How Do You Select the Best Coach for Your Company’s Needs?
The number of companies using coaching, as part of their professional development offering, is growing as coaching is recognized to deliver significant outcomes – a strong ROI for the company.
Coaching has been very successful as an intervention approach ie working with under-performers, overcoming communication issues, supporting team management and other ways of ‘building up’ skills.
I’m pleased to see that the intervention focus for coaching is changing to a more proactive approach – to work with executives and leaders to enhance their capacities, to build on current skills & strengths and stretch beyond their current comfort zone, to a higher level of working. This coaching approach is often self-initiated, whereas an intervention focus is often company initiated.
So how do companies select a coach and – just as importantly – how do they choose between internal and external coaches?
Of course internal coaches can be offered at a low cost, provide more consistency in methods and are very aware of the organisational culture. They can possibly offer more flexibility in the coaching program and they can more readily see the person in everyday action, to provide first hand feedback.
However, internal coaching success relies heavily on the coach being perceived as credible and offering complete confidentiality.
An external coach, on the other hand, can bring greater objectivity, fresh perspectives, and potentially, a broader experience base to coaching. Professionally accredited coaches are bound by the core principals of confidentiality from their governing body. An external coach’s success depends upon their integrity, honesty and ability to work within a confidentiality framework.
So what do you look for when selecting an external coach?
- Qualifications and membership of professional bodies
- Good testimonials and relevant prior experience
- Focus of coaching on relevant and achievable ROI
- Flexibility of coach in offering a customized program to meet specific needs
- Willingness to involve others in the program for the purpose of input and feedback.
In every organisation there is always untapped potential across the company as well as in pockets. Significant changes can be made, by engaging the right external coach, which reap surprising and often huge, rewards.
Selecting the right coach easily pays for itself.
