Ivey Business Journal: Business Coaching

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Ivey Business Journal (2000) has once stated that "Executives and HR managers know coaching is the most potent tool for inducing lasting personal change." No matter how our business model changes with technological advancement or economic fluctuations, managers have been playing an important role in sustaining the firm’s competitive advantage by directing workflow and more importantly, nurturing their subordinates. Meanwhile, companies have been weighing employees’ coaching as an inevitable responsibility displayed by managers, and their coaching skills are seen as heavy correlation to employees’ understanding of company’s objections and satisfaction. If business coaching is so important in an organisation, then you may wonder, who set the …show more content…

As one of the largest UK company in the industry, it has been actively giving consulting solutions to companies from the private, public and even government sectors. I have assigned to shadow a Client Development Director -- Peter, who was recently being promoted from a Managing Director position of the Social Infrastructure team and is now in charge of 8 teams with more than 1000 staffs. Among these three eventful working days of the program, the most memorable part stands out as the coaching session for Peter. His company has outsourced the coaching service to an association that is specialised in leadership development and executive coaching, which is now responsible of assisting Peter with his leadership. During one of the coaching session at the end of the business quarter, Peter showed strong disappointment towards the 10 ongoing objectives held by his companies and further expressed his disagreement towards his team. Throughout the meeting, the coach, Tom tried to help him breaking down the main issues of the failure and guided him to figure out solutions by focus on the main objectives. The meeting was concluded with a constructive agenda aims at fixing the problems. This coaching section had broadened my horizon as it had enlightened me of the benefits and necessity of coaching towards building a health …show more content…

According to Watson (1996) and the research from Larcker (2013), they both observed that managers are usually defined as a lonely and isolated person. Larcker (2013) further explains even though those managers are receptive to take advice and make changes, only one third of the participants have experienced coaching. The Chairman and CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt made an advice and made an argument during an interview, "I was a CEO. I was pretty experienced. Why would I need a coach? Am I doing something wrong? My argument was, how could a coach advise me if I'm the best person in the world at this? But that's not what a coach does. The coach doesn't have to play the sport as well as you do. They have to watch you and get you to be your best. In the business context a coach is not a repetitious coach. A coach is somebody who looks at something with another set of eyes, describes it to you in [his] words, and discusses how to approach the problem." (Lashinsky: 2009) From the above speech by the Google CEO, it proves that no matter how experienced and how successful you are in the workplace, taking part in coaching sections do not call into question on one’s leadership ability, instead, it is a channel for the managers to gain benefits and improve their leadership development in different areas through various coaching

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