Organizations must, as some authors suggest, become learning organizations, builders of learning opportunities, from the individual to the collective, developing person and company, to achieve excellence together.
This learning can be spontaneous and at the same time very expensive, through trial and error, but it can also be a very profitable investment in time and resources, if it is fostered through innovative proposals such as Coaching.
The Directors, Managers, employees and all members of the organization, including teams that seek to improve their performance, can develop their competencies through an intervention process called Coaching which according to Cole cited by Alles (2005: 165) is:
«Training –individual or group- characterized by on-the-job training, accompanied by continuous evaluation and personal support and advice. Coaching refers to intensive training of one or more people by another whose abilities are undisputed. As for the figure of the coach, he says that he must be a person with high capacities, proven before himself, before his peers and publicly ».
Some questioners of the process assure that coaching is simply a fad that in one way or another will be extinguished like many others, and that it is also a process with difficulty in defining it. In this regard, Joy refers to it quoted by Caby (2004: 20) when he says:
«It is a well defined process. The coach has the function of helping people to define clear objectives in a specific time frame. Those objectives refer both to the fulfillment of a professional project and to the resolution of a more personal problem ”.
In that same vein, Dilts (2004: 20), broadening the definition of coaching, mentions:
“In our day, and particularly since the 1980s, the notion of coaching has acquired a more general and extended meaning. At the business level, training involves a variety of ways to help people perform more effectively, including training in the project, situation, and transition areas. Project coaching involves the strategic management of a team to achieve the most effective objective. Situation coaching focuses on the specific expansion or improvement of performance in a given context. Transition coaching involves helping people change from one job or role to different ones. "
For his part Echeverría (2005: 96) refers to the Coaching process from the Coach's perspective when he says:
«The Coach is someone who, provided with distinctions and competencies that another person does not possess, observes what he does and detects the obstacles that interfere with his performance, in order to show him what he does not see, and lead him to undertake the actions that lead her to reach the levels of performance to which she aspires ».
In such a way that we can affirm that Coaching is a system that includes concepts, structures, processes, work tools and measurement instruments and groups of people; It also includes a leadership style, a particular way of selecting people or creating developing groups of people. This in turn helps employees improve their job skills through praise and positive feedback based on constant observation practice.
In the same way, we can say that it is a conversation that involves at least two people (although it could be a conversation between a superior and his team), where processes oriented to the search for results are generated. It is pertinent to clarify that the concept behind this definition is that there has been no coaching unless a positive change has occurred.
In this way, managers, supervisors and leaders can have many types of conversations in which they can try to improve some aspect of individual or team performance, however, if no improvement occurs, then what happened was some communicational interaction, not necessarily within the coaching process.
Bibliography
ALLES, Marta. Development of Human Talent Based on Competencies. Granica editions. Buenos Aires. 2005.
CABY, Francois. Coaching. Editorial De Vecchi. Barcelona 2004.
DILTS, Robert. Coaching. Tools for Change. URANO editions. Barcelona. 2004.
ECHEVERRÍA, Rafael. Language Ontology. Dolmen Ensayo editions. Santiago de Chile. nineteen ninety six.
