The Business Coaching Toolkit: Top 10 Strategies for Solving the Toughest Dilemmas Facing Organizations

INTRODUCTION

The Evolution of Professional Coaching

The professional coaching industry has undergone a significant evolution over the past several years. The use of business and executive coaches has become mainstream and the results are in—coaching works! Business coaches and consultants are commonly used to help smooth the transition of a new executive, provide hands-on training for a high-potential manager, strengthen relationships between team members, and help business owners achieve higher levels of success. But as the industry evolves, we see several trends emerging; some are exciting while others give us pause.

TOP FIVE TRENDS IN PROFESSIONAL COACHING

TREND ONE: Manager as Coach

More and more companies, both large and small, are starting to add another responsibility to busy managers’ plates—coaching. It is common for today’s managers to refer to one-on-one meetings with their associates as a coaching session and for some of these managers to be enrolled in a coach training program. There are three primary reasons for this trend. First, companies want to publicly recognize the capabilities of their best managers by giving them an official designation: Coach. It provides these leaders a platform to solve problems with other leaders and to facilitate teams within the organization. Second, it is a way for companies to give people a level of prestige within the company. Being chosen by your peers as a person who demonstrates exceptional communication skills and finds creative solutions to troublesome situations can place you on the fast track for promotion. Third, it can be a cost-cutting method that enables companies to say they have coaching resources available for their associates without actually spending money on coaching services.

While we applaud the development of business leaders’ people skills that coaching brings, we are also concerned, because not everyone has the professional expertise and experience needed to help people through their toughest challenges. A busy manager may become distracted from his or her core responsibilities of running the business to provide coaching attention to a challenging situation. Associates receiving this coaching may need more than their manager is able to give them. First aid is great, if that’s all you need. But sometimes you have to see a doctor. This trend is here to stay, however, in spite of what many professional coaches think about it. Innovative coaches will learn how to tap into it as a revenue stream.

TREND TWO: Rise of the Internal Coach

With the broad acceptance of professional coaching among Fortune 500 companies and recent studies pointing to its great return on investment, more and more organizations are tapping into the benefits of coaching. With the cost of top executive and business coaches increasing and the availability of self-employed coaches barely making a living in their practice, there is a simultaneous push to train internal coaches and hire coaches from the outside as internal practitioners.

We have heard reports of several large coach training organizations that started off just training individuals interested in professional coaching, but are now finding they can make much more money offering coaching certifications for managers and internal coaches. This is just the beginning. Over the next several years, companies that specialize in training managers and internal coaches will generate greater revenue than those that train individual coaches and consultants, who will become increasingly unable to pay premium pricing for certification. When individual coaches discover their coach training school is working hand in hand with companies to train their replacements, there could be a backlash. Innovative training companies will see this as an opportunity to use graduates of their programs to lead train the trainer seminars and thereby become more attractive to potential students by being able to instantly guarantee clients upon graduation.

TREND THREE: Commoditization of Coaching

As the numbers of coaches continue to grow exponentially, supply is outstripping demand. As with any industry, when supply exceeds demand prices drop, often precipitously. There are signs of this in almost every major city with an ever-growing contingency of coaches. With low barriers to entry, the teaching that everyone’s a coach, while well-intentioned, is starting to undermine the professionalization of the field. You can barely go to a networking event today without meeting half a dozen people with coach on their business card. As the title becomes ubiquitous, coaches face the danger of becoming the consultant of the twenty-first century—the title everyone uses when they’re in between jobs.

Unfortunately, this trend will continue to grow as more and more people with less and less training enter the field, pushing the cost to hire a professional coach to new lows. How low can we go? I recently came across a coach offering his services for $25 per hour with the first month free. That kind of desperation pricing undercuts the ability of other coaches to make a serious living.

We must work together to develop a clear delineation between coaching with a capital C and coaching with a small c. Coaching with a capital C is someone who has met a certain level of professional standards, has received coach-specific training, and receives her primary income from coaching and consulting. Coaching with a small c is anyone using an interactive approach to help others achieve their goals. While everyone can use the skill of coaching, we believe the efforts of some to call everyone a Coach are detrimental to the long-term professional status of the field.

TREND FOUR: Growth at the High End

For many coaches, the words of Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities still ring true: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. While many top coaches are doing very, very well and continuing to land bigger and bigger jobs, the number of coaches who are barely eking out a living is growing. In my previous book, Getting Started in Personal and Executive Coaching (John Wiley & Sons, 2003), I found 53 percent of coaches reported earning less than $20,000 per year, while fewer than 9 percent made over $100,000. Other studies have found slightly different numbers, but the overall growth among the top 10 percent is much higher than the growth of the bottom 50 percent. So the rich get richer, because they are masters in their field, and the poor get poorer, feeding the trends outlined earlier.

One major reason for this is the failure of coaches to understand the importance of the newest trend, the Double Niche.

