Performance Coaching For Dummies

Gladeana McMahon, Averil Leimon

• Publisher: For Dummies
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780470517482
• eBook ISBN: 9781119997689
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Mentoring & Coaching
• Index: Business

Performance coaching is a modern and rapidly growing method used to assist development, and involves helping individuals to improve their performance in all areas of their life, with a particular emphasis on the workplace. Performance coaching draws parallels with NLP and often focuses on the psychology of excellence – making what's good even better, and helping individuals keep ahead of the game. On an organisational level it can include helping managers to consider how to get the best from their staff, peers and superiors, as well as helping to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. A performance coach assists individuals in building on their successes and helps to design, plan and instigate successful business/life strategies.

Despite its popularity confusion still surrounds coaching. It is a relatively new area and there is still a lack of understanding about how best to use coaching and in what specific situations it will be most effective. In addition to this, anyone can assume a performance/professional/business/life coach title without holding any particular qualification or registration. With this increased awareness and confusion the need for a no-nonsense book on the topic that offers trusted advice is needed all the more, which is where Performance Coaching For Dummies steps in.

Part I

Getting to Grips: Introducing Performance Coaching

In this part . . .

In these chapters you begin to get the big picture. This is where you really find out what Performance Coaching is, and can sample some theories and applications. You start thinking more clearly about what you want to achieve and how you can go about it. You also see how to set up and structure your Performance Coaching.

Chapter 1

Coaching for Performance

In This Chapter

Finding out what Performance Coaching is – and isn’t

Ensuring that you’re cut out for the job

Understanding the Performance Coaching process

Applying Performance Coaching in the real world

Putting a structure in place

What is Performance Coaching, and are you the right person to be delivering it? This chapter gives you the answers. We explain the Performance Coaching process and how to apply it in day-to-day corporate life.

Defining Performance Coaching

How many flavours of coaching have you heard of? We have life coaching, business coaching, executive coaching, career coaching, personal coaching, corporate coaching, sports coaching, and coaching psychology, to name just a few. They all have the positive purpose of skilfully enabling someone to change and achieve valued goals but it seems almost everyone who coaches invents a new title for himself. So what are the distinguishing characteristics of Performance Coaching?

Sir John Whitmore, in his book Performance Coaching, states that: ‘Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximise their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them.’ Performance Coaching means:

Accessing potential

Facilitating the individual to make the changes required

Maximising performance

Helping people acquire skills and develop

Using specific communication techniques

The Performance Coach works with people, often colleagues, using coaching methods to enhance their existing behaviours and develop new ones central to personal and professional success and, in business situations, the success of the organisation.

Performance relates to effectiveness in terms of leadership, decision-making, relationships, creativity, stress, time management, meetings, and dealing with day-to-day tasks and aims to significantly increase your colleague’s effectiveness.

Performance coaching uses many models and theories from business and psychology as well as from general management approaches. Put simply, Performance Coaching is all about making an individual more effective and efficient.

Coaching can be useful in the following situations:

Something going right – a success is a good opportunity to build confidence and guarantee repeated success

Something going wrong – mistakes and failures create opportunities for development

Planned delegation

A new job, or a new role within an existing job

Talent management

Special projects

Attending meetings

Information about all these scenarios is included in this book.

Seeing how it all started

Sports coaching usually gets the credit for having started the whole coaching business. If you suffered through school PE lessons, however, you may wonder if sports coaching ever made it further than the elite sportsmen and women of Olympian levels. Tim Galwey, writer of the Inner Game book series, applied cognitive psychology techniques to the sports field, working on the thought processes of players in order to increase their skill at the sport of their choice. Athletes who trained this way took their skills out into a variety of other applications where they thought coaching may transform performance, and Performance Coaching was born.

What Performance Coaching Is Not

Sadly, people can make mistakes when trying to Performance Coach. In this section we warn you against inappropriate or ineffective approaches and beliefs about Performance Coaching.

Coaching is still largely unregulated rather than an established profession.

The remedial class

Coaching often used to be perceived as remedial; sorting out problems and putting things right. All coaching has an element of removing blocks to success – the ideas or behaviours that stand in the way of your colleague’s best efforts. However, in Performance Coaching, the basic assumption is that your colleague has the capacity to perform even better, rather than that he must rectify issues. Performance Coaching is not about:

Highlighting flaws or weaknesses

Correcting failures

Managing poor performance

Performance Coaching is about helping individuals be the best they are able to be. Sometimes this means helping someone improve his performance to the required standard. Coaching can also mean working with a talented individual to develop his skills even further. The idea that Performance Coaching is always about c...

Table of contents

• Title
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I : Getting to Grips: Introducing Performance Coaching
• Part II : Does Your Face Fit?: The Personal Attributes of a Performance Coach
• Part III : Applying Performance Coaching
• Part IV : Troubleshooting in Performance Coaching
• Part V : The Part of Tens
• : Further Reading