The dynamic impact of coaching

The ICF performed a study on the efficiency of coaching and revealed the following statistics:

• 70% stated a rise in productivity
• 72% mentioned a boost in communication skills
• 73% cited an enhancement in relationships
• 80% noted a surge in self-confidence

In today’s environment, business leaders and managers aim to retain and motivate their workforce. When times are tough, and teams are fearful, developing trust is ideal for getting the best out of your employees. The right people are the most precious asset for a company. Realizing its importance, companies should keep their employees motivated and efficient and enhance their growth. A significant effect of coaching is that it helps your workforce gain ownership and responsibility for their actions and self-development. The best news is that the manager, as a coach, doesn’t have to come up with solutions. Instead, they must listen more efficiently to their employees, reflect as soon as possible according to what they hear, and question them to bring out the best solutions and ideas.

Coaching programs

As there is a rise in the number of companies and people adopting coaching, the use of skills and methods has grown beyond professionally trained practitioners to include leaders and managers to apply their competencies in their daily workplace interactions.

The coaching continuum concept is a phrase ICF uses to outline the different modalities in which coaching competencies and methods can be applied. At the end of the continuum, managers and leaders adopt coaching skills. The extent of coaching skills needed differs dramatically.

It is predicted that around 71000 coaches were available in 2019, with a rise of 33% from the 2015 estimate. According to the research from the Institute of Coaching, the efficiency of coaching as a management tool was done. Did coaching impact employees’ performance, attitude, objectives, and well-being? The results revealed that coaching significantly impacted all results and suggested that it is a remarkable intervention in companies.

But, considering the benefits of coaching, it cannot be treated as a tool. Instead, it is a way of being with someone to help them start to believe in and progress with their ideas. Coaching teams can be achieved by working with certified coaching training programs for leaders, executives, and managers to help them coach their staff successfully by:

• Creating and managing the right energy and space for them to develop their potential
• Encourage them to predict risks
• Challenging their negative thinking
• Helping them enjoy a sense of achievement on little progress
• Working with them to boost their potential
• Successfully helping them improve their self-belief in times of uncertainty

Coaching offers the best results when you develop a calm and comfortable environment with every session, helping address issues and ensure the workers feel supported. Coaching is to help people with a specific mindset and work respectfully with everyone. A manager as a coach should believe in their employee’s potential, listen to them, and work in close collaboration to enhance their potential. Coaching is highly effective when performed in an environment of openness and honesty. Most companies that choose a coaching management style recognize that employees are motivated by a sense of inclusiveness, well-being, and belongingness.

It is also effective to enable workers to strike the right work-life balance and enhance their skills through training and mentoring. It is essential to notice that according to a study by the International Personnel Management Association, regular training boosts productivity by 22% but training teamed with coaching enhances productivity by 88%.

Hence, the best way to enhance the productivity and performance of a team is not through training or mentoring but through coaching. So, how does the industry at large realizes this?

According to a survey of 100 executives, the average ROI of executive coaching was six times higher than the coaching cost.

As per the Institute of Coaching report, 80% of coachees report a rise in self-confidence. And one in six businesses turns to a coach to enhance their performance.

Most executives, leaders, and managers using coaching skills have a Master’s or Doctoral degree (61%) or a Bachelor’s Degree (34%).

More and more companies are turning towards coaches to help them enhance their team’s strength and potential. If the team is struggling with learning new skills or the company wants to focus on its professional developing, choosing a coach is the need of the hour. Of course, there is a steep rise among leaders using coaching skills from certified coaches. The proportion of respondents who rose from 37% in 2015 to 55% in 2019 is high.

The number of managers with 200 or higher hours of coaching training differs by region. At the same time, it is 39% in Latin America and 14% in Asia and the Middle East. Around three in four managers plan to choose an additional coach-training program in the coming 12 months. And one in two (52%) stated that they wanted to boost their coaching abilities, and the remaining wished to perform as coaches to train their teams externally or internally.

By choosing efficient coaching techniques, managers and leaders can create space for employees to reflect on their skills. Training needs time for efficient implementation, and this is where coaching really helps. The one-on-one programs help employees raise their concerns and present problematic areas in a non-judgmental space. Employees are more willing to take responsibility for their projects and feel encouraged and valued.

