At the age of six, Tiger Woods began competing in golf tournaments. His father Earl was his coach. In the year 2000, he won four major golf tournaments—the U.S. Open, the U.S. Amateur, the British Open, and the British Amateur. He was 24.
Today Tiger is considered the greatest golfer in the world. And who is Hank Haney? His coach today. Even at his current stature, Tiger still has and needs a coach. Wondering? Muhammad Ali had Joe Elsby Martin, Sr. and Maria Sharapova has Robert Lansdorp. It is clear that behind great sports figures are coaches, their names and persons often barely known to many, who play an important role in their clients’ road to excellence.
Today the sporting world does not anymore have a monopoly of the idea of coaching. Coaching has been included as one standard requirement in endeavors that are competitive and exact excellence. In the business world, owners want their executives to be winners.
In today’s dynamic workplace, a win or a loss are the obvious outcomes, very much like in the world of sports. If the world’s greatest athletes still rely on regular coaching, why can’t business executives do the same and benefit from it?
Management experts define coaching as “the development of somebody’s skills and knowledge through one-to-one training.” Coaching is normally conducted by supervisors and managers, administered to their subordinates. Sometimes it is termed as mentoring. It involves training activities, the outcomes of which can be measured, intended to ease learning by providing support and guidance or tutoring. Executive coaching is a form of coaching used for senior managers in the organization. Coaches can be from within the organization or provided by external consultants.
Trends
Business leaders and decision-makers today are hard-pressed in the continuing search for organizational effectiveness. Management fads keep on coming and waning, again and again, in continuous anticipation of yet another wave of new ones. They are one in saying though that they need four resources in this continuum as far as their employees are concerned: “learning company road maps, making the transition, accessing technology, and the imperative to provide coaches.”
Executive coaching addresses people relations and change responsiveness. For many years now, most organizational gurus have known that what really matters in the long run is not how much one knows but how well he or she relates to other people in the organization. It has been discovered that the main causes of executive ineffectiveness involve the lack of emotional competence and the difficulty in handling change, not being able to work well in a team, and poor interpersonal relations.
When does one need coaching?
The world of business keeps on changing and organizations must be in a pace that allows them to enhance their competitiveness, or survive at the minimum. The organization’s external environment is barraged with new products and continuing improvements in technologies; customers with more demands than ever; and new ways of doing business. Similarly, its internal environment changes—employees getting older while younger ones fill up positions and new business processes being introduced more frequently. In short, there is a continuing change in both the external and internal environments. In such as scenario, the executive must always be on-guard, responsive to these changes if he is expected to excel.
Comments