In the business world, managing as a coach is a necessity not only for your success, but also for your survival. Business coaching is about helping employees become more effective — and supporting and involving your employees in the process. Coaching influences employee adaptability, productivity, and retention. It helps you make better use of your time.
The definition of coaching, in a business context, has the two following aspects:
Coaching is an approach to management — how one carries out the role of being a manager.
Coaching is a set of skills for managing employee performance to deliver results.
Being a coach means that you see and approach the role of manager as a leader — one who challenges and develops your employees' skills and abilities to achieve the best performance results, and to function as self-sufficiently as possible. In other words, if you manage as a coach, your staff members learn, grow, and work hard, too. As you seek to get the best out of their performance, you also have to work very hard.
As a coach, you develop and possess various skills and efforts that are aimed at guiding employees to achieve high productivity and positive results. The more you manage as a coach, the easier you'll find coaching as a manager because you'll be putting those skills into practice.
In the business world, the terms "coaching" and "mentoring" are often used synonymously. But that's not always the case. When you hear employees talk about wanting a manager who is a mentor, they're essentially talking about wanting a manager who carries on as a coach. They want a manager who cares about their development and who challenges them to grow and perform to their best — in brief, what managing as a coach means.
Coaching is the sum of all the coaching skills — giving performance feedback, delegating, motivating employee performance, and so on.
Mentoring is one set in the overall skills of coaching. It's a significant part of coaching and the set that focuses on guiding employees to do for themselves. Mentoring promotes self-development and self-sufficiency.
