Performance Coaching is dialogue that recognises excellence and achieves business goals by specifying areas for improvement and learning. Managers who coach others do so to help them develop new skills, initiate a desired competency or goal, stretch performance to the next level or redirect behaviour to solve existing problems. Performance coaching must occur regularly and consistently, not just once or twice per year.
People who receive performance coaching usually look forward to it, knowing that it has the power to make them even better at what they do, thus opening up opportunities. Unlike other processes, performance coaching focuses explicitly on business results. Performance coaches spend most of their time discussing high-impact behaviours and linking them to results. They aim not just at addressing performance problems per se but more often at achieving high performance and reaching a person's full potential.
However, many business owners, managers and executives, who have not been personally coached, have trouble understanding how to coach for high performance. With companies rarely observing the quality of performance coaching and managers sometimes exaggerating their time reporting on coaching activities, leaders often don't understand the nature of coaching actually taking place.
However, a single leader who coaches for elite performance can make a big difference within a business. Yet, the real power comes when businesses share high-performance coaching capability across all managers and leaders. Since most companies don't do this, scaling high performance coaching is a significant source of advantage, available for the taking.
The key success factor to integrate high-performance coaching across all managers and leaders is to strategically select a few emerging leaders for a six month engagement of weekly hour face to face or telephone coaching sessions with an outside executive coach; in order to understand, appreciate and be ready to implement with their team members the power of performance coaching.
These executive coached managers will then be ready, willing and able to structure performance coaching conversations with their direct reports to gain useful feedback and skillfully pinpoint the right workplace behaviours.
Coaching can be hard to do and feel uncomfortable at first. But by being professionally coached and recognising the benefits of their own personal development, these new leader-coaches will begin to achieve exceptional team results within the organisation.
Business Tips
Performance Coaching for Business Results
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- Parent Category: Business Tips
- Category: Coaching
