The start of any coaching experience should begin with a clear purpose. What can you show in return? Successful coaching is about achieving goals. The coach helps the employee to identify significant behaviors and determine specific behaviors or steps to meet them. The coach assists in clarifying milestones or measures of success and holds the employee accountable for them.
Growth is the ultimate aim of any coaching process, and it is essential to measure the progress of the team in order to guarantee that the desired results are achieved. Most of the time, our client organizations have never measured coaching before, so they have no idea if it's happening or how well the team members receive it. Having this information gives them clarity about the effectiveness of their current training and how they should improve. Education and training are a crucial part of a coach's growth journey. Unfortunately, too many companies view education and training as standalone events that, on their own, will provide what is needed to generate behavioral change and growth results.
But often, despite what is learned at an educational event, that knowledge is not applied and the change is not implemented. The best way to combat this trend is to create a collaborative implementation environment that is based on bringing together people who are trying to improve their behavior as a coach. We refer to these meetings as implementation meetings. These meetings focus on the continuous exchange of best training practices and on the open discussion about the challenges to be overcome.
Implementation meetings give coaches the ability to collaborate with each other on what works and what doesn't. They also create responsibility when it comes to implementing training activities, since it is difficult for coaches to participate if they haven't done the work. Furthermore, they reinforce the importance of the coaching process. Analyzing this type of training information not only allows a story to emerge, but it also solves a long-standing mystery about performance improvement that, until now, has never been understood. Bill Eckstrom, co-author of The Coaching Effect, is the founder of the ECSell Institute, a research-based organization that works with international leaders to help them better understand, measure and raise the impact of coaching on performance. For coaching to be effective, they need to understand why they are training and what specific actions they should take.
In most of the companies we've studied, coaches perform only 54 percent of the training activities needed. However, as your training processes and objectives become more consistent and more valued, internal coaching will take hold. Managers must know business arguments in order to train and develop others if they want to value and use them effectively. Leaders and organizations have realized how beneficial it can be, and they are adding the capacity to train and develop others to the growing list of skills they require in all their managers. Forty-five percent of managers failed to meet the training quality standards needed to achieve their sales figure.
Coaches aren't going to change their training behavior unless they emotionally accept the need to do so. Future leaders of organizations can benefit greatly from coaching programs, which provide them with management and communication skills. All managers need some guidance on the whys and hows of coaching, but most organizations can't afford to train them on a large scale, so the least they can do is strive to create a coaching culture. There's no doubt that coaches develop and inspire people to do their best work, and they get more discretionary effort than managers. Organizations that effectively implement coaching in their talent management strategies achieve an overall improvement of 21%.
Their role models demonstrate effective training both formally and informally, and help motivate others to use and improve their own training capabilities. When you select the right people and invest in their development and position them as promoters of coaching, you lay down the foundation for expanding coaching far beyond just one-on-one relationships between managers and direct reports. Professional training and development have a profound effect on performance and productivity, so making sure you thoroughly understand the process and how it affects your business objectives is essential for a successful training program.
