Business coaching – just another fad or something of real value?
By Desmond High
Every now and again something comes along that seems to make excellent business sense. What makes the latest example a rather odd one is that it originates from central Government.
After years of Business Links, subsidised consultancy programmes, Regional Development Grants, Train to Gain and so on, we now have Growth Accelerator. This crept out almost unnoticed in May 2012 and the marketing budget remains distinctly modest.
In summary, companies with fewer than 250 staff that have growth ambitions and potential can avail themselves of business coaching at a fraction of market price, attend free master classes on topics such as finance or sales, and benefit from subsidised leadership and management training. The latter is the old Train to Gain programme repackaged and now only available to those with growth potential – in this case broadly defined as 20% top line per annum.
The big difference between this and previous initiatives is the “coaching” label. Business coaching can often be seen as a high cost luxury offered by individuals who reinvent themselves as business coaches, often under a franchise structure. But the more I think about it, the more it feels like the right long-term answer to developing skills within businesses.
To give this some context, I have coached junior cricketers for 10 years and also have extensive and wide-ranging business experience. At the core of coaching is knowledge transfer (sometimes also known as teaching).
In sports coaching, the aim is to help participants improve their performance whether it’s giving them the basics or challenging them to understand how they can continue to improve. What it is not is the football manager bellowing from the touchline.
So I’ve signed up to the scheme as a Business Coach. I’ve been working on all sorts of business projects for the last 20 years and many of my roles and responsibilities have included helping business owners and senior staff to develop new skills, albeit without the coaching label.
The real reason this scheme stands a better chance than most of working is that it is designed to unlock or improve skills within a business rather than keeping it dependent on a passing consultant. If the coaching is good, those skills are there for the long term.
Much depends on getting the right coach and what they can bring with them. For example, look how Andy Murray has improved with the help of Ivan Lendl. The former world number one brought with him the priceless know-how from years of competing against players with arguably greater natural talent (eg McEnroe) and has been able to pass that on to Murray.
That’s why it is important that Growth Accelerator uses people who actually know how to coach and have a broad range of board-level decision-making experience, rather than someone recently made redundant.
Some of my colleagues have asked how it differs from consulting and other forms of business support. So, slightly tongue in cheek and with a passing nod to the old Chinese proverb “give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime,” here goes:
Consultant – does the fishing for you, using his own boat, but keeps half the catch.
Adviser – tells you where the sea is and that you’ll need a boat and a rod.
Mentor – used to do some fishing, and suggests you might enjoy it.
Non-executive director – knows the best fish restaurants.
Coach – asks you how you might deal with your hunger, will gently remind you that there is an ocean nearby, and will encourage you to work out what you might need to capture the fish.
OR
Consultant – takes your watch and tells you the time.
Adviser – suggests that if you want to know the time you should buy a watch.
Mentor – says that in his day he found watches useful, and you might too.
Non-executive director – has a Rolex.
Coach – asks if you can work out how to measure how long it takes to do something. Then asks if you think you can find a way of doing it quicker.
January 2013