Why Coach, What is Coaching and What is its Relevance to Leadership?

Posted in : HR Updates on 6 August 2014
Paul Fieldhouse
Hyperion Growth
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Paul Fieldhouse writes:

So this month let's look a bit more closely at another leadership skill, coaching.

To be a great coach we must have high levels of Emotional Capital, something we have discussed in many of the previous articles.

So what is the role of the coach? Well I believe it is essential in business today and certainly one of the keys to the effectiveness of supervisors and managers is their ability to lead their team.

Successful coaches must assume a variety of roles to help the team reach their fullest potential. Laying a foundation to include an understanding of the attributes of effective coaching and the importance of it in improving workplace effectiveness will assist in moving into further skill development.


Good Coaches

One of the first elements of effective practice of coaching skills is to understand how one’s values and personality influence our interactions with those that we supervise or manage.

This awareness and honesty about our traits may help us to recognise that each style may be different but can nonetheless result in coaching and leadership success.

And true coaching in its purest form is the ability of an individual with highly developed emotional capital to unlock people potential to maximise their own performance.


Coaching v Mentoring

I guess we have all heard of coaching and mentoring, is there a difference you ask? Well in Greek mythology Mentor was a friend of Odysseus who placed Mentor in charge of his son Telemachus.

Because of Mentor’s relationship with Telemachus, and the encouragement and practical plans for dealing with personal dilemmas, the personal name Mentor has been adopted in English as a term meaning someone who imparts wisdom to and shares knowledge with a less experienced colleague.

Coaches on the other hand use a style in which they ask questions and offer opportunities that will challenge the coachee to find answers from within him/herself. This facilitates the learner to discover answers and new ways of being based on their values, preferences and unique perspectives.


Why Coach?

So why bother coaching at all, well its is believed that training a team member has the potential to improve productivity by 22%, when adding coaching discipline we can increase this to around 88%!

So the premise of coaching is that each individual has all they need within themselves all that is required is nurturing to bring the best out, much like the acorn which has within itself all that it needs to grow to a strong oak tree, and the best gardeners know how to nurture it to get the best growth.

As Galileo Galilei said;

“You cannot teach a man anything, You can only help him discover it within himself”

This article is correct at 21/10/2015
Disclaimer:

The information in this article is provided as part of Legal-Island's Employment Law Hub. We regret we are not able to respond to requests for specific legal or HR queries and recommend that professional advice is obtained before relying on information supplied anywhere within this article.

Paul Fieldhouse
Hyperion Growth

The main content of this article was provided by Paul Fieldhouse. Contact telephone number is 07545 251095 or email paul@hyperiongrowth.com

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