Coaching and mentoring involve working with experienced professionals who can help teams adapt to the environment and workplace culture. It includes pairing a coach with new employees to help them relax in a specific surroundings and start well. Coaching often comes into action when a current or new employee benefits from personal guidance on particular projects, processes, or job responsibilities. Small businesses often use a mentor to help develop employees’ skills during their career path.

On an organizational level, mentoring and coaching offer several advantages. They help encourage loyalty to the company. When professionals help mold the career and provide opportunities to coachees, these individuals develop a higher sense of communication and commitment to the business. Coaching helps employees gain comfort and calm with management and motivates them to communicate openly in a positive work experience. It allows companies to save money that would have been spent on consistent onboarding and recruitment training.

Using their expertise and experience, the coaches help younger and inexperienced workforce speed up and boost their efficiency across the organization. In addition, they guide an employee along their career goals and keep them well-versed in the company’s expectations. Coaching allows employees to eliminate all their concerns and issues within the boundary of a reliable relationship. It further helps reduce frustration on a personal level and boosts people’s job satisfaction, offering further benefits to the company. In addition, coaching helps enhance the function of the team, department, and entire company.

Difference between coaching and mentoring

• Coaching is more action-oriented compared to mentoring. You may feel like your coach wants to get work in collaboration with you through long meetings, understanding your intentions, and enhancing your belief in the company’s goals.
• In contrast, mentoring is more task-oriented. The mentors assigned want you to educate about specific things that will help enhance your career.
• Mentoring is a long-term process, while coaching is done over a series of meetings or one-on-one sessions.
• Mentoring focuses more on sharing experiences, while coaching focuses more on the action, work done, and accountability.
• Mentoring involves formal procedures and is more structured. Coaching, on the other hand, is informal and works on the goals teams want to accomplish.
• Coaching is goal-oriented. A coach helps coachees know what they want and what they should do. They aim to enhance their skills to accomplish their goals.

How does coaching play an essential role at each level of the organization, But why is it most impactful at senior management and leadership level?

The role of a coach is vital at every level of the organization. Different teams at different levels of companies can avail themselves of the benefits of a coach. However, it is most impactful at the senior level.

So, how does coaching help leaders?

Coaching leaders in a company is often noted as a valuable tool for developing the workforce and businesses. According to the Institute of Coaching, 70% of people who get coached benefit from enhanced productivity, work performance, improved communication skills, and relationships. They also report that 86% of companies feel that they recovered from the investment into coaching. Studies reveal that coaching effectively eliminates procrastination and offers higher goal attainment. There is a higher body of empirical research supporting the findings that business coaching does in accomplishing goals.

As per a case study published in the International Journal of Evidence-based Coaching and Mentoring, coaching supports the development of female leaders too. The research further reveals that whether one-on-one or group coaching, both help get the best results for leaders.

The benefits of coaching for leaders can be described below:

• Self-awareness: A considerable number of leaders stated experiencing a rise in their self-awareness. They also reported gaining a better understanding of themselves and their self-concept, gaining a deeper insight into how they affect others.
• Self-confidence: Many leaders also reported an enhancement in their self-confidence. It was teamed with a fall in their self-restricting thoughts.
• Self-leadership: Leaders noticed that with a rise in their self-development and knowledge, they also enhanced their self-leadership. How they lead themselves, and the expectations they set for themselves were impacted in coaching classes. While some participants covered realistic expectations, others covered unrealistic expectations. They were able to enhance their ability to lead themselves with higher compassion.
• Improved leadership style: Coaching also reported a rise in their leadership behavior. It helped raise awareness of their leadership style and offered a chance to reflect on it and be more thoughtful about it concerning tasks and objectives.
• Relationship to line manager: With coaching, coaches helped clients explore their current relationship with their manager, which had several advantages. Some clients identified things they wanted more from within their relationship and amended it. Some used coaching as a measure to explore things they were satisfied with and what they valued in their professional relationship and found helpful.
• Relationship to conflict: Most leaders under the study discovered their relationship to conflict great, and coaching further helped them find out the topic. Some leaders were okay with conflicts, while others considered it an area of concern and thought it needed more learning. While coaching, most participants explored that they originally avoided conflict, and coaching them explored the negative points and challenged the situation to improve it.
• Power relationship: The study further revealed that women leaders often rejected the idea of power and developed negative feelings about it. Coaching helped bring change in insights and perceptions for a client with power and allowed them to use it better. Through the process of coaching, leaders have started seeing it as a positive power and constructive force linked to developing strength and confidence.
• Relationship to personal life: The coaching platform allows leaders to explore and reflect on their work-life balance and duties. Coaching also supported leaders in developing connections in work to parts of their life outside work, bringing a holistic aspect to it. Coaching thus helped coachees develop insights into how things were connected in their lives.

