Positive Characteristics Of Coaching

Coaching is generally known as a collective, action-oriented conversation that facilitates the enhancement of life experiences, goal attainment, self directed learning and performance in the individual being coached professional and personal life. Moreover, coaching takes on many beneficial characteristics such as: (1) the ability to unlock people’s potential to maximize their own performance; (2) a facilitative approach that helps people to learn, as opposed to teaching them; (3) an instructional approach that is directly concerned with the immediate improvement of performance and development of skills by a form of tutoring or instruction; and (4) the potential to enhance performance in work and personal life domains, underpinned by models

Therefore, some key behaviors to engage in entail: (a) collaborate, (b) help and assist, (c) empathize, (d) recognize the individual's value, (e) recognize the individual's goals and interests, (f) listen, (g) give positive feedback, and (h) create positive exchanges (Eikenberry, 2010). Furthermore, it is highly critical to create a sense of ownership and empower others to do their work. Further, as a coach a pivotal behavior includes helping and assisting and finding out in what ways you can help. One area of importance is empathizing with the employee because it shows that you value and understand how they are feeling. In addition, when coaches know something about people’s strengths, interests and long term objectives, they can often help them reach those objectives and support those interests. When you exhibit these behaviors in a genuine, authentic way you encourage and support people to become the very best they can be. Isn’t that the goal of coaching anyway? (Eikenberry,

Although the term coaching may be used to refer to a variety of one-to-one development activities, there is some emerging consensus about what constitute the core features or elements of coaching. Likewise, these are (1) formation and maintenance of a helping relationship between the coach and coachee; (2) a formally defined coaching agreement or contract, setting personal development objectives; (3) the fulfilment of this agreement (i.e., achievement of the objectives) through a development process focusing on interpersonal and intrapersonal issues; (4) striving for growth of the coachee by providing the tools, skills, and opportunities they need to develop themselves and become more effective (Jones, Woods, & Guillaume,