Coaching Skills Training - What is Meant by Coaching
Isn't it what football managers do? Well it might be, but these days football managers seem to have an army of separate defense coaches goalkeeping coaches and so on, so that's not a helpful comparison. Perhaps you've seen a Life Coach on daytime TV or read a life coaching, self-help type book. There might be a useful definition to be extrapolated from life coaching, but in a business context we've rarely the time or the expertise to delve into personal, lifestyle issues. Becoming a manager who coaches must require us to use coaching in a very different context.
Before we can begin to acquire coaching skills we must have a clear understanding of precisely what coaching is, but this is harder than it may seem. Coaching is an emerging area of Human Resource Development (HRD), it draws upon a very wide range of influences from psychotherapy to sport and is continually evolving. We must construct a working definition that helps you to recognize exactly what coaching is and what it is not and shows how you can absorb coaching into your existing set of management skills.
I will not be inviting you to discard what you already know about managing people, but I do hope to offer concepts and techniques that give you fresh options and new ideas when things seem difficult or the going gets tough. Equally I hope to show you the way to take your team's development to new heights, in the words of one of my course participants:
"I've turned to coaching because I've taught them all I know, but I know they're still capable of more."
Coaching defined
My little Collins English Dictionary defines the verb to coach as 'to instruct by private tutoring, to instruct and train, to act as a coach'. This is too loose a definition to be useful, and is contaminated by references to training and instructing which might prove confusing as we'll see later on.
Let's instead turn to a couple of well known writers in the coaching field for their views:
"Unlocking a person's potential to maximise their performance." John Whitmore
From this definition we can see that coaching is an activity designed to help improve someone else's performance. A comparison can be drawn with the world of sport, where coaches try to get the best out of their team without actually being on the field of play. In modern organizations, coaching must also involve turning work situations into learning opportunities as this is increasingly seen as an important part of what it is to manage.