General Benefits of Coaching
Coaching is relatively new to a lot of people, so it is understandable that there are some knowledge gaps that are yet to be bridged, for instance regarding how coaching differs from training, counselling, mentoring, consultancy etc. There are also some confusion about how coaching engagements work and if there are really tangible benefits that coaching offers to individuals, businesses and others.
The general benefits of coaching relate to improved performance and productivity, whether it is people, teams or organisations. This is because coaching focuses on three major factors The first in increased awareness of self, potentials, opportunities, environment, needs etc. Such awareness usually inspires positive beliefs about striving to do better or achieve certain goals.
The second major factor is capacity-building, whereby coaching ‘stretches’ a person, compelling him or her to focus on, and commit to taking necessary action. The third factor is the desire or aspiration for some specific outcomes, or the achievement of specific desirable goals. These three factors, including several others have made coaching an essential part of personal development, employee engagement, team performance, organisational efficiency, business growth etc.
As a result, many organisations are investing in coaching, especially in supporting top and middle management to be more inspiring and effective team leaders. It is about blueprinting new age leadership in the workplace, who lead with vision and inspiration rather than by intimidation, coercion or manipulation, as they develop and optimise the leadership skills, which produce high performance in self and others.
In this regard, executive and leadership coaching have become the bedrock of many companies who are serious about boosting their performance. There are several areas that executive and leadership coaching can focus on, as a process to bring the best out of leaders. Three of such areas are personal abilities, lifestyle and energy of leaders.
Imperatives of Boosting Personal Abilities of Leaders
One unquestionable attribute that a leaders that would be trusted and followed by 
other people is competence. People will ordinarily not trust or commit to following someone that is lacking in abilities in certain core areas of need. Anyone that is aspiring to lead others must exude and inspire confidence, based on knowledge, because knowledge is what will always appropriately position a leader to positively impact and influence others. And, that is why leadership coaching is all about building leadership capacity and improving personal capabilities through continuous action-learning. It is the skilful adaptation and utilisation of the acquired knowledge that can be expected to bring about transformational changes in the life of the leader and in the lives of others.
The truth is that whatever you know more than anyone else generally puts you in a vantage position in relation to someone that does not know what you know or have access to the assets that you have. The ability to lead in this regard is developed through the creative building up of the leadership capacity that is present in the leader as a potential.
What leadership coaching will typically achieve is to facilitate the process of enhancing the core or specific knowledge power of the leaders, and inspire the best attitude, which will optimise skills. These can however only be achieved by ensuring that every possible personal or external inhibition is isolated and eliminated. This can be illustrated by a simple mathematical formula below.
Ability = Knowledge X Good Attitude X Skills – Inhibitions.
It is in the areas of your strength and the most exciting display of your excellence that you are celebrated as a leader of note. It is therefore your responsibility to develop and improve further the areas of your best abilities, inching ever closer to the level of excellence. A good and experience coach focuses on these key factors of abilities.
A Leader’s Positive Lifestyle Must Inspire Others
A person’s lifestyle refers to how the person lives his or her life, and functions on a daily basis in relation to other people and the environment. Lifestyle 
encompasses the issues relating to personal values, habits, obligations, desires, activities, and behavioural tendencies, among others.
Lifestyle thus reveals much about how a person balances his or her life. It shows how the person manages the diverse contending life orientations concerned with right living. These are the factors that ensure excellent relationships with people at work, in business, within the family, at play, at home etc. They underscore the essence and importance of maintaining a good balance of talents, health, mind, body, spirit, resources and well being.
For a person that is leading others, a positive lifestyle is most essential, especially as a basis for developing and manifesting the powers of influence in leadership. They are also essential for modelling, coaching and mentoring budding and present leaders. A positive lifestyle in this regard reveals a person’s attitude, life perceptions, knowledge and motivations.
There is no real personal achievement and excellence that can be separated from right living. Right living for a leader of people in this regard is the kind of lifestyle that is evidenced by the capacity to influence people through positive impact. It suggests that the creation of a positive environment and scenarios to assist people to unlock their potentials would be the major goal of the leader.
