What is Coaching and Why Do You Need It? Cory Colton Explains!
Coaching is probably most familiar in the sports world, where expert athletes, once star in their field, decide to help others reach their potential and achieve success. Sports coaches (or performance coaches) help individuals and teams set extraordinary goals and achieve them through mentoring, guiding, and training them to connect to their innate drive and passions.
But earlier, even in ancient times, learned teachers like Socrates, used a method to help students and protégés access the answers that lay within. The Socratic method consisted of cooperative discussion or dialogue between individuals based on asking and answering questions to stimulate critical thinking. Socrates believed that all people were whole, creative, and resourceful and had the answers inside themselves.
Modern business coaching draws from both practices to ensure that leaders and teams are functioning at their best, achieving extraordinary goals, and aligning their passions and values to meaningful work. See the pattern?
According to the International Coaching Federation, coaching is:
Partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential.
The keywords in this definition are partnering, thought-provoking, and maximize potential.
Carol Wilson, in her book Performance Coaching: A Complete Guide to Best Practice Coaching and Training, says that:
Coaches open up a space inside the coachee in which there is room to look around, see what is no longer required, what might be rearranged, and where there are gaps that might be filled. A good coach will support, listen, and direct the coachee’s focus forward to the future. The result for the coachee is that they make decisions with conviction and are more likely to stick to plans which they have come up with themselves.
Therefore, coaching is a thought-partnership that is forward-thinking, and helps the client to shift perspective, remove roadblocks and live their best, most meaningful life! For leaders, coaching supports them in accessing authenticity, inspiration, passion, and joy.
Research shows corporations that institute a coaching culture, where coaching is available to all leaders and teams, and where all leaders lead with a coaching mindset, achieve greater success, higher revenue, and have employees who are more engaged and stay longer with the company.
These high-functioning companies see at least a seven-fold return on their investment in coaching initiatives. Creating a coaching culture, especially for startup companies, or for small to medium-size businesses, is not easy and frequently not inexpensive.
Koachee was founded specifically to help these businesses make coaching available to key leaders or all leaders and teams. Koachee has a cohort of experienced, certified, and accredited corporate coaches around the globe, and can help you with access to coaches for key leaders or for all leaders through our custom corporate platform.
If you would like to explore the benefits of coaching for your small to medium-sized businesses, please contact us for a consultation. Kaochee is here to help.
You grow your business, let Koachee grow your leaders!
Written By Cory Colton.
