It's a belief amongst the uninitiated that coaching is the latest in a trend of newly named old phenomenons, dressed up and sold as the old present re-wrapped, yet is it. Well coaching in itself is hardly new, an American take on a Socratic belief, introduced in the 1970's by an accountant who avoided advice in place of nurturing a skill in clients, after all how could someone advise you how to make your business work if they did not know the intricacies, yet help and advice was needed. When faced with a year of accounts improvements can often be made, the owner of a multi million dollar corporation can always look to improve or earn more, that is the only way to stay at the top, the top earners and achievers look for ways to continuously expand and improve profit margins, yet behind nearly every strong powerful organisation is an advisor, the coach, the critique, the guide.
So how did coaching suddenly become so popular? In the UK it was always going to be on the cards. Many businesses and individuals employ a coach in the USA, so as usual these business and personal strategies filter across the pond to us. I don't think you can talk to anyone in the field of medicine or accountancy that do not mention goals and plans, now, actively encouraging us to take responsibility for ourselves whereas a few years ago it was a minority. Therefore there must be some evidence to support coaching does work.
Many make the error in assuming that coaching evolved from sports coaching and therefore transferring into everyday life or career seems quite a difficult task, and it would be as there is little association between the two. However discipline that comes from coaching someone within sport can be transferred even though the ethos is not the same.
The danger is a poorly skilled coach can do more harm than good, you only have to read the works of Passmore, Whitmore, Beck and Robbins to know that the mind is fragile and playing with it outside of a trained environment can cause problems. NLP for example, if carried out correctly can induce a trance like state, similar to that of hypnosis, to dabble in this unskilled could have serious consequences, how many would want that responsibility.
So how many would be coaches are there around, well actually loads, there is no regulation in the UK concerning life coaching so there are the few jumping on the wagon, I had experience of this recently when going to the dental surgery, I was given a new leaflet which asked me to write what I wanted in terms of service, my goal for the work to be done and of course good old scaling, the safety net of all would be coaches, let me insist you mark your experience on a scale of one to ten, there is a lot of information that steers away from this when used in this way. Unfortunately after filling in the form I asked the dentist for a realistic time scale of when I could expect to achieve the completion of work, and she was non committal telling me it is difficult to predict a time scale, which surely undermines the whole exercise.
After a chat it seemed that as a company, their are two surgeries, they had been approached by a coaching company who were going to come in and define improvements that could be made, well I'm not sure how a questionnaire that the staff did not understand the relevance of, could help. So moving positively into new strategies for companies and how to improve their business it is helpful if they extend this training to their staff including the freelance and self employed.
You cannot dictate coaching it has to come from within, you also have to want it, for coaching to be effective and improve performance everybody has to take the experience with both hands and run with it into a new era, it is difficult to sell coaching to employees as they have different goals to business owners, you cannot buy loyalty it has to be earned, can it be earned through a coaching environment, yes absolutely, but it isn't an overnight result, however the benefits can be reaped, they can also be reaped by a sole trader looking to improve their business strategy and approach.
Small businesses in the UK have a poor record when it comes to survival, with three years considered to be the average time it takes for a company, regardless of size, to get off of the ground, if it can generate a profit after three years then it is considered to be more likely to survive. However over the last couple of years we have seen some household names fall off the edge after many decades of trading, and yet lessons could have been learned before the fateful day, it may have held their business away from danger even if it wasn't a picture of what they had come to believe it looked like. Yet the failure rate for small businesses in the US have fallen, despite the fact that start up's for small business has increased, which indicates a turn in the US economy does it indicate a slower turn in the UK?
Coaching in the executive sector has been a slow burner, our reluctance as a business owner often prevents us from asking for help, throwing around ideas, or doing more of what worked in the past can be putting good money after bad, a fresh look from a coach can revitalise a business, but more importantly it's how as well as what.
Will we see a coaching revolution in business, undoubtedly, will we see a coaching revolution for personal achievement that is not so clear as those who do have a coach for specialist coaching are often private about this and therefore the research is harder to carry out.
copyright 2014 A Green reproduction in full or part, forbidden without express permission of the author
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