What do celebrities have in common?

What do Nelson Mandela, Bill Clinton, Margaret Thatcher and Mikhail Gorbachev have in common?

They all used a coach sometime during their career!

Even though in Europe, the USA and even in Turkey, executive coaching has gone mass market with a growth rate that “The Economist” estimates at 40% a year, the coaching sensation remains in its infancy in Cyprus and Greece.

Why do professionals need coaching skills?

According to the rules of professional conduct, auditors must not take part in the decision making process of the company. Coaching your clients avoids that risk. With the help of well structured questions, the auditor can assist the client to come up with the right solutions and decisions.

Relationship of coaching and other disciplines

People confuse coaching with consulting, mentoring and therapy as it is relatively a new concept. Thus a brief explanation is given below:

• Consulting: This discipline provides you with a solution. The typical scenario is when a client visits an accountant asking for advice on how to set up companies in a group structure. The client has no idea how to do this and the accountant comes up with the best possible solution.
• Mentoring: The client is faced with a situation he has never experienced before and the mentor is supposed to show him what to do. The client says “I have got this unknown situation” and the mentor says: “Don’t worry because I’ve got the experience to show you the way as I have been through this situation before.”
• Therapy: This is about the emotional resolution of issues. The therapist will listen to your problem and work with you by going in the past and give you advice on how you should approach the situation from now on. Again you provide an issue of an emotional content and the therapist will work with you to arrive at an explanation of why you exhibit a certain behaviour.
• Coaching: Coaching presumes that all the answers to the questions are in the client. So the coach helps the client arrive at a way out of a situation by asking well constructed questions. In some cases, after obtaining permission from the client, he may suggest some solutions but he never takes the client on a path that the client is not willing to go. Coaching focuses on the present and the future and is all about ACTION and RESULTS.

According to “Fortune” magazine, coaching is “the hottest thing in management”. Managers hire coaches to facilitate organisational change and to get guidance on how to improve their decision-making process.

The coach wears multiple hats. He is part consultant, part oracle, part cheerleader. Coaches begin with “diagnostics” intended to yield a reasonably valid personality profile of the client. Having established a baseline profile of the client, a coach works with him and eventually formulates a series of “action plans.”

Individuals and companies often quote measurable improvements in performance after coaches come in to give out their wisdom. The focus on results now extends well beyond the corporate world. Just as people hire personal trainers when they’re looking ahead to the summer season, they hire personal coaches when they’re up against deadlines or business issues. Besides most people, don’t care about what got them to where they are. They need immediate help to get to where they want to be. Growth is hot, diagnosis is not.
Try coaching, it really works and promises to help you transform your business and enable your clients achieve even better results!