What is Effective Coaching?
by Coaching has become a brand new field in corporations, accepted by leaders and managers as a method for improving performance at all levels of business. What does it take to become an effective coach?
Coaching has become a brand new field in corporations, accepted by leaders and managers as a method for improving performance at all levels of business. For all its popularity, no clear answer exists to the question, what is effective coaching? To compound the problem of answering the question, there is no standardization of terminology. Leadership coaching, executive coaching, managerial coaching, masterful coaching, and performance coaching top the list of preferred terms.
With so many terms available, our understanding becomes even more befuddled.
Coaches on Coaching
A quote from Tom Landry, and American football player and coach said, “A coach is someone who tells you what you don’t want to hear, who has you see what you don’t want to see, so you can be who you have always known you could be.”
Robert Hargrove said in his book, Masterful Coaching, “Coaching involves challenging and supporting people to be extraordinary leaders as well as to achieve extraordinary levels of performance.”
The International Coach Federation said, “Coaching is an ongoing partnership that helps clients produce fulfilling results in their personal and professional lives. Through the process of coaching, clients deepen their learning, improve their performance and enhance their quality of life”
Definitions abound, to say the least, and all are an essentially true definition of coaching. One more definition is this: Coaching is the art and practice of inspiring, energizing, and facilitating the performance, learning and development of the player.
An Explosion
The Art of Coaching is exploding, there is no doubt. Coaching is rapidly replacing managerial training classes that do little to motivate the participants into greatness. Coaching has become a necessity if individuals and organizations are to thrive in the new business world.
To many, this sounds like a great career, but how does an individual become an effective coach? Coaches often display simple qualities such as munificence of character, giving their coachees the gift of themselves and their time.
An effective coach has wisdom to deal with many situations and circumstances. A coach doesn’t have to be someone who is paid for their time and their services; they can be a teacher, a boss, the diner owner. Any time someone inspires us or energizes us, that person is a coach. A coach is something inside your core, not just a technique.
Choosing to Coach
An individual can choose the title of coach, but in the choosing there has to be action to accompany the title. To truly be a coach, we have to change who we are in the world.
A person may announce to themselves, “Because of the type person my boss is, I have to be an in-control, totally in-charge manager who makes all the decisions.” This is not based on fact, but rather an interpretation of the situation.
If that same person announced, “I am not going to be totally in-charge because that is a decision I made based on the circumstances I was in. I will, instead explore alternative possibilities such as being a mentor, teacher or coach,” that person is one the road to becoming a coach because they declared a possibility. The individual can make that possibility a reality.
The process of coaching is to first define what a coach is and then to determine how you, as an individual, align with that definition. Once a definition is established, then the hard work of changing tactics and beliefs begins.
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