Performance Coaching For Dummies

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Many coaching clients will seek coaching or mentoring for performance enhancement rather than the rectification of a performance issue. When an organisation is paying premium rates for development services, performance is usually the key pay-back they are looking for.

Even if an executive or manager receives support in balancing work and home life, it will be with the aim of increasing their effectiveness and productivity at work and not for more altruistic reasons. Performance coaching derives its theoretical underpinnings and models from business and sports psychology as well as general management approaches. Skills coaching has some commonalities with one-to-one training. Job roles are changing at an ever increasing rate. Traditional training programmes are often too inflexible or generic to deal with these fast moving requirements.

Skills coaching programmes are tailored specifically to the individual, their knowledge, experience, maturity and ambitions and is generally focused on achieving a number of objectives for both the individual and the company. These objectives often include the individual being able to perform specific, well-defined tasks whilst taking in to account the personal and career development needs of the individual. What differentiates it is that like any good personal or professional development intervention it is based on an assessment of need in relation to the job-role, delivered in a structured but highly flexible manner, and generates measurable learning and performance outcomes.

Personal coaches may work face-to-face but email and telephone based relationships are also very common. These coaches and mentors operate in highly supportive roles to those who wish to make some form of significant change happen within their lives.

Coaches offer their clients a supportive and motivating environment to explore what they want in life and how they might achieve their aspirations and fulfil their needs. By assisting the client in committing to action and by being a sounding-board to their experiences, coaching allows the individual the personal space and support they need to grow and develop.

In many cases personal coaching is differentiated from business coaching purely by the context and the focus of the programme. Business coaching is always conducted within the constraints placed on the individual or group by the organisational context. Coaching and counselling share many core skills. However, professional counsellors work with personal issues in much greater depth than would generally be explored within a coaching context. This is not, however, the same as consultancy per se. The key difference between coaching and the therapies is that coaching does not seek to resolve the deeper underlying issues that are the cause of serious problems like poor motivation, low self-esteem and poor job performance.

Coaching and mentoring programmes are generally more concerned with the practical issues of setting goals and achieving results within specific time-scales. It is possible for someone who has underlying issues to experience success within a coaching context even if the underlying issues are not resolved.

This is driven in part by the professional restrictions and barriers that have traditionally been placed around psychology and the therapies, but is mostly due to the fact that psychological assessment is a complex process that does require specialised training. Client progress is always monitored and coaches and mentors watch for signs which may indicate that a client requires an assessment by a trained therapist.

Some coaches will on-refer a client to an appropriate therapist if this is felt to be useful. Other coaches will conduct a coaching programme in parallel with a therapeutic intervention. Therapy is, if anything, an extension of what happens in a coaching relationship, it is forward focused and aimed at life improvement or enhancement.

It is about moving on and breaking free from problems and issues that have held people back and prevented them from getting all they can from their lives. Therapy is also time-limited and based on an assessment of needs. It is quite rare now to encounter therapies that involve open-ended interventions that last for many years. Psychologists who apply therapeutic approaches are also ethically and professionally bound to work with clients only if measurable value can be demonstrated, this means that if people do not actually NEED therapy, it is not ethical for providers to continue providing the services.

This means it is possible to offer the appropriate level of service depending on immediate needs and client preferences. Anyone seeking life improvement, and who is willing to work at the deeper issues could benefit from contracting a coach or mentor who does have a traditional therapeutic background in the first instance. If the client is not sure what type of service would benefit them the most, they should be encouraged to secure a professional assessment by an appropriately qualified provider.

In some countries such as the UK, there is goverment regulation in place for psychologists. A small number of restricted titles have been identified by the Govt for the purpose of ensuring that the public can be assured that any professional using these titles is appropriately registered under the regulatory framework.

More general terms like psychologist, therapist and counsellor are not restricted titles, so anyone is able to use thee to market their services.

