Coaching is Coaching

The term “coaching” is used a lot these days. We hear about “personal coaching” and “business coaching” as often as we hear about coaching in the field of sports, but are we really talking about such different things?

Leaving aside arguments over the quality of some coaching, regardless of whether it’s personal, business or sports-related, all coaching is done with the aim of creating improvement. Whether it’s improving someone’s quality of life or improving the way a business handles its customers, the coaching process is one of making something better.

One of the more interesting observations on the subject of coaching was made by a professional football coach while being interviewed about the failure of a business headed by one of his former athletes. “He always needed coaching to perform well and I guess he just didn’t get any when he took off his uniform and put on a suit” was the gist of his comments.

Think about it. Performance is part of daily life in business just as it is in sports. There are similar forces impacting on people in both spheres of activity — stress, personal confidence, competition, and the ability to influence others just to name a few of them. The businessperson and the athlete both have to perform at their peak levels to achieve success, requiring many of the same physical and mental attributes.

A business leader and a top athlete share all these characteristics when they’re performing well:

– A focus on the job at hand
– The ability to recover from a loss
– The capacity to make decisions quickly
– A determination to succeed
– Working well with a team
– Communicating effectively
– Working towards a goal

There’s also the question of talent. Some have it in greater amounts than others and the more it can be developed through coaching the better that person will perform. That goes for the CEO of a business just as much as it does for the tennis player who takes out a Wimbledon championship. Raw talent is only the beginning; coaching can turn it into something that’s part of achieving success.

Every professional sport has its “good but not great” people — in fact, they make up the majority of players in any sport. They’re dependable, competent sportspeople that support the stars and although they don’t make the headlines they manage to make a living out of the sport they play.

What’s missing? They’ve got what it takes to play the sport at a professional level. They have a great deal of natural ability. They’re 99% of the way there but they’ll never be a “great” of the game. They might think they’ve lived up to their potential but there’s every chance they’ve got more potential than they ever realized.

The difference between good and great is more often than not the result of coaching, and that goes for people in business as well as sports. A coach can develop the factors that go well beyond a basic ability and turn that person into a top-performer. Going even further, a coach can take a business that’s performing adequately and turn it into a market leader.

We accept the need for coaching in sports but too often fail to understand the benefits to be had from coaching in business. Athletes train themselves all the time, but businesspeople usually just stick to doing what they do and don’t do any further development of their abilities once they’re on the job. A coach can provide a stimulus for the right kind of ongoing training and development for busy executives.

Athletes who captain a team know they have to work with their team members to get the best out of them on the field. “Captains of industry” on the other hand too often just give orders and expect them to be obeyed. A coach can spot such behavior and redirect a business leader towards motivating their team rather than simply commanding it, thus getting better results.

The coach is there to create improvement. Coaches bring an outside perspective to a situation and apply their skills and knowledge to people so that they can perform better and achieve their full potential. That’s why we say “coaching is coaching”, and it’s just as necessary in business as it is in sports, for exactly the same reasons.

Copyright 2005, RAN ONE Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission from www.ranone.com.