The Progress Coaching Blog

Coaching has grown in popularity in terms of setting up a business now more than ever. Coaching continues to rise as the reception of coaching continues to grow in the corporate world. We have life coaches, executive coaches, sales coaches, nutrition coaches, just to name a few. As our market gets crowded, and dare I say saturated,

An increasing number of managers and companies are cultivating a culture of coaching, and as a result they are seeing higher levels of employee engagement, being proactive, and a more positive workplace culture. Yet even as this cultural ground-swell occurs, many people persist in seeing coaching as a dichotomy, as black or white, either you’re a coach who nurtures, or a manager who yells. But persisting in seeing coaching as an either-or scenario misses a really important point about coaching: everyone needs a coach. Even coaches. We can all improve.

Human beings are emotional creatures. Our day-to-day interactions and perspectives prove this. People need perspective because they usually will not find perspective arbitrarily on their own.

Especially when we are coaching very specific areas or targeted areas we need to be very clear as it relates to expectations. Let me give you a brief example. A few months back I sat in on a meeting when a manager stood up and kept preaching that we need to have a sense of urgency when it comes to getting back to customers. I stop the meeting and asked everyone to write down their own definition of what a sense of urgency meant. Needless to say, out of 23 people we had 15 vastly different interpretations of what a sense of urgency meant. In essence, this manager really had no way of creating success because he had not yet defined the parameters, expectations, and definition of what he meant by a sense of urgency.