Coaching - Key To Getting THE Competitive Advantage

Monday 30 April, 2012

by Margaret Manson

Competitive advantage - the Holy Grail of business success. Is it about technology, new product development, the illusive innovation, working lean, or great marketing? What makes the difference to winning more often, is how your team performs as a whole. How do you achieve this? In a word - coaching.

So what is the factor that leads to the Holy Grail? The bad news is that it's all of the above, delivered better and faster than anyone else. The good news is that it is within your reach. So, how do you outpace competitors from around the world? How do you gain sustainable competitive advantage?
Great businesses have great resources. But, they also have great systems. While technology can create a barrier to entry, it can be acquired. People can also be hired for their skills, experience and other valuable traits. But, your competitors do the same. So, if you have done due diligence, you will end up with comparable operational resources.
Then you put them into your system. And, that's where the difference in performance occurs.
Have you ever seen a top league sports team without a coach? The best teams have talented players, with comparable skills and physical abilities, and maybe one maverick. What makes the difference is how the team performs as a whole, through coaching. By coaching the entire team, even the less experienced players perform better and eventually, some will become stars and others will know how to play as a team to win together.  

Business is a contact sport

It depends on team performance. Strategy kept in the head of the CEO or the management team is of no value if it is not clearly communicated to the whole team and if the employees don't know what role they need to play - and why - in that strategy. One-off induction, no matter how good, is not enough.
In the increasingly complex world, to succeed, businesses need to have and provide clear focus to their workforce to help them make the right decisions faster.
This can only be achieved through consistent coaching of the team in what is really important: what you want to achieve, how it is to be achieved and what role everyone plays on the field. It is the responsibility of management to illuminate the path for their employees and to build a connected, informed and supported team.
Coaching is the fastest growing management approach. So what is business coaching? Here's the context:

• Managing is making sure people do what they know how to do
  
• Training is teaching people to do what they don't know how to do

Job roles are changing at an ever increasing rate. Traditional training programs are often too inflexible or generic to deal with these fast moving requirements and usually limited to specific job functions without bringing the whole team together.
Sometimes, one-to-one skills coaching, allows a flexible, adaptive, ‘just-in-time' approach to skills development. It is also possible to apply skills coaching in ‘live' environments rather than taking people away from the job into a ‘classroom' where it is less easy to simulate the job environment. But this is limited in scope and cannot be duplicated easily.
Many companies these days use mentoring. Mentoring is not to be confused with Coaching.

• Mentoring shows people how others who are really good at doing something, do it
  
• Coaching, on the other hand, helps identify the skills and capabilities that are within your people, and use them to their best ability 

Business coaching puts your people's best skills in the context of your business' strategy.
Why do the best athletes have personal coaches? Why is it easier to achieve the desired level of weight loss or fitness with a personal coach? Coaches keep you focused on what's important and on track. Your winning team is no different. If you want top performance, you need to consider getting in on the secret of high performance sports teams.
In the age of the Internet, e-learning and an interconnected world, enlisting this winning management approach is within your reach. Like with all trends, early adoption ensures a competitive advantage.
The benefits of coaching include not only better performance in achieving immediate business goals and more profitable outcomes. Coaching will also create a more cohesive team that is more connected and engaged, through better understanding of a bigger picture of where you want to go.

4 steps to implementing business coaching in your organisation:

1. Review and clarify your Vision, Mission and Goals
   
2. Communicate it widely and frequently to ALL your stakeholders
   
3. Automate the process with an online coaching system
   
4. Make learning of what is important to you accountable

Source:ceoonline.com