As this is the case, when selecting a coach or mentor with therapeutic, counselling or business focused psychological skills it is important to ensure they are registered with an appropriate regulatory body. Coaching is work-related, proactive and focused on conscious or just below the surface things. Counselling is a whole different ball game. You can do more harm than good by mixing them up.

Programme Syllabus and Content

Make sure you do not make the same mistake. If you are on the receiving end, make sure you have a profile that fits your needs. The good ones will help you as a coach to facilitate learning rather than to direct it. Questioning techniques and active listening are your primary means to do this. Everybody can become a coach.

Most companies today invest in coaching to improve individual performance. Our minds can only process a limited amount of information at the same time. We have a mechanism in our brain that filters all incoming signals and only those considered important come through. It would be impossible to function without it. This selection process takes place automatically without any conscious effort. You can however feed your brain better input and influence the importance given to certain inputs.

By being aware — or in other words by tuning your senses and engaging your brain — you are in control of the quality of input that your brain receives and the importance it is given.

Performance Coaching: 30 High Performance Coaching Tips! [2018 update]

And you improve input through awareness. So if you can help your coachee to increase awareness and thereby collect help to collect better input, you dramatically increase the possibility of increased output. As a coach, you cannot tell someone to become aware. By asking the right questions however, you can facilitate this process. So to increase your coaching performance, you need to always check the change in awareness level first.

If nothings happens at that level, you need more effort before moving on. This is a short, but very important paragraph for those looking to position performance coaching into a company context. Strategy execution is made up of many, MANY individual execution efforts — an infinite to-do list taken up by different people at different times.

Performance coaching helps this process by creating the necessary commitment with the individuals involved to move these actions forwards. In other words, performance coaching creates engagement to get things done. This is different from counseling or mentoring. They are listed in my book Strategy Execution Heroes. The list below is therefore incomplete and even has some contradictory performance coaching tips.

But they have all been tested and will be useful for you as a coach somewhere along your growth path. As your coaching skills develop, so will your needs for further development. It might therefore be a good idea to run through this list every few months. You will see that, after some time, certain coaching tips will hold no mystery for a high performance coach anymore and others will attract your attention and reveal different nuances over time.

How does working with a coach help?

Bonus Download a free checklist Get a useful PDF checklist that helps you to identify the best tips for you! Asking closed questions prevents people from thinking. Asking open questions causes them to think for themselves. Ask open questions that demand your coachee to focus more than usual to give accurate answers. Ask open questions that demand descriptive, non-judgmental answers. And analysis thinking and awareness observing are two different mental processes that are virtually impossible to combine to full effect.

So aim for questions that start with words such as what, when, who, how much and how many. Make your coaching questions clear and unambiguous. It helps when you limit yourself to one brief question. And listen for the response before launching a new question. First, you start with a map that helps your coachee decide where they are going their Goal and establish where they currently are their current Reality. Then you explore various ways the Options of making the journey.

In the final step, establishing the Will, you ensure your coachee is committed to making the journey. In fact, most coaching takes place unsolicited, with the coachee unaware of the process. The coached individual will simply think that you were being particularly helpful and considerate. This means that every conversation you have becomes a potential testing ground — a learning experience — to improve your coaching skills.

Everybody learns, even the best coaches. So do ask for feedback from your coachee. Besides the positive learning experience for you, it has the extra benefit for improving the relationship. I have mentioned before how important it is to begin the coaching process, formal or informal, with a clear definition of what your coachee would like to achieve. Using a self-evaluation form helps this process tremendously. With as few as 10 questions you can offer your coachee your first added value.

How to become a great performance coach?

When coaching for performance, you aim to improve certain performance shortcomings of your coachee. But without the proper attention, she might not be aware of them, or even worse, adds them to the list of behaviors that need to change. When you know the coachee, you probably have more information available.

You might, for example, have heard something from a colleague. So stick to what you hear directly from your coachee. Ask your coachee open questions that will make him reflect. You should be able to detect it from their body language such as a pause before answering or a raising of the eyes.

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