In sports, a coach teaches and oversees training for both individual athletes as well as the entire team. Coaching involves ensuring physical and mental development for the individual and building teamwork in the group.
Business coaching follows many of the same principles. A business coach provides feedback, support and advice to groups and individuals within the business setting. In sports, the more effective the coach is, the more the team will win. And as many have come to believe, the same is true in business.
Indeed, business and life coaching, according to a MarketData Report, is a $2.4 billion industry with a growth rate of 18 percent. There are more than 50,000 independent business and life coaches in the United States today, not including those who coach within organizations. The International Coaching Federation, headquartered in Lexington, Ky., has more than 21,000 members in 100 countries.
With such rapid growth and growing importance, coaching has developed many techniques and training styles. Louisville author and coach Michael Duke has found one to be the most effective: coaching toward a specific goal. His book, Coach to the Goal: Ten Truths to Transform Your Team Into Winners, describes the approach he created to the coaching process.
Duke focuses his technique on business coaching, recommending it for leaders including entrepreneurs, supervisors and CEOs. He makes a strong case for coaching as a remedy for problem employees as well as for developing emerging leaders. He also suggests using coaching in other settings, including parenting.
The role of the coach, Duke says, “is to transform the lives of the people around you.” While using their own individual style, a coach must “recognize the raw potential” in people and teach and motivate them.
Duke suggests 10 “truths” in which the individual must be grounded in order to be effective as a coach. These are more strategic game plan basics than technique-oriented. He divides them into “power” categories: The power of the coaching philosophy, consequence and praise.
“Great coaches love their players,” Duke says in explaining the first truth: value the heart of your players. “You love your people by living out of a desire to help them learn and grow.”
Coaches realize they’re victorious through others, he says. They cannot be about themselves. Without a clear grounding in this philosophy, the coach cannot lead a successful team.
The second truth, build your team on values, emphasizes the idea of developing individual team members before building an effective team.
Duke uses famous sports coaches, from John Wooden to Tom Landry, to illustrate how different coaching styles, grounded in values, can be equally effective. He pinpoints the strengths of the coaches he references. An oversight of the book is that it fails to reference female sports coaches as examples.
Whatever the coaching style, the most vital activity is to stay focused on people.
“You can’t coach the real goal and react every day to your environment,” Duke says. “If you’re truly going to coach the right goal, you must provide your people with the appropriate time, training and communication.”
The fifth truth continues to make current headlines: accountability. Part of the coach’s job is to implement consequences, involving both rewards and punishments. Constructive feedback is vital to coaching. Too often, Duke argues, business leaders neglect people and their performance.
This lack of action usually causes bad situations to get worse. On the other hand, praising only the big things is not necessarily beneficial. It is often more motivating to praise the small wins and build upon success.
Truth No. 6 is one that leaders often have difficulty accepting. In this truth, Duke says that coaches must learn that “their attitude reflects your leadership.” A good leader needs to understand and communicate expectations clearly and consistently.
This awareness helps the coach to be a teacher. In truth No. 7, Duke emphasizes the need not for someone who simply instructs, by who teaches by words, behaviors and attitudes. The coach sets the standard.
Truth No. 9 goes deeper into a sports analogy with “love them or trade them.” Duke rephrases the bus analogy first developed by Jim Collins in Good to Great.
“When you decide that somebody on your team, somebody who’s on your bus, can’t perform anymore, then it’s time to put somebody else in their seat,” Duke says.
Coach to the Goal presents us with an effective approach to coaching. Michael Duke has given us a worthy goal — become a coach who leads individuals and businesses to a new level of winning.