From a fast-emerging field only a few years ago, business coaching has become firmly established as a method to help individuals, as well as organizations, achieve success. Coaching theory, as well as methodology, has become an important tool for enabling management and leadership to improve effectiveness and balance on-going complexities of change. Major international corporations make coaching available for their CEOs and many levels of management. Entrepreneurs use it to ensure start-up success.
In Coach Anyone About Anything: How to help People Succeed in Business and Life, authors Germaine PorchÈ and Jed Niederer present a comprehensive instruction book on coaching. While other books aimed at the coaching crowd target specific areas, these two authors have created a guide that can be used by anyone interested in coaching on any level. This ranges from managers motivating teams to parents of teenagers. The point the authors make is twofold: everyone can benefit from a coach and everyone can be a coach to help others.
To understand the role of coaching, particularly in business, there is a need to distinguish it from leadership and management. Leadership, by the authors’ definition, is declaring a future and enrolling people to make it happen. Management is coordinating people and materials to accomplish specific objectives. The authors define coaching as “facilitating people in their own commitment and enthusiasm to accomplish their objectives.”
Coaching, leadership and management are all a matter of context, not content. Many executives often lack understanding of the boundaries between these roles. For example, sometimes they are managing the operations of the company instead of creating the vision. They are often managing when they should be leading. A coach can help clarify, switching attention from the activity to the individual and the action.
Quoting from Bruce Tugan’s book Managing Generation X, the authors give one of the more compelling reasons for understanding that difference and using it effectively. Tulgan responds to the question: How do you keep people who are inclined to walk away at a moment’s notice? “You need to turn managers into coaches, and you need to start negotiating with people on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis and make ‘pay for performance’ a reality, not just a slogan.”
As a coach, you are not coaching a business or a relationship. According to the authors, you’re “coaching the dialogue in the pathway to the player’s intended results, whether that’s personal or business.”
Clarity is key to results. Whether you are coaching teams, entrepreneurs, teenagers or volunteers, creating clarity is core to the coaching role. Every coaching relationship starts with some basic questions, including:
• What are the results to be produced? Can they be quantified?
• What is the timeframe to produce these results?
• What obstacles do you face?
• What are the risks involved if results are not achieved?
• Are you committed?
• Who supports you in this endeavor?
Coach Anyone includes a toolbox of techniques that apply to coaching. Particularly interesting is a section entitled “Questions Coaches Ask.” Questions, the authors assert, are the coach’s most potent tools. They allow for the opportunity to express thoughts, ideas, and perspectives, but, more importantly, they direct towards achieving objectives.
Take, for example, “The Powerful Five” questions that move you toward results:
1. What must happen?
2. Why do you think so?
3. How might that be accomplished?
4. Who should do it?
5. When must this be accomplished?
Inventing Coaching Questions is a process that moves from this simplistic base to more complicated, detailed information gathering. This section is particularly valuable for anyone wanting help to improve communication and listening skills.
Another tool of interest is the Panorama Card Process Mapping. This coaching tool details a series of steps to produce outcomes. Each step of the process is represented graphically. Its intent is to give an overview of processes and determine whether changes will help to reach objectives. The process has been used in redesigning everything from factories to worldwide distribution systems, from company operations to customer service systems.
Coach Anyone is a well-written guidebook to the process of coaching. The authors move beyond the fundamentals to give specific tools that can be used individually or as part of an on-going coaching process. It’s a user-friendly approach to the art and science of coaching.