Performance Coaching: The Missing Link to Level 3 Impact

Condition 4: The Person Must Be Rewarded for Changing
Absolutely! Achieving personal best should be celebrated. Affecting divisional-goal outcomes or business-unit objectives or monthly numbers by virtue of personal best demands recognition. Coaching actively supports recognition through the continual feedback given at each session. This provides individual rewards through the direct effects on self-confidence and job satisfaction. Qualitative or quantitative, if the measurements indicate success, reward that success. How is up to you. The organization should put formal strategies in place to acknowledge the time and effort committed and benefits received. Coaching will force those benefits out into the open.

Coaching Is Process-Driven
Coaching is process-driven, and like any business process, it becomes part of the organizational culture of how things get done. This is why it is important to consider coaching not only from a senior executive perspective, but also from a management perspective. If your current coaching process (or experience) is that senior executives get external coaches if needed or desired for specific, targeted development, and management is given an additional competency requirement (to coach subordinates) with a two-day training experience or self-driven learning, who will be more successful? The breadth, scope and consistency of your coaching process have everything to do with the degree of impact you can achieve.

The coaching process includes both the nature of the coaching event itself as well as the implementation of how coaching interfaces in the organization on a daily basis. In studying the onslaught of coaching books now on the market, there is very little attention (if any) paid to how coaching gets implemented within the organization. Most experts choose to focus on the coaching event—the process of how individual change will occur and what competencies, from a coaching perspective, are driving those changes. No ink is given to how to harness coaching organizationally. This seems incredible, as its reputation for dramatic impact is so high.