TREND FIVE: The Double Niche

In studying business and executive coaches making over $100,000 per year, virtually all of them use a strategy my co-author Bill Zipp calls the double niche. Not only do top coaches have a specific area of expertise, such as marketing, leadership development, sales, team building, or diversity (the first niche), they also apply this expertise to a specific industry or profession (the second niche).

For example, like many of you, I started off as a generalist, coaching small to midsized companies on leadership development, marketing, and skill-based training. I’ll be honest, I would coach them on almost any topic they would pay me for. While my business was good, it wasn’t near the level I knew it could be. It took me a few years before I started to target small professional service firms, like technology consulting firms, accountants, doctors, and lawyers. I continued to hover around a six-figure income.

It wasn’t until I started emphasizing just my marketing expertise (niche one) and focused on one industry, small law firms (niche two), that my business began to experience rapid growth. We have seen triple-digit growth every year now for the past three years and signed up more than 6,000 new clients in just the last 24 months. With the help of my business partner, Travis Greenlee, the Rainmaker Institute has rapidly become the largest provider of strategic marketing services to small law firms across the country. We specialize in helping attorneys generate more referrals and find new clients fast, and use coaching, consulting, training, and speaking to help our target market.

My experience is not unique. I have had many other colleagues share similar stories of rapid growth when they fully leveraged their area of expertise and applied it to a specific industry or profession. In this hypercompetitive field of coaching, being perceived by your ideal target market as a double specialist may be the best way to guarantee your success. For more success strategies, be sure to visit our web site at www.BusinessCoachingToolkit.com.

WHAT IS THE BUSINESS COACHING TOOLKIT?

The Business Coaching Toolkit is a collection of application-based coaching tools you can use with clients, managers, or employees to help them overcome a variety of common problems encountered in today’s workplace. Whether it’s increasing their time management skills, giving feedback to an employee, or building their leadership team, these proven tools present an endless supply of easy-to-apply exercises.

In starting out, it is important to understand that this book is not:

• A philosophy or model of coaching

• An academic book filled with various theories

• For beginning coaches who are just starting out

• Just for external coaches

The Business Coaching Toolkit is an application-based training manual for advanced coaches and business leaders who need coaching tools to help them find creative solutions to difficult problems.

In addition to our personal experience as small business owners, business coaches, and consultants, we have interviewed several nationally recognized internal and external coaches who have graciously given us direct access to some of the most transformational tools they regularly use with clients.

In addition to this book, we have compiled a resource guide and other instructional tools on our website: www.BusinessCoachingToolkit.com. We invite you to visit to find additional tools, free articles, training events, and to sign up for our free newsletter.

Who Is This Book For?

This book was written for four primary groups:

• Professional business coaches and consultants

• Professional speakers and trainers

• Internal coaches

• Managers and executive leaders

Professional Business Coaches and Consultants will find practical tools to use with a wide variety of clients. You will find these tools and techniques bring a new dimension to your work with clients and often open up doors to speak truth to them at a deeper level. Both authors and all the contributing experts are accomplished business coaches and consultants who understand how to leverage a tool to quickly establish rapport or to create a stronger client-consultant relationship.

Trainers and Professional Speakers often use group exercises in teaching attendees a new skill or to illustrate a point. Many of these tools can be used in large group settings or can be easily adapted for your next small group training event. Both authors are members of the National Speakers Association (www.nsaspeaker.org) and regularly conduct public and private training seminars. We know the importance of making sure every group exercise is a big success. Every single tool in this book has been extensively used and perfected in a wide variety of settings.

Internal Coaches often have the thankless job of providing developmental feedback to a manager or working with a high potential to overcome a specific negative trait. At the same time, they need to present it in such a way that the person will grow past it or change their behavior to avoid the negative consequences of it, such as getting fired, demoted, or transferred. Many of the experts we interviewed for this book work extensively within mid-to-large organizations, including a few who either are, or train, internal coaches. They understand the sensitive nature of being an internal coach, the limitations of confidentiality, and the necessity of building a culture of trust. The techniques we present in this book will not only help you establish your expertise as a creative problem solver, but will also assist you in coaching high potentials to achieve even greater levels of success.

Managers and Executive Leaders are frequently required to act as a coach to their direct reports and peers. However, most managers, leaders, or business owners have little to no training about how to effectively help their people overcome obstacles, negative behaviors, or increase their communication skills. If you’re a leader looking for some easy-to-use tools, this book is definitely for you. We have taken the most common situations encountered in a company and found the best tools around to help you successfully coach others in a variety of tough situations.

Why Should You Buy This Book, and What’s Different about It?

There are several great books about coaching skills and training tools, but here are four reasons why we believe this toolkit uniquely deserves to be on every practitioner’s desk.

1. Proven Tools. This is not an academic book filled with theoretical exercises that sound good on paper, but lack practical application. We require each tool to have been time-tested and refined at least a dozen times in the real world before we would include it in the book. You can trust these tools will not flop when you use them.

