Guest Blog: The Power of Coaching - The Leadership Group

by?Pierre Gauthier, Professional Coach

The Olympic Games in London provide good entertainment, but also a great opportunity to witness the power of coaching. The impact of coaching is very obvious in elite athletics. During the London 2012 games, we saw how recent changes in coaches can lead some athletes to perform below expectations and others to reach new heights.

Professional executive coaches share many similarities with athletic coaches, and their methods can be just as powerful. Let?s take a look at how an executive coach works, and why coaching can have such an important impact on a leader?s development.

Why We Need Coaches

Coaching is a methodology or toolset for performance improvement. Coaches like me and those at The Leadership Group have a great deal of training and experience in using the tools of coaching to help managers and executives perform to the absolute best of their abilities.

Even the most elite athletes in the world use coaches. Yet those athletes are far better at their chosen sports than any coach will be, and likely better than their coaches ever were. Likewise, executives practice leadership every day while coaches do not.

So how can a less-skilled athlete (the coach) help an elite athlete or executive to improve one?s game?

How Coaching Works

There are a number of reasons that coaching works:

First, a coach is an outside observer.

As such, a coach brings a unique perspective and therefore he or she sees things that the trainee does not see. A coach pays attention differently and must be a keen observer to give valuable feedback.

In executive coaching, we often refer to the ?Executive Blind-Spot?. Every leader has it: a habit he or she is unaware of and which hampers her ability to achieve the results she wants. This blind spot is often obvious to a trained and experienced observer like a coach. A coach also has the tools and experience to give the leader feedback and tools to address such limitations.

Second, a good coach understands how change happens.

All change ? whether it?s an alteration to how a rower rows, a change in boardroom behaviour, or finding a new way to communicate with a difficult employee ? involves building new pathways in the brain. The challenge for the executive or athlete is to create new pathways that produce better results than the existing pathways. The best coaches, whether or not they are trained in neuroscience, have a solid grasp of just how tenacious those old pathways can be.

In fact, there are strong neurological reasons why this is so (for example, electrical signals in the brain travel much faster along pathways that have been used often than along new pathways, due to thicker myelin on the neurons? branches). One of the skills great coaches possess is the ability to draw upon a myriad of ideas, tools and exercises to get an individual to try completely new ways of doing things. It?s a simple enough thing to say, but to make change happen is a real skill.

As executive coaches, much of what we do is about getting managers and leaders to try new ways of doing things. Our understanding of how change happens in the brain is a powerful ally in our work.

Finally, a coach pays a lot of attention to thoughts and emotions.

In particular, they pay attention to the thoughts and emotions that stand in the way of peak performance. Coaches pay attention not just to what a coachee does, but also to what the individual is experiencing as he or she acts. The emotional and intellectual context of one?s actions are critical, and by drawing attention to these things, a coach helps to address strong emotions, avoid extreme reactions, prevent self-defeating thoughts and maximize performance. This is often where a coach?s expertise can be the most useful in improving performance.

The Shared History of Athletic and Executive Coaching

Timothy Gallwey was one of the first people to apply coaching principles to management. He helped many elite athletes improve their performance before turning his attention to business leaders. Gallwey wrote:

?In every human endeavor there are two arenas of engagement: the outer and the inner. The outer game is played on an external arena to overcome external obstacles to reach an external goal. The inner game takes place within the mind of the player and is played against such obstacles as fear, self-doubt, lapses in focus, and limiting concepts or assumptions.?

As an executive coach, I am in debt to this amazing tennis coach who launched a whole new field of performance excellence: leadership coaching. And he developed his proven methods 20 years before the brain scans that would eventually validate their impact were even possible!

Watching the Olympics this past week has reminded me of the importance of coaching in improving performance, and just how powerful the impact of a good coach can be. If you know someone who would like to improve their performance, do them a favour and suggest to them that they try coaching.

Pierre Gauthier is a Certified Integral Coach in private practice as well as a Faculty Member at the Canada School of Public Service (CSPS). He can be reached at icpierre@hotmail.com

Source: http://leadershipgroup.ca/2012/08/guest-blog-the-power-of-coaching/

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