When you hear the word "coach", a football team with a man
pacing to and fro and calling out the names of the players
or a basketball team with a man/woman shouting out
directions jumping up and down pointing like a commander on
a battlefield comes to mind.
Coaching is not for sports anymore, it is now one of the
key concepts in leadership and management. What makes
coaching so popular? Coaching levels the playing field and
helps all involved to grow and find their best.
I am going to help you explore coaching. It is one of the
six emotional leadership styles proposed by Daniel Goleman.
For those who may not know of him here is a short bio about
Daniel:
Daniel Goleman is an internationally known psychologist who
lectures frequently to professional groups, business
audiences, and on college campuses. Working as a science
journalist, Goleman reported on the brain and behavioral
sciences for The New York Times for many years. His 1995
book, Emotional Intelligence (Bantam Books) was on The New
York Times bestseller list for a year-and-a-half; with more
than 5,000,000 copies in print worldwide in 30 languages,
and has been a best seller in many countries
Moreover, it is a behavior or role that leaders enforce in
the context of situational leadership. As a leadership
style, coaching is used when the members of a group or team
are competent and motivated, but do not have an idea of the
long-term goals of an organization. This involves two
levels of coaching: team and individual. Team coaching
makes members work together. In a group of individuals, not
everyone may have nor share the same level of competence
and commitment to a goal. A group may be a mix of highly
competent and moderately competent members with varying
levels of commitment. These differences can cause friction
among the members. The coaching leader helps the members
level their expectations. Also, the coaching leader manages
differing perspectives so that the common goal succeeds
over personal goals and interests. In a big organization,
leaders need to align the staffs' personal values and goals
with that of the organization so that long-term directions
can be pursued.
Coaching builds up confidence and competence.
Individual coaching is an example of situational leadership
at work. It aims to mentor one-on-one building up the
confidence of members by affirming good performance during
regular feedbacks; and increase competence by helping the
member assess his/her strengths and weaknesses towards
career planning and professional development. Depending on
the individual's level of competence and commitment, a
leader may exercise more coaching behavior for the
less-experienced members. Usually, this happens in the case
of new staffs. The direct supervisor gives more defined
tasks and holds regular feedbacks for the new staff, and
gradually lessens the amount of coaching, directing, and
supporting roles to favor delegating as competence and
confidence increase.
Coaching promotes individual and team excellence.
Excellence is a product of habitual good practice. The
regularity of meetings and constructive feedback is
important in establishing habits. Members catch the habit
of constantly assessing themselves for their strengths and
areas for improvement that they themselves perceive what
knowledge, skills, and attitudes they need to acquire to
attain team goals. In the process, they attain individually
excellence as well. An example is in the case of a musical
orchestra: each member plays a different instrument. In
order to achieve harmony of music from the different
instrument, members will polish their part in the piece,
aside from practicing as an ensemble. Consequently, they
improve individually as an instrument player.
Coaching develops high commitment to common goals.
A coaching leader balances the attainment of immediate
targets with long-term goals towards the vision of an
organization. As mentioned earlier, with the alignment of
personal goals with organizational or team goals, personal
interests are kept in check. By constantly communicating
the vision through formal and informal conversations, the
members are inspired and motivated. Setting short-term team
goals aligned with organizational goals; and making an
action plan to attain these goals can help sustain the
increased motivation and commitment to common goals of the
members.
Coaching produces valuable leaders.
Leadership by example is important in coaching. A coaching
leader loses credibility when he/she cannot practice what
he/she preaches. This means that a coaching leader should
be well organized, highly competent is his/her field,
communicates openly and encourages feedback, and has a
clear idea of the organization's vision-mission-goals. By
vicarious and purposive learning, members catch the same
good practices and attitudes from the coaching leader,
turning them into coaching leaders themselves. If a member
experiences good coaching, he/she is most likely to do the
same things when entrusted with formal leadership roles.
Some words of caution though: coaching is just one of the
styles of leadership. It can be done in combination with
the other five emotional leadership styles depending on the
profile of the emerging team. Moreover, coaching as a
leadership style requires that you are physically,
emotionally, and mentally fit most of the time since it
involves two levels of coaching: individual and team. Your
members expect you to be the last one to give up or bail
out in any situation especially during times of crises. A
coaching leader must be conscious that coaching entails
investing time on each individual, and on the whole team.
Moreover, that the responsibilities are greater since while
you are coaching members, you are also developing future
coaches as well.
So as you see coaching can help you find the path that your
and your company needs to be traveling over. Coaching is
not mentoring in the true sense so you must look deep and
find out what you need coaching or mentoring.
----------------------------------------------------
"Dr. Robin", is a well known MLM Radio personality and is
nationally recognized as an expert in the network marketing
business.He is the current host of the radio show,
"Networking with the Blindguy"live daily from Gorilla
Broadcasting Network,and Guerilla Marketing Talk Radio
Network,providing Success and Retention Training for the
network marketing industry. You can listen to him at
Gorilla Talk Radio. http://gorillatalkradio.com
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