Steve Crabb

If you’re looking at business coaching only from a best price perspective, you’ll probably be disappointed and you may end up with buyer’s remorse. There are more important criteria for you to consider than just price. When hiring a coach, think of the process as a two-way conversation and building a professional relationship.

Think of business coaching and mentoring as the use of a professional skill set where the well-trained coach doesn’t need to have experience of a particular type of business, specific leadership role, or experience in the same functional area as the person being coached. The coach is using a set of skills and experiences to help the client find solutions and make sense of things from the client’s own resources.

As a mentor and business coach, you have a responsibility to ethically persuade. When looking to influence, always keep the end goal in mind and consider what could be an obstacle or resistance to reaching it. Always think, what does my language do to the submodalities of the listener or receiver? The word manipulation is emotionally charged, especially in the context of influencing and persuasion.

Mentors, if you aren’t getting the desired results, change your communication strategy. Do you know the saying, “The meaning of the communication is the response you get”? The more variety clients have in the way they communicate their ideas, the more success they have in achieving their desired results.Social psychology experiments confirm that our decisions and behaviors are influenced by many things beyond our conscious awareness.

As a mentor, you need to have a cache of words that you can draw on to help make a difference. Have you ever met someone who said he would do something but didn’t follow through with his actions? This sorry state of affairs is not uncommon in business, especially after meetings when instructions have been given or agreements have been made but people still don’t do their part.

Developing collaborative relationships within and outside of a business can help to leverage ideas, investment, innovation, and the like. Many high-growth businesses have been spawned through collaborative working and the development of specific industry networks. The high-tech sector, in particular, has actively identified synergies in new products or joint working and collaborated to create spin-outs and new joint ventures.

Networking is reciprocal. As a business coach, you can develop your network in different ways. Traditionally, face-to-face relationship creation has been the norm. This method often consists of getting together at evening network meetings with like-minded business professionals over canapés and a glass of wine or at a business breakfast with a speaker and mingling while you chew on a croissant and drink average coffee.

The UK department store chain John Lewis has a tagline: “Never knowingly undersold.” Its website explains that this tagline means the following: Quality: “We have the very highest standards when it comes to product quality, plus we regularly benchmark John Lewis–branded products against the competition to ensure that we’re not just market-leading in quality, but also on price.

The following business coaching example shows you how to check for commitment and desire to established SMART goals. You can ask individuals to do this exercise on their own or do it with them. Business outcome: By the end of December the customer services team in the meat packing unit will have improved the time for acknowledging and answering initial complaints from five days to three days and have improved customer satisfaction with our complaints process while reducing packing and delivery errors.