Every day we read more news and opinions about the effectiveness of business coaching, a fundamental tool to achieve maximum personal and professional development. Is it really useful to evolve in our professional careers? And to become better leaders or even CEOs? Today in our blog we carefully analyze all the advantages of a trend that seems unstoppable: professional coaching.
Coaching: what it is and what it is for
Thomas Leonard, one of the internationally recognized professional coaching gurus, defines the term coach as:
“Your partner in achieving personal goals. Your coach in communicational and life tools, who accompanies you in the generation of changes. The unconditional support of successes and mistakes. Guide in personal development. Co-designer in the creation of new projects. Breath in stormy times. He is the one who wakes you up when you are ready to hear your own alarm.
Business coaching: what is it for?
The main objective of business coaching is for the coachee to become an excellent executive by enhancing their leadership and developing the skills and competencies necessary to:
- Improve work efficiency.
- Prevent failure.
- Manage and motivate your collaborators.
- Manage both your own time and that of your staff.
- Solve internal or external problems that affect employee performance.
- Face new projects and challenges.
- Optimize the results of your department or company.
As you can see, business coaching will allow you to boost your work profile, promote yourself and achieve a meaningful job that adjusts to your values and your vision, where you can give the best of yourself and that gives you satisfaction, both financially. as a professional and personal.
Pillars of coaching
Types of business coaching
There are two main types of business coaching: individual business coaching and team business coaching.
In the first case, individual or personal, the self-analysis and improvement program seeks to improve the coachee’s own skills, help him adopt a change of direction in his professional career, or improve his strategic capacity. Thus, depending on the objectives that each individual program seeks, we find different types of personal business coaching:
- Coaching to develop skills: as the name suggests, the coach will enhance the client’s capabilities. Among other things, it is intended to promote communication, interpersonal relationships, the decision-making process, leadership skills, planning and time management, etc.
- Coaching for change: aimed at a person who is looking for new professional challenges, who is looking for a new job, who wants to promote himself within the company, etc.
- Strategic coaching: the client wants to achieve operational results, learn processes for decision-making, or to identify obstacles and opportunities.
In the second case, business team coaching aims to develop high-performance teams and works on communication, trust, and cohesion of group members. It addresses management committees, commercial teams, and teams with a common challenge.
The business coaching process
Business coaching is a process consisting of 5 steps or stages:
1. Analysis of the situation the coachee is in. In this first contact, it is a matter of identifying the topic that you want to work on, which can range from specific and specific work aspects to general aspects, such as developing leadership skills.
2. Identification of the objectives that the coachee wants to achieve . At this stage we draw the professional situation that we consider ideal and in which we would feel completely fulfilled.
3. Identification of barriers. An important step in the business coaching process is that both the coach and the coachee know and understand the reasons why the second is not currently achieving the objectives they want to achieve. In this phase, the coach must detect what actions or attitudes are hindering the achievement of the coachee’s goals, which are usually expressed with phrases such as “I can’t do it”, “I don’t know how to do it” or “I’m not worth it”. Through conversation, the coach has to redirect the coachee and modify these types of judgments and prejudices that prevent them from evolving and achieving their goals.
4. Definition of the action plan. The action plan will be specified in a series of acts and commitments that the coachee acts differently, try to do new things, and experiences the consequences.
5. Follow-up of the action plan and evaluation of the results of the actions that are being carried out.
The coaching process can last very few sessions or last for a year, it depends on the needs of each person, their learning capacity, the real or fictitious barriers they face, etc.
What are the benefits of business coaching for the executive and for the company?
Undoubtedly, choosing business coaching as a tool to enhance personal development brings great advantages, both for executives who use it individually and for companies that implement it in their human resources strategies.
The British Sir John Whitmore , another of the pioneers of business coaching, points out that the benefits of coaching for any executive who puts it into practice are:
- Improved performance and productivity.
- Personal development.
- Improved learning.
- Improved relationships.
- Improvement of the quality of life at work.
- More creativity.
- Better use of skills and resources.
- Faster and more effective responses to emergency situations.
- Greater flexibility and adaptability to change.
From the point of view of the company, the advantages offered by coaching for the organization are as interesting as the previous ones:
- It facilitates the rapprochement between workers and the exchange of knowledge, skills, and experiences.
- Make the most of the opportunities that arise at work to learn from real situations.
- It favors the transfer of everything learned in the coaching process to the daily situations that arise at work.
- It fosters an environment of continuous training, support, and responsibility.
- Substantially improves the quality of work.
In short: business coaching has been proving its effectiveness and value for years for professionals and companies that, like you, want to take charge of the future and raise their business projection to the maximum potential. What do you think? Would you like to try it?
