When you think about your idol, your favourite athlete, musician or actor, what is it that makes them so successful? Is it raw talent, years of practice or perhaps something more. More often than not, behind each of these successful individuals is a great coach!
This is true in business too. Think about the most successful people in your business or network and the chances are they have a formal coach already, or they have had great experiences of being coached themselves during their career.
Coaching in the workplace is fundamentally different to what most people experience in their daily workplace diet. Coaching at work is really about helping the person to arrive at the answer, rather than giving them the answer. It's about helping them to arrive at an answer that works best for them, in their situation.
There are many quotes that seek to describe 'coaching' and of course, it is only one of the many approaches successful leaders use.
"Coaching is the art of facilitating the development, learning and performance of another" - The School of Coaching.
Our favourite is by John Buchanan, Australia's most successful cricket coach, and he said:
"The art of a great coach is not to put the greatness into humanity, it is to elicit it, for the greatness is there already"
This epitomises what coaching in the workplace should be.
In a world where typically someone more senior, older or more experienced feels the constant need to demonstrate to others how much they know by simply 'telling' others the answer, it is refreshing and sadly too rare to be effectively coached.
What people, and line managers particularly often don't get, is that they can so easily disable the person they are trying to help just by 'over telling' them. If they just took a step back, and tried a little coaching technique, they would be so much more effective as an enabler of those same people.
There are many practical uses for coaching in the workplace.
Problem-solving in the moment, and helping someone to come up with the right solution to overcome the issue they are experiencing.
Helping someone to think for themselves rather than you doing the thinking for them, right up to thinking longer term and putting together a career plan.
However, coaching does take time and in my job, we tend to hear a lot of people saying "it’s quicker to do it myself", especially when correcting mistakes or developing people. That may be true but if you don’t make them aware they are doing it wrong in the first place, you will be forever correcting their mistakes.
One of my recent sessions involved an audit partner from an accountancy firm who came to me with the problem of always being the last one in the office reviewing files and correcting mistakes, even though his auditors were experienced, well-trained professionals. This meant that he was missing out on time at home with his family.
After asking a series of challenging questions, he came up with the idea that the next time he found a file with mistakes, he would go back to the auditor and let them know how many mistakes he had found, but not where they were.
When he first tried this approach, the auditor was taken aback. However, he took the file back and managed to find five out of the six mistakes himself. The next time he presented a file to the partner, there were next to no mistakes.
The benefits of coaching are apparent both for the individual (the coachee), the coach and for the business.
If you feel like you still need assistance in answering the question "What is coaching in the workplace?" please contact us today and we can discuss how our truly unique behavioural workshops can transform the ability of your people to enable others, and therefore help you to create a truly high performing team.