What Is Coaching?

Coaching is a face-to-face process that helps managers and their staff to talk about situations, recognise and develop people’s potential and improve the performance of team members. These activities happen all the time, usually impelled by the need to improve work skills and to encourage an ongoing awareness of the need for continuous improvement. Coaching needs the considerable skill of confronting unsatisfactory performance or behaviour because the manager has a responsibility to respond to inadequate or unsatisfactory performance which comes to his attention.

Click here to view a video on why people can benefit from coaching.

Coaching is "…a process that enables learning and development. To be a successful coach needs knowledge and understanding of process as well as the variety of styles, skills and techniques that are appropriate to the context in which the coaching takes place", according to Eric Parsloe, author of The Manager as Coach and Mentor (1999).

Coaching is not about simply showing people or telling them how to do something. If one only does that there is no guarantee that any learning will take place, coaching is far more that. Coaching puts the emphasis on helping the learner to learn, rather than on getting the teacher to teach. It involves guiding and encouraging people to achieve results by helping them to learn for themselves while doing the job. Real work is the vehicle for learning. Its ultimate target is to help individuals to release their own potential and improve their performance.

Coaching is about helping the person to learn a new skill or behaviour by doing the job and achieving the desired results. 

It supports:

• Teaching the employee the right methods used in the organisation.
• Immediate feedback on performance.
• Giving confidence to the employee.
• Building working relationships.
• Finding deficiency gaps.
• Finding performance problems.

Mentoring

Mentoring performs a different function. Mentors aid their mentees to understand larger issues such as becoming sensitive to the organisation’s culture and developing in the mentee an understanding of the political dynamics within the organisation. It also involves aiding the mentee with networking and career decisions. Mentoring as a developmental art is likely to have been going on long before the Greek classics gave it a name. It is one of the oldest forms of development.

Counselling

Counselling is a supportive function which aids the employee to deal with a wide range of personal and work-related problems. It is less involved with specific job skills. Counselling has best results if the person is encouraged to distinguish between the apparent problem and the real problem, to be prepared to look at possible causes and to formulate their own course of action.

Training

It is a planned and systematic effort to change or develop knowledge/skill/attitude through learning experience, to achieve effective performance in an activity or range of activities. Its purpose in the work situation enable an individual to develop abilities in order that he/she can perform a given task or job.

Learning

It is the process whereby individuals acquire knowledge, skills and attitudes through experience, reflection, study, or instruction.

Development

It is the general enhancement and growth of an individual’s skills and abilities through conscious and unconscious learning.