Of course, every person has a different coaching experience, but the research shows how coaching can be effective for leaders. If you are a leader or working in a company and wish to go for professional development or personal growth, coaching can be the best intervention to consider.

When does coaching for leadership work best?

Coaching leadership works best with a team of professional leaders and team members ready to adapt to the change. Coaching leaders can work with a workforce prepared to enhance their skills to become better and more proficient in their duties.

When choosing a situational leadership approach, coaching leadership style is for particular situations. It should be applied at the right time and when the circumstances for the coach and those being coached are perfect. In other conditions, people can go for the six leadership styles of Goleman.

A stressful condition when decisions have to be made instantly, and there are dire consequences of judgment error, it is not a condition when a coaching leadership style should be adopted.

The coaching leadership style works great with small or more significant teams where strong relationships can be nurtured. It becomes tough to execute the coaching leadership strategies in a challenging situation, as it is virtually impossible for the leader to connect deeply and personally with many people in limited time restraints.

Many a time, coaching at the leadership level is confused with mentoring. However, coaching at the leadership level can be a game-changer when compared with mentoring.

Leadership coaching

• Leadership coaching helps leaders enhance their performance under the skillset and guidance of a professional coach. For instance, if your IT managers consistently miss their deadlines, why is their time management faulty? A professional coach will work with them to acknowledge the problem and develop a strategy to prevent it from happening again.
• Planning goals and journeys to accomplish management mastery is a challenge that most coaches aim to work with, helping the managers take the right actions daily. Studies reveal that the effect of good leadership coaching has a positive impact. Employee engagement is 8% higher at companies with a coaching culture compared to the weak one. Similarly, companies have noticed 600% ROI with executive coaching.

Leadership mentoring

• According to a survey in 2019, 76% of employees thought mentorship was important. Mentees acquire the support of someone who has stepped in their shoes before to gain leadership success rather than being challenged by fresh ideas.
• With time peer mentoring and reverse mentoring also gained popularity for helping minorities and women work better in leadership roles.

How can coaching at the leadership level be a game changer and its pros when compared with mentoring?

Focus: While coaching is performance-based, coaches support managers to gain the abilities they need to overcome leadership challenges; Mentoring inspires leaders to enhance their performance and focus on issues. Coaching helps show appreciation to employees from minorities to underrepresented communities.

Approach: Mentoring is usually directive. The mentor advises the mentees on accomplishing their objectives, depending on their personal experiences. Coaching is purely different. The coach probe with investigative questions and offers control to the learners to follow their path, focusing on their leadership enhancement.

Format: Coaching is more rigorous compared to mentorship. Mentoring is casual, based on relationships, covering too many issues. But coaching is offered to leaders, executives, and managers that need enhancement in their leadership abilities to acquire business goals within a set time frame.

What should you choose to improve leadership performance?

Though mentoring is the perfect way to connect with people in a company, share and work on different ideas and boost confidence to succeed, coaching proves to be a better solution to drive and enhance leadership performance.

However, to increase coaching results, leaders should go for precise coaching methodologies, feasible for their organization. While other coaching forms focus on the relationship between the coach and coachees, 84% of coachees agree that the dynamic relationship is vital for the success of coaching.

The coaching approaches focus on matching coaches and coachees on the basis of attributes that have minimal chances of impacting positive outcomes for people and companies. Usually, the relationship and coaching methodology is based on a structure to promote performance. It helps develop better leaders by ensuring they are focused on solution-based objectives, helping them master their targeted talent within a positive and nurturing workplace environment facilitating good behavioral change.

Did you know that around 25% to 40% of Fortune 500 companies currently use coaches? The figure is remarkably high, which explains why successful companies invest in coaching. So, the secret is no longer a secret; companies are investing to make the most out of it.

The undercover experts outlined an average ROI of more than $100,000, around six times what coaching costs. So, why are companies and their leaders going out of their way to invest in coaching? Of course, they understand that coaching is the most potent tool for inculcating long-lasting personal changes.

So, why is coaching so special?

The answer is quite clear. Rather than being yet another top-down program forcing over-stretching of employees, coaching helps people develop their own solutions to deal with issues and reach goals. This boost the chances of action manifold. In simple words, it is missing a connection to high performance.

