Coach & Coachee

Serious Performance Improvement therefore, seldom works without the infusion of fresh perspectives, options and additional bandwidth. All of which is brought to action by a Performance Coach.

As a Business Performance & CEO Coach. I often get this question, from company CEOs: How would a Coach be able to help me?

Well, there are clear answers visible if you are willing to look around. But if you are not able to look around and find the obvious around you, you might like to read this:

What is the Coach’s responsibility? Let's look at this thing first, for what s/he does is a separate thing. The primary responsibility of a Coach is to enhance the performance of the Coachee, in whatever terms necessary and agreed between the two. This is both fundamental and important to note. Because, in this world, there are different grades of coaching, different shades of coaching and different styles of coaching. It depends on what the Coachee is being coached on. And please be mindful of the great confusion out there between a Coach, Mentor, Guru, Teacher, Expert, Consultant & …..

The performance improvement thing is clear. Its fundamental and it's at the base. We are not going to negotiate with that at any cost. Let discuss a few more questions.

1. What performance improvement can we target and how ? Performance is improved through a process in time.
2. Which performance is improved is dependent on what you choose to work on.
3. Is it going to create an overall change in whatever you do? It depends on what kind of coaching intensity that you are taking on yourself and your colleagues and people around you so that there is an impact which is larger than one person or one unit. (We do this under our 100-day Rapid Improvement programme)

So you can already see that there are complex situations in a simple coaching scenario, where a Coach and a Coachee basically sits together to answer questions that need to be addressed around a performance improvement focus.

The next question that we often hear at this stage is: “why is it that the Coachee is not able to address these performance challenges himself or herself?” Well of course, they can, but under conditions. The fact that they recognise that those issues are burning is in itself a very good point to start with, because the constraints have been spotted on the radar. They are now being observed and monitored. Now whether the Coachee should decide to embark on a journey on performance improvement by themselves or by learning some tools and tricks or should they do it with the help of a Coach is a reflective question.

Let us go back to the earlier question on the Coach’s responsibility. A Coach has a performance to deliver in terms of the performance improvement of the Coachee and that's the Coach’s performance now, right? While he or she has been roaming around on the surface of the earth has been seeing, experiencing, learning and accumulating that learning and wisdom, can now come to put it back into act when they find that the Coachee needs to find a solution and is not being able to pinpoint exactly on what needs to be done as a response or a decision for action.

Broadly, there is a playbook that you have between the two. But you are also going to have outlying incidences when the Coachee is going to call up and say, ‘Hey Coach what we are doing is fine but you know, I’m just confronted with this specific issue & I don’t know how to go about it’. The Coach then thinks through and gives a response based on what s/he has experienced and believes would work – i.e. low risk, low failure rate.

Let’s see what’s behind this. A Coach or a ‘performance improver’ as I like to refer in this case, is a person who is constantly on the lookout for new ideas, new thoughts, new ways about how things are being done how decisions are being taken, how people interact, how people influence, how people transact, how systems are made to operate, how an organizational system can be made to resonate with happiness, so on and so forth. While this person is doing it, s/he is mentally playing it out and thinking that if I take it to my client X (Coachee), this is probably the impact that they are expecting at but they cannot see all this across so many perspectives. As a problem solver, performance builder, a Coach will have a number of problems to solve simultaneously from a number of clients. S/he is going out and talking about these to a number of people in a number of ways and are therefore getting wider and deeper into different styles of problem-solving and decision-making.

This represents the value of the added bandwidth that a Business Performance Coach brings on board which in turn helps the Coachee to dig out positive outcomes in a certain time frame, simply because the walls of reality with an organization has its own limitations.

Serious Performance Improvement therefore, seldom works without the infusion of fresh perspectives, options and additional bandwidth. All of which is brought to action by a Performance Coach.