Management Coaching - Help Wanted

A lot of companies fall into the mistake of hiring someone who has managed people before, and assuming that, since they’re an experienced manager, they don’t need any more help. Nothing could be further from the truth. The fact is that managers are human beings too, and just as cooking at home for a few years doesn’t leave someone completely qualified to be a good chef (although it might well be a good start), being a good manager consists of more than having experience managing some people for a time.

Here is where management coaches come in. Management coaching can provide one of the most important elements of human resources: it can turn a mediocre manager into the leader of an all-star team. One-on-one training with some of the world’s most elite coaches is a top reason that CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies succeed, and they alone make it a multi-million dollar business. Even someone who has achieved as much success as Bill Gates or Steve Jobs knows that they don’t know everything.

A similar phenomenon occurs in music. Great composers like Beethoven or Gershwin learned from others, even when they were already the richest and best-known composers in all the world. Even world leaders take personal coaching, so there’s nothing for you to be ashamed of in taking management coaching. Make sure your management team is all that it can be.

So when you have decided that your company could use management coaching, the question is who should be coached. We would answer that anyone in a position of responsibility in your company regardless of division or number of people managed should be coached.

Anyone making management decisions needs coaching, and the reason is that no one is perfect. We all had to learn things somewhere, but changes in the world (especially increases in business efficiency) require us to adapt and stay ahead of the curve. Like the kid’s saying “you snooze, you lose”, managers who receive no training “lose”. They lose their edge, their team’s advantage, and, if they are particularly bad managers, they might even lose their work force.

If you have received good management coaching, then your teams will not be destroyed by single incidents, and bad days will not have carryover effects. Leadership is much more difficult than managing, and much more rewarding for your business. But leadership doesn’t happen by itself. Management coaches can help you develop the leaders your business needs to be great.

When companies provide management coaching, even mediocre managers can strive to become excellent leaders. Such training is best when it is also imparted through personal coaching. Good management coaches provide an edge to a manager’s abilities, increasing his strengths and reducing his weaknesses. From the organization’s point of view, it has much to gain from training its managers, as, for example, bad managers de-motivate people working with them and soon become problems for human resources manager. However, even excellent managers need to be coached to keep them abreast of latest developments and techniques.

- George Purdy