The Coaching Process

My clients, CEOs of growing organizations accept that coaching is important. They freely talk of the many different balls they are juggling and how focusing on the important things can sometimes be challenging.

When asked why they haven’t sought the services of a Coach; some CEOs say they don’t have time to be coached, others say they don’t have a budget line to pay a Coach, others say it’s not top on their priority list and others say they haven’t found the right Coach.

CEOs of growing organizations, I want to address you and say that Coaching is an investment, the same way you invest in a good computer to work efficiently or pay for advertising to ensure your products are known in the market place or attend a training workshop to build your capacity.

When I Coach you with business scale up as our focus, we start by having an overview of the life of the business, what are the milestones, what are you proud about, turning points (the ups and downs) etc.

I am interested in your Vision and Mission and your key goals, I’m interested in understanding how your strengths will help you achieve the goals. My work as your Coach is to help you focus on your goals.

As your Coach it’s important for me to understand how you view your business and your involvement in it. I will ask you questions to stimulate your thinking and make our work together more productive.

Along the way, we shall review both the Business SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunity and Treats) as well as your personal SWOT. In Business and in life, the area where we have the most opportunity for improvement and growth is not our weakness but our Strength. The question is: How do I use this strength to take my business to the next level?

The other important exercise is nailing the business goals. According to Gerald Westerby in his book, In Hostile Territory;  

You cannot focus without an object to focus upon. You cannot arrive somewhere unless there is a ‘somewhere’ to arrive at. You cannot achieve a goal unless there is a goal. And you cannot have a goal unless a goal has been defined. Therefore, to achieve your goal- define your goal.  

He goes on to say that when you cannot define a goal, you consequently cannot define the path toward that goal. Thus, without a goal you expend a great deal of energy pursuing multiple ‘fuzzy goals’

My experience with CEOs of growing businesses is that a majority of them have set goals. The challenge is clearly defining those goals. Defining goals is not an easy task as it forces one to consider where they will be after they have accomplished those goals. Yet if you are unwilling to engage these thoughts and facts, if you are unwilling to define a goal and consider your life actions after the attainment of that goal, then your goal is fleeting; it is one that you do not truly seek and one that you will therefore certainly never achieve. 

After the goals are clearly set the Coaching process proceeds to personal productivity, personal effectiveness and life-work balance.

As your Coach I will walk with you and we shall keep evaluating the progress.

My coaching process is in six sessions that take about three months. The first consultation is free, as it gives the CEO an opportunity to decide if they want to proceed with the Coaching process to the end. A Coaching process is demanding on all fronts as it must produce tangible results. It is however equally rewarding.

Get in touch with me for your first free consultation: wwmahinda@gmail.com

Demystifying Coaching

Coaching is really about a conversation that explores and probes. It is not always about “goal-setting” and achieving per se. It can be, but it is always about a result and an outcome for the times you spend with your coach. A great coach can get right into the heart of a conversation and unpack your thinking styles and reflect it to you in a way that gives you a better insight into yourself to generate the change you are looking for.

Coaching is about getting into your higher level of thinking, where you store your meanings and values. It is about helping you explore how you think, how you reason, what motivates you,  what you want, how you could do it and the action that can be taken to achieve it. It can also be about behavior change, perception change or changing how you operate in the world. The possibilities are endless.

According to Michael Hall, an Executive Coach and author of Executive Coaching; one of the most obvious conversation is the clarity conversation. This is about getting clear aspects of yourself that you were previously unaware of or needed more understanding on. There is the decision conversation, where you explore an aspect of your life or business and make a decision from the coaching session. There is the planning conversation which could be about career change following the clarity conversation about what really motivates you. There is the experiencing conversation, where you may wish to try out and practice internal resources needed to reach your goal, for example, confidence, conviction or assertiveness. Then there is the change conversation, where you want to work on changing aspects of your thinking to become a higher performer or to improve your social and emotional awareness of what is going on inside you. And for those who love a challenge, there is the confrontation conversation, where you can be coached on your blind spots and resistance to move forward. The last one is for those with a strong sense of self, who can take that hard look at themselves and not shrink back, but embrace it and use it as a catalyst for transformation.

During the coaching process the coach is able to track the many layers and patterns of your thinking and raise it to a whole new level of awareness about ‘how you think about what you focus on.' A coach is an expert in the process of coaching to an outcome, using a range of quality tools. The tools are used to uncover thinking styles and perceptions of experience, values and meanings. They help the coach to uncover the motivation to change, explore levels of performance operating and the blocks to higher performance. Coaching is therefore highly-systematic and when combined with a flexible style of coaching it can really transform how people perceive external events and behaviors.

Coaching is always about thinking things out in a way that makes progress and where you take action on what you have discussed with your coach. Coaching could be on career change, business decisions or overcoming challenging experiences. Coaching is always about exploring the inner game you play and how you attend to that on the outside. There is no prescription to coaching and therefore there are plenty of possibilities on where you can take your coaching conversation.

I would like to add that Coaches are not experts in your life, business or relationships. What they have is experience and awareness of many areas of life. At the heart of coaching, the coach is an expert in the process of the conversation and can offer many levels of coaching, be it life coaching, business coaching, career coaching or executive coaching. 

I hope this clarifies any misconceptions that you may have had about coaching...keep following!

Succession Planning - The Importance of Coaching

Goal setting and feedback are the two main components of coaching: They provide a concrete road-map on what employees are trying to achieve and how they can succeed. Goal setting allows the employees to know what direction they are working towards- it doesn’t matter which path they decide to take, the purpose is for them to look at the bigger picture and be creative on the way to reach the goal. At the same time, real-time and continuous feedback gives the employees an opportunity to improve and ask for support if needed. 

Coaching therefore allows employees to gain valuable skills and knowledge from their coach. Coaching also provides you with how the employee is performing; by following up with their progress, you may discover that they possess skills that you were not aware of. Coaching helps you identify the competencies of your team and you may then take the initiative to strengthen these skills by encouraging them to take advanced classes or/attend seminars.

A big part of being an effective leader at work is the ability to coach the people in your team. Most people in organizations give advice, solve problems and give instructions but they don’t actually coach.

As a coach it is important to tailor your coaching to the individual’s style. Understand that people learn in a variety of ways; hands on experience, visual learning or team projects. Keep in mind the individual’s level of experience as well.

Coaching takes time and patience. When you are busy with pressing matters, it’s tempting to take the easy way out by deferring concerns or questions. But that tactic may backfire. Employees begin to suspect that you don’t care and stop sharing valuable information that could prevent future problems.

Explore options with your employees. Help them explore possibilities and analyse problems so they can arrive at solutions. A great coach doesn’t just solve problems, but instead guides employees to develop their own abilities.

When employees are coached they feel supported and encouraged by their manager and their organization.  Coaching is a two way communication process. You provide feedback to your employees and they are able to use this opportunity to also give feedback. Employees are more likely to stay in the organization if they feel that their voice is being heard by you and by the senior management. 

By integrating coaching, you are encouraging your manager and yourself to be more present among your employees. Coaching also allows you to identify employees who fit with your succession planning.

For the next two weeks I will be spend more time explaining Coaching and how it works. Keep following..