing skills in order to have a greater impact with your clients, peers and senior leaders.
• Need to tone down aggressive or domineering behaviour patterns and acquire emotional intelligence for better people interactions.
• Need to win new business, have better networking skills, marketing and entrepreneurial competencies.
• Need to enhance their management skills, to better motivate their team and tools to manage change with enthusiasm.
• Need to become stronger leaders to set direction using strategic thinking, innovation, creativity and decision-making.
• Need to acquire confidence and deeper self-awareness in order to transition to more responsible roles in the organisation and be promoted.

Other powerful reasons for specifically using external coaches are if you are a CEO, Executive director or partners, where it’s vital to have a confidential expert, trusted advisor and external sounding board with whom to discuss, clarify and decide on strategic, confidential matters (where it’s difficult to find internal peers or others who are not conflicted if you speak to them).

Our coaching programmes foster powerful shifts in self-awareness, increasing levels of confidence, improved attitudes and behaviour that inspire others, unleashing the leadership capability of individuals. Executives’ personal productivity and effectiveness are improved when objectives are proactively agreed and pursued. In a collaborative coaching relationship they set better goals, take more action, quicker, handle stress better, and more fully develop their natural abilities. When successful, such leaders provide a role-model for development of others.

Blog originally published here.