This is the key to motivating people to respond to inspired leadership because most people want to live well and positively influence other people. And, under every one’s hard shell lies someone that wants to be loved, appreciated, recognised and rewarded.
A positive lifestyle is what makes a leader to be loved by his people, because he or she has learned to be a peoples’ person. He or she in this regard is able to connect with people honestly, open-mindedly, positively, cheerfully, and just has the ability to make other people comfortable around him or her.
A positive lifestyle also means that a person is not ‘two-faced’ or a ‘mask wearer’, either at work, in business, at home or anywhere. You are unique in your own way, and you must exhibit that uniqueness everywhere, because that is what makes you special. Trying to be someone else, no matter the circumstance makes a lie out of living. As a leader, live a life of truth, trust and humility, which worth emulating by followers and admirers.
Great Leaders Energise People
Several researches prove that less than 40 percent of people employed in an organisation are really personally enthusiastic about going to work each day. What tends to happen is that people often drag themselves out of their beds, and go through the motions with gritted teeth each day. It is similar to how many of our kids reluctantly go through the motions of getting for, and going to school each day. It’s a demonstration of how we are feeling ‘inside’, as displayed by our personal energy or enthusiasm.
Why then do we act quite differently when we are going on a holiday or to visit 
someone that we love? It relates to our perception and our realities about ‘having to do’ something, rather than ‘loving to do’ something. When we have to do something, we just do it anyway and try to get it over with. But, when we love doing something, we would want to do it over and over. We never want to stop, because we have the energy and are energised doing it. In reality, we hardly get exhausted when we do what we love.
For some people that view work from the job perspective, working is simply doing what they consider as necessary work. It is what they have to do to survive and make a living. As a result, the daily activities in the workplace appear to these people the same as doing some daily chores. There is therefore hardly any great joy, pleasure or enthusiasm when they are at work. There are fewer ways to depress productivity in an organisation than having a bunch of people that are working without passion or joy.
Do kids get tired of playing? Yes, when they are bored with their toys or do not like the people that they are playing with. It is the same in any organisation. People lose the work enthusiasm when they are bored, fed up and tired of the job; or when they do not terribly like the people that they work with every day. Guess who they really would not like to see or be with most of the time – their bosses of course! Why is this so? It relates to the perception and reality of workplace dichotomy instead of workplace team spirit.
In the former, the personnel work in an organisation and often relate with their bosses with a mindset of an employee. An employee’s mindset is naturally geared toward working for wages and not usually working to create shared values and commonwealth. This dichotomy is shown by an attitude of “we” and “them”, where the “we” tends to refer to “slaves” and “them” refers to “task masters”.
How does a slave behave? He generally obeys commands and carries out tasks as a ‘zombie’, devoid of personal initiative, and works only for personal survival and to advance the wealth of the master. He has a low self-esteem and most often seeks ways of escape, often not to be a master, but to serve perhaps a less harsh master. A lot of people work like this in an organisation, never seeking to be stakeholders.
The workplace team spirit is entirely different. It is where the personnel work as valued members of a team with a clear understanding of the 5R’s of great teams: Roles, Responsibilities, Rewards, Recognition and Respect. In this latter case, there is no boss, but a team leader; no taskmaster, but a motivator; no single person getting all the profits and wealth, but the whole team sharing the pains and the gains in commonwealth.
Therefore, the power of a true leader is to build the energy of his team around his own energy. This involves giving the people a reason to be enthusiastic, cheerful, inspired, motivated and eager to create value (or more appropriately wealth). This is the way to create the space for the development and unleashing of individual creative powers and application of each member’s unique knowledge and abilities. This engenders critical mass and wholesome display of team power, so that together everyone achieves more.
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Dr Emmanuel Imevbore is an executive coach, management consultant and business strategist. He is the CEO of International Coaching and Mentoring Institute, a specialist coaching and coach-training Organisation. He can be reached by email:
emmanuel@ic-mi.com; and WhatsApp: +27 79 259 1768.
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