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Who Will Benefit from Coaching?

Hello, everybody, welcome to this series of blogs and videos called 'The Coaching Conversation' presented by me, Graham Whiley. In this edition of The Coaching Conversation, I’m going to talk to you about the kinds of executives and organisational leaders that benefit from any form of coaching and mentoring.

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Over the years, it has become clearer and clearer to me as to the types of people that work well with coaching. Inevitably, people that come forward for coaching are either looking at it for themselves, or they're looking at it for members of their team. When they're speaking to the members of their team, they're looking for individuals who are also looking to benefit from the program on a personal level.


The kind of people that would benefit and enjoy a coaching and mentoring program can be categorised into the following descriptions.


First of all, people who have a degree of ambition; want to be something better. They want either their organisation to develop and grow, or they want their own abilities to develop and grow. Secondly, people who ate open-minded; they're ready to learn. They are curious, they're risk-takers, and they're prepared to try things that might just go wrong at the same time.

There are people who see coaching as not only a professional journey but a personal journey. Many of the initiatives that they undertake and many of the goals that they set themselves span both their private life and their business or professional life. The obvious goal is work-life balance. There's no question that many senior leaders find it very difficult to strike an even-keel between the time and effort and stress that they put into their work, compared to what they do for that. We help them with that - and it's been subject to the completely different edition of The Coaching Conversation.


There are other goals, for example, interpersonal skills. If an executive is finding it really difficult to work with people or finding it very difficult to develop relationships, we help them as a coach to acquire the skills, to develop the talent, to take the risks, and to make themselves vulnerable with people and their relationships - they learn to do that both at work and at home.

Equally, coaching can build commitment to hard skills - whether it's commercial skills, whether it's negotiation skills - doesn't end at the office. It is often is a sort of thing that clients can carry forward in their evaluation of things in their private life such as buying a house or negotiating the purchase of a car, or deciding whether their savings are working well for them and so on.


Coaching can give you the kind of perspectives that more rounded individuals benefit from. Coaching and mentoring is often key to developing more than is intent within the individual. So, what we see, therefore, is people coming forward for these kinds of programs are business leaders and business owners who really do continue to want to push themselves and their organisations. In many ways, the push is really a pull because they really desire this - they really want it to happen and therefore it's not really hard work. It's people who are willing to not only put the effort in but to take the risks of learning and practising something new that see the most benefit.


That's not a universal talent - they're not universal traits - I'm sure if you're reading this, you're either a coach and mentor yourself or you may well be a former client who is checking out our credentials or you could be someone who's exploring coaching who's never used the service before. But either way, in business in organisations, you will have met people with closed minds. You will have met people with very poor interpersonal skills. You will have met people who have very limiting views; people who see themselves as the finished article when really that doesn't exist. People who have opinions that they believe are right, regardless of anybody else's opinion, and are therefore not open to persuasion, and are very difficult to deal with; they're not going to benefit readily from a coaching program or a mentoring program. Therefore, they won't come forward and if they do, during our early stages of talking to them or getting to know them, we'll identify that and they will bow out gracefully from the opportunity.

Coaching and mentoring programs accelerate personal development. When they're done with a number of people in a team it can be transformational for the overall performance of that team and therefore that organisation. Often that is on a level that's precedented.

In a future edition of The Coaching Conversation, I'll share with you some of the experiences of those transformations and some experiences of those outcomes that I've seen, and that our clients have seen, because I think it's very difficult to believe the scale of the change until specific examples are laid before you, but it is extraordinary.


The feedback that we get from our coaching programs is just wonderful and it's very satisfying. It's very pleasing to believe that you've helped people on their way in the period of time that you have.


Many of our clients do come back to us afterwards for a new session, perhaps one or two years later, and they often involve other members of that team. Once they've been through the experience and they've enjoyed it, they can identify talent within their team and invite people to the programs.


The kind of people that don't benefit from this program, I've already identified, but they also don't benefit from it if they look at it in terms of ROI, because whilst this is a financial investment and it will pay back very quickly, you're not going to be able to join up the dots between a conversation about a person's interpersonal skills and their ability to sell to the next customer that comes along. You're not going to work out that the conversation around commercial skills and learning how to understand financial positions and numbers, transfers into a greater margin. It will do, but you're not going to join the dots up that say ‘I had that conversation. I made that decision and therefore, the coaching program has been paid for by X, Y, and Z’.


Coaching has to be an investment based on your knowledge of the individual, your trust in the individual's talent, your desire to get the most from them and to help them do it. It's got to be sincere - you've got to really want it and it has to be a collaboration between your organisation and the individual.


So, they are the kinds of people that we've seen benefit from coaching and mentoring programs, and hopefully, you're one of them.

So, there you have it, the latest edition of The Coaching Conversation. I hope you found it interesting. I hope you found it useful. You can find out more about our coaching programmes at theexecutivemindset.co.uk


If you want to reach out you can send us an email at theexecutivemindset@sagegreen.com you can book a free 30-minute coaching session at theexecutivemindset.co.uk which will give you a really good feel for how coaching can help you.

 

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