Coaching the Coaches

How well do your managers coach their teams? How well do you coach your managers and executives?

There are techniques for helping your people to achieve absurd successes. A significant portion of our business consists of such coaching. We are happy to do it. We do it well. This program is for those who want to take responsibility onto themselves to maintain, and even accelerate, their development.

There are several advantages in this approach:

1. It allows you to reach more of your people more often.
2. We remember best that which we teach. We practice best that which we teach.
3. This approach is the ultimate in cost-effectiveness.

Coaching is what makes the greatest managers brilliant at having the strategies, initiatives and actions implemented on time and on budget the very first time. Most managers reach the senior levels by achieving things; great managers must not accept the limitations of what they alone can achieve.

The real art of management is coaching. It is what allows an executive to multiply his successes by 10. Or to multiply his successes by 100. Or by 1000. Do these numbers sound ridiculous? Actually, they are utterly reasonable. The only real limit to these multipliers is the number of people an executive can coach, multiplied by the number of people this first generation of trained coaches can in turn coach. Multiplied again by those in succeeding levels of this developing pyramid of coaches.

General Electric and their phenomenal track record for the last several decades is an illuminating example of what unrelenting dedication to coaching can accomplish. You do not need to establish a GE-style corporate university to attain these types of returns. Coach your people. Coach them well. Coach them thoroughly. And, above all, teach them, in turn, to coach others.

The caveat: Never forget that coaching involves very different skills than most top managers have learned in their careers. It cannot be done through memos, meetings, edicts, threats, cheer leading or generally good management techniques.

Develop the techniques of coaching the coaches and become a perpetual motion machine of ever-greater achievements.