Here are some benefits:

• Workers at all levels of the company enlist coaches for supervision, guidance, and help to enhance their performance, improve their profit and make good decisions about strategies and goals.
• Whether enhancing their business development procedures and leadership abilities or easing target attainment, coaching boosts confidence, and resourcefulness, fostering the growth and profitability of the company along with market share.

The business demand for coaching is doubling with every passing year. Out of $80 billion presently invested in corporate education, FLI Research predicts that $2 billion is particularly invested in executive coaching at the senior level in Fortune 500 companies. The IBIS World research states that the US and UK corporate wellness sector is marked at $8 billion and is consistently growing.

If you still need convincing, here is a list of some Fortune 500 companies using leadership coaching and benefiting from it.

How do organizations worldwide realize this fact and increase their spending on coaching their leadership?

Bosch

The engineering and technical leader Bosch has always worked on revamping its methodology to L&D. ultimately; they are moving away from long seminars and classroom sessions. They are working towards a system of learning that helps maintain productivity at its peak and yet meets the areas that need attention.

So, through a learning experience platform, Bosch offers its workforce small modules they can access anywhere and anytime they want. It leads to yet another big trend in corporate training- basically an on-demand method.

The current lifestyles are not about conducive to removing blocks but to teaching information that’s the need of the hour. Bosch gives its employees access to training and educational material, which they can use anytime they want.

They have a coach in action to help train the workforce according to the educational materials as and when they need help.

Walmart

The retail giant Walmart now uses its advanced spin when presenting the knowledge to its staff and helping employees retain all they have learned. Considering the safety and training included, Walmart realized it was essential to revamp. Right from manuals, classes, and notifications, the company adopted a more efficient, rigorous, and impactful idea to reach its workers.

In addition to following the Bosch initiative, it also started making employees download an app instead of offering bite-size courses and videos on efficiently operating a forklift, for example. Keeping these modules in mind, their workforce is tested to ensure they retain the information. Following this, they have a team of coaches to help them understand the data in case of any problem, which reduces the injury numbers by half.

Volvo

Volvo Trucks agree deeply with keeping up with the consistently evolving L&D mindset. Realizing that employee training is virtually driven, they have taken deep pains in the previous years to accept the Volvo Group University platform. This has led to an innovative Ted-Talk specification that allows employees to share their experiences and the lessons learned.

The Group talks feature is the company’s estimate and a good way to inspire its employees to interact better. It underpins the company’s commitment to creating relationships and connections.

As these companies are a few of the Future 500, they have shown great ways to transform how they handle employee coaching and training. It is a completely changing environment. Between the rise of distributed teams and the demand for customized learning, companies must find a way to stick to the old ways and conventional formats, as they will not take them anywhere.

An AI-based eLearning platform that assesses the performance of every person, marks their strengths and weaknesses and further delivers individual recommendations of coaches with an engagement program will make a measurable difference concerning productivity and motivation. Fortune 500 companies have recognized the importance of and embraced it. Have you yet?

With perspectives on coaching differing from one region to another, around two in three leaders in Western Europe, the Middle East, and Africa consider coaching a skillet. However, a survey reported that there are three potential hindrances to developing a strong culture in a company which includes:

• Minimal support from leaders
• Lack of measuring the effect of coaching
• Improper budget allocation for coaching

But choosing the right coaching platform will help you deal with the problem in a good way. uExcelerate is your one-stop solution to getting desired leadership modules for top management from the world’s top coaches.

At uExcelerate, we understand that a true leader should bring all the elements of compassion, innovation, and agility together to accomplish goals, considering the traditional views of leadership intact. Creating agile, advanced, efficient leaders helps build a workplace with engaged employees who can confidently handle all challenges thrown at them using their unique ideas to defeat their competition.

We aim to unlock your team’s true potential and create successful leaders at every level of your company, driving it to success.

Using the AI-based platform, companies can shortlist the right coach for them from the long list available. They aim to find the best method to help teams, leaders, and executives address their challenges, collaborate with their teams, and lead by example. Our coaches promote trust and dependability to build a thriving work environment and reliability.

Leaders can improve their skills by connecting to the stalwarts of the coaching fraternity according to their needs and demands. Understanding that every coach is unique and every leader has their individual requirement; the platform helps make the right coach-coachee match to establish a deep working relationship. They offer a comprehensive approach to leverage coaching for people development.