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6 Business Coaching Tips

Written by: Peter Rowe

Article Overview: Do you have a routine to follow with each new business coaching client, or new team member? These are the steps I follow, to ensure that I don’t miss an important step in laying the foundations for their future success, and the success of our coaching.

6 Business Coaching Tips

Whenever I start coaching with a business client, I have a set routine that I follow to ensure that I don't miss an important step in laying the foundations for their future success. Otherwise, it would be easy to become so fascinated by my client's business and the challenges they face in managing and growing it, that I might fail to properly fulfil my role So, like any good pilot, I have my "pre-flight checklist" and it occurred to me that this might help you improve your own performance, so here are the first six pre-flight tips for business coaching success:

1. Clarify Your Goals. If your business is a small sailing boat, and your goal is to use it to reach the distant shore of a large bay, it would be helpful if there were a lighthouse right where you wanted to make landfall. If there were, you could look up at any time during your journey and check to ensure that what you are doing right now is taking you towards your distant goal.

A glance at your written goal for your business will ensure your "lighthouse" (your Vision) remains fast against the wind, current and tides of day-to-day business, and provides you and your team with guidance every day.

2. Measure Your Progress. As you sail, make it a matter of routine to plot your position regularly, so that you can gauge your progress towards your goal.

In business, profits are easily measured, and so they form the primary measure for us of progress made towards goals.

3. Prioritise Your Tasks. You can't do everything at once, and if you attempt to, you achieve very little and usually wear yourself out in the process, so a Time Management system is a must for every client. In truth, no one can manage "Time", we can only manage our use of it, and that usually boils down to how we prioritise.

I use a simple, 3-level priority system (High - Must do today; Medium - Should do today; Low - Nice to do today) and then coach my clients until they are consistently getting their Highs done first.

("Acquiring better time management skills" is, world wide, the Number One reason given for going coaching. If you'd like to know more on this critical skill, email me about Time Management.)

4. Work Out What Matters. This step differs from the last in that it's about your "values" - the things that you say in response to the question, "What is most important to you in the context of your business?"

One way to think about Values is that they represent the boundaries of the path you are prepared to follow to achieve your Goals. (In the process of clarifying goals, I've had some clients break down in tears as they realise that the business to which they have shackled themselves almost without thinking, is not delivering them the things that they most value in life. Once realised, it's just a matter of realigning the business to then give them what they value. Feel free to email me for more about how to work out your own Values.)

5. Tap the Team. Most businesses with a few staff and a few years of experience under their belt develop a certain amount of resident wisdom. The problem is that wisdom is seldom noticed by the owner or manager, and is too rarely recognised and acknowledged and that tends to breed a relationship in which the team are waiting to be told what to do and/or how to do it, and in which the leader feels overloaded and stressed.

Sitting down with your team to clarify your goals, share your values, explain your timetable and priorities to them, then ask for suggestions on how things could be done better, quicker or cheaper can be a mind-expanding experience for all parties - and it's an essential step for the growth of any business.

6. Delegate to Develop. You can't do everything yourself, so anyone wanting to grow their business has to adopt a simple and fail-safe delegation process, one that offers them the peace-of-mind that the job will be done satisfactorily, and offers their staff the space and safety in which to grow.

Delegation is such a key management skill (I say skill because it is learned) that we have spent years refining The ProfiTune Delegation Paradigm that we now install with each client.

Hint: The First Rule Of Delegation is, "If someone can be trained to do it 80% as well as you can do it, delegate it!". The fact is, after a little time on the new task they are likely to do it better than you! (Feel free to ask me for more on Delegation)

If you have read thus far, and you're thinking, "Hey, I need the lot!" then you should email me with a time at which we can talk.

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Article Tags: business, business coaching, coach, coaching, goals, new business, success, team member



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