2. Practical Approach. This is not a book to be read, it is a manual to be used. We have laid out each tool step by step to make it as simple and practical as possible to apply in as wide a context as possible. Please do not mistake simple for easy. We are not of the opinion that every problem can be easily solved with a tool, but just like an auto mechanic, the difficulty level often decreases when you have the right tool in your toolbox. Increasing the number of tools you are adept at using strengthens your skill set in coaching a more diverse audience.

3. Easy Access. Each chapter stands on its own and is a separate tool. This means you can easily turn to the chapter that most clearly focuses on the issue you’re facing or the skill you want to teach. While advanced practitioners will use this book as a reference to coach clients through common problems managers face, trainers and internal coaches will be able to quickly pick and choose tools based on the need at hand.

4. Specific Ideas for Implementation. At the end of every chapter we provide 10 specific ways you can use each tool, depending on your role.

How Can This Book Help You Grow Your Practice?

I’m frequently asked to speak at events for coaches, consultants, speakers, and trainers where I often tell their members, tongue firmly in cheek, The two biggest problems faced by service professionals today is they don’t know how to find new clients and second, they don’t know what to do with them once they land them. In my previous book, Getting Started in Personal and Executive Coaching (John Wiley & Sons, 2003), I dealt extensively with the first problem. This book focuses on the second.

As professional business coaches and consultants, we often have only our personal past experiences to guide us when working with difficult clients or politically charged business situations. Bill Zipp and I have diligently worked to supply you with cutting-edge tools and techniques you can use and adapt to working with clients, regardless of your role. At the end of the first 10 chapters are 10 different applications of the tool we believe you will find especially helpful.

For those of you who are external consultants, here are a couple of specific recommendations on how to use this toolkit to build your practice.

BUILD A STRUCTURED PROGRAM USING THIS BOOK AS YOUR GUIDE. We have selected over a dozen of the most common skill-based problems a person would encounter that would lead them to seek out a business coach. We have heard from many clients that they dislike the vagueness of the formal coaching relationship and feel frustrated by the lack of structure most coaches use. See whether this conversation sounds familiar:

What are we going to talk about in our coaching?

"Anything you want to."

How long will the coaching relationship last?

"As long as you want."

How do I know when I’ve achieved my goal?

"Coaching is more about the journey than the end result."

One of my favorite graduate school professors, Joseph A. Kloba, Ed.D., taught me structure provides freedom. Business clients generally seek out structure in their relationships and are often goal-driven. Use this toolkit to structure your coaching relationship by leading your individual clients through one exercise per session and then have them practice that skill with an employee before the next coaching session. Of course, within that structure you have the freedom to customize it to meet your client’s specific needs, but instead of selling them an open-ended coaching relationship, offer them a 10-session coaching program called Communication Tools for Leaders (one session per toolkit chapter).

Just by giving your coaching program a name and a time frame we have found clients are much more willing to commit to it. Also, companies are more likely to pay for a program like this out of their education or training budget than they are for an open-ended coaching relationship.

PLAN A SKILL BUILDING FOR MANAGERS WORKSHOP. Consider creating a daylong Skill Building for Managers Workshop based on several tools from this guide. Teach each skill to the managers or employees and then have them practice in small groups.

Alternatively, set up an 8- to 12-week Best Practices in Leadership course, live or by teleseminar. Lead the group through practicing each of the tools during the session and then have them use it with an employee or peer during the next week. We have sold these programs to our clients for anywhere from $2,000 per person to $15,000 a day for a customized version with a specific company. Depending on your expertise, specific niche, and geographic area, it could be more or less.

What Will You Discover in This Book?

Each chapter of this book presents a specific coaching tool. A business case is made for each tool and a business impact story on the real-life use of the principles behind the tool is presented. And, as mentioned before, the first 10 chapters end with the top 10 ways to use the tool. Here’s a brief overview of each chapter and some of the highlights you will learn.

Chapter 1: Developing a Leadership Vision (It’s not What You Think!)

One of the most critical aspects of being a great leader, manager, or coach is setting a vision for where you are going. Most people, however, think of vision as some big, challenging goal. With this tool, you will discover the deeper meaning of vision and how to tie your goal into your company’s or client’s core values and how to make a truly significant and sustainable impact on their long-term success.

Chapter 2: The One-Percent Solution

Technology has created a tidal wave of tasks that leave most people drowning in a sea of things to do. Traditional time management just doesn’t work anymore because there is not enough time in any day to keep up with the exponential increase of things to do. The one-percent solution is a tool that allows leaders to use the discipline of focus, not efficiency, to master their time. Priority management, not time management, is the secret to great performance.

Chapter 3: Getting Things Done through Others

Delegation dysfunction plagues most businesses. Here’s how it works: You give something to someone else to do. They put it on the bottom of their pile. You check on it