What is Coaching?
Coaching is a fairly young discipline, so there are a lot of definitions of the term “coaching”. Let’s take a look at various descriptions offered on the World Wide Web.
Coaching can be defined as:
* A process providing an individual with feedback, insight and guidance on achieving their full potential in their business or personal life.
* A strategy used to help individuals reach their fullest potential and achieve their goals.
* A set of practical skills and a style of relating that develop the potential of both the individual being coached and the coach.
* A professional relationship in which you work together with your coach to clarify your options, set goals and develop action plans to achieve these goals.
The notion of coaching originated from sports, but nowadays there are lots of different coaching types. However, in this article we’ll look at the two main types of coaching: life (personal) coaching and business (corporate) coaching.
Benefits of Corporate Coaching: Organizational Development.
1. Increase of performance. This is perhaps the main advantage without which coaching literally would have no sense. Coaching develops the best qualities of people and teams and enables the usage of these qualities at work for the benefit of organization. Thus using coaching in management significantly increases staff productivity.
2. Improvement of relationships at work. Questions asked during the coaching process add value both to the person being asked and his/her answers. Thus an atmosphere of mutual respect and trust is being established. Good relationships at work provide the fertile ground for staff productivity, while the instructions and directions typical for the directive style of management aren’t likely to bring such positive changes.
3. Staff development. Staff development means not only educational seminars and trainings, but also unlocking the inner potential of the company’s employees. Whether the employees are going to develop themselves or not depends mainly on the company’s management style. Initially, all of us have a great potential which can be revealed through coaching. Coaching allows the employees to develop themselves directly in the workplace, thus increasing their efficiency.
4. Flexibility and adaptability. Improving competitiveness on the market requires such skills as flexibility and adaptability. Coaching aids in quickly adapting to every kind of change, which is quite important in today’s business world.
5. Staff motivation. Nowadays people work under their own will, not under constraint. Coaching helps people to fully develop their potential, increase their self-esteem and thus raise the quality of their work. Of course at the same time people become motivated to be productive and work efficiently.
Benefits of Personal Coaching: Personal Development.
1. Life quality improvement. The most important constituent of a person’s quality of life is emotional satisfaction. This factor must be taken into account in regard to HR management. When using coaching, apart from improving relationships, every employee gets higher emotional satisfaction from their work, which cannot but motivate them to perform at their best.
2. Creativity. Coaching itself and the working environment created by it encourages employees to make creative suggestions. At the same time employees aren’t afraid of being laughed at or rejected. Moreover, they are motivated to put forward their suggestions to improve business processes. And one creative idea, when properly evaluated and accepted, generates lots of new ideas.
3. Fast and effective response to critical situations. If people feel an atmosphere of respect and recognition, they’re always ready to stand for the company’s interests in critical situations. Working overtime and temporary changes to the working environment won’t be a great problem for them and will be accepted with understanding. Moreover, the employees will do their best to avoid such a situation, and will handle it themselves, without any direction from management.
4. Unlocking hidden resources and potentials. Coaching creates an atmosphere of trust and confidence, where a person discovers inner resources that they didn’t know about earlier. The coach’s questions help the coachee to see the ways of achieving their goals. Coaching helps a person to find their inner ‘assembly point’, from which the way of approaching goals becomes clear.
Conclusion.
We can talk about the benefits of coaching for a long time. Today it’s indeed the most effective personnel management style, a powerful tool, which allows achieving amazing results. Coaching is not a theory, first of all it’s a practice, not difficult to master, but at the same time extremely efficient. To make sure it works, all you have to do is try to use coaching at work, and the results could well be positive, even the first time.
