Improving your Coaching Skills should be part of your Business Growth Strategy

When you hear the word Coaching, what comes to mind? You may just see and treat it as a separate task, as a “side dish” on the menu of business responsibilities. Yet, you’ll lose a lot of leverage and influence if you view coaching only as a way of correcting deficiencies in performance.

My view is that coaching should be an integral part of your leadership and management strategy. It’s an indispensable tool and fundamental way of relating to your team.

Business owners have a tendency to resist the coaching role because they view it as just another job they could do without. But trust me when I say, the skills of coaching can improve communication, lift business results, lead to greater leadership satisfaction, better time management and greater levels of performance from others.

The Task View of Work

The narrow view of coaching stems from a body of thought that suggests business owners should be detached, analytical, and control people’s performance in mechanical and prescriptive ways.

For years we’ve been taught that performance can be maximised by focusing on the task. As a result, business owners developed a love affair with control and, for many, it’s hard to reduce their dependence on control as the tool of choice to maximise task performance.

This view of business asserts that each job can be broken into the smallest constituent parts by experts who can figure out the one best way to do the job. A job is broken down to become a set of independent tasks.

But there are a number of flaws with this way of thinking:

  • It fails to focus on results, effectiveness and the real mission
  • Our time is consumed with planning, organising, controlling and directing while our staff are stuck with all the doing
  • Staff become more concerned with ‘doing a task’ and not too concerned with the relationship between tasks or relationships among the people doing them
  • Staff become simply ‘compliant’ and we stifle creativity
  • Staff feel no ownership of the job – their motivation and contribution are limited
  • Attention to quality, workmanship, and customer satisfaction suffer
  • We as owners end up with the responsibility, knowledge of the tasks and the burden of motivating our people and directing (controlling) work efforts

The Process View of Work

Our competitiveness is related to the way we view work. The “big picture” of work integrates multiple tasks and focuses on quality processes that lead to better results. The broad perspective values the notion that people, and relationships, make a difference.

Continuous improvement is not simply ‘doing more’ but improving the way you do it.

Coaching these relationships then becomes the core of continuous improvement in the technical and people side of any business. Coaching is the process of continuous improvement in the human element of work.

The Octagon of Coaching Skills

Research and observation over the past thirty years has identified the following eight coaching skills are integral to developing any business relationship.

  1. Support – Invite and use the suggestions of others, offer encouragement, and accept responsibility when things don’t go well
  2. Clarity – Define topics and needs. These skills focus our attention on a specific issue, gather information, give feedback and clarify roles of each person
  3. Influence – Impact other’s perspective to help them see how their actions are perceived by others. As a result, they are more likely to change themselves
  4. Guide – Gain agreement on what the next action will be. Who will do what, when, and where in a manageable way?
  5. Commitment – Solidify a personal commitment to the new plans from all parties, the “verbal signature”
  6. Deflection – Listen, redirect excuses or resistance, examine legitimate obstacles then revise the plan accordingly
  7. Explore – Help others to consider all the possible consequences of their decisions as performance is more predictable when expectations match realistic outcomes
  8. Follow up – Consistently monitor results, recognise successful efforts, and redirect struggling efforts… demonstrate our own commitment and not give up

When we examine our roles as business owners and consider the things we do in a “typical” business day we notice how much of our job involves relationships. With customers, suppliers, management and staff.

Since only a small part of our job is doing a task independent of our relationship with others, most, if not all, of our success depends on how well we manage our relationships – how well we employ these primary coaching skills.

In fact, our effectiveness as entrepreneurs is dependent on how well we use ‘coaching’ techniques, consistent with these basic principles.

“Focus on the results NOT on the work itself”

Coaching is the ability to manage a relationship in a way that mutual goals can be achieved.

Today, the integration of ‘the human element’ into our work environment is critical for long-term success. This involves moving beyond the old task view of work, toward a process view of work.

This expanded view of work stresses the interrelationship between tasks and among the people involved in the process. Managing relationships then, becomes the main dish, not just a side dish occasionally used to correct individual performance.

When we view coaching as the heart of both the job and the relationship with our people, the process of leadership and management begins to look different. When applied in a broad consistent framework, our people will see a powerful and effective pattern in all our business discussions.

If we get this right, the primary skills of effective coaching can be applied to multiple relationships and interactions. Relationships with our customers and suppliers, with our peers, even with friends and family.