The growing use of the term business coaching or business, executive or managerial coaching reflects the strength that learning this strategic goal is also acquiring in our environment.
In fact, many advanced executives - not initiated in the jargon of this discipline - are increasingly interested in knowing its meaning, utility and importance. No less intense is their concern about how this meta-managerial competence is learned or mastered. This article aims both to satisfy these needs and concerns and to serve as an introduction to the subject.
Introduction to Coaching
Coaching is the activity carried out by a coach with a coachee or group of coachees.
The word coach is widely used in the sports field. In our environment it is associated with a coach, but the expression goes far beyond that. Not every coach has coach competencies, even though it would be very useful to have and use them, to put their trainee (s) to the best of their ability.
This is extensive -in all fields- to every teacher, instructor, etc. wanting to acquire masters in the art and science of dynamic facilitation of individual and / or collective learning processes. And to every entrepreneur, director, executive or manager who wants to achieve collective success, this is a very high group performance with prosperity and happiness.
Coaching is -literally- the activity carried out by a coachman, to take a passenger -in a special car- to a mutually agreed place. The coachman can be associated with a coach, driver, guide, leader, etc. We can associate the passenger with a coachee, passenger, guide, etc. The special car can be associated with the specialized means that the coach uses, to try to take the coachee to the agreed place (or situation that mutually wants to reach). Coaching can then be associated with the activity conducive to achieving the advancement or displacement of the coachee towards the desired situation.
The degree of success of coaching is measured both by the degree to which the desired advance or displacement is achieved and by the degree of sustainability -of said advance- over time: the degrees of advancement and sustainability depend on both the coach and the) coachee (s).
The outstanding coach of our prestigious Galárraga does not need to be a baseball champion himself, to be an excellent coach: what matters is that he is able to see Galárraga's strengths and weaknesses and make them see him in relation to opportunities and threats that they can jointly visualize in the present and future environment, to see how to achieve what Galárraga wants to achieve… and keep high what has already been achieved and that they are interested in sustaining (avoiding resting on their laurels: the first sign of stagnation).
No one can get a horse to drink water if he doesn't want to drink it. No one can teach anything to anyone who does not want to learn: there are no teachers who teach but students who learn (human beings are closed information systems, Maturana).
Management Coaching
The executive or manager -to become a managerial coach- requires acquiring mastery in those aspects that beyond his technical and managerial competences enable him as a business coach in a context of transformative leadership of human groups: this is leadership of human systems configured by beings human, cultural and emotionally interrelated, by multiple and very complex conversational networks - verbal and non-verbal - that try to achieve individual and collective objectives.
A manager, a candidate for transformational leader, requires both a thorough understanding of what this means and learning to exert idealized influence, generate inspiring motivation, achieve intellectual stimulation, and give individualized consideration (the 4 i's of Baas).
Hence, for the manager to act as a coach -in a context of transformative leadership- it is not enough to increase his purely linguistic or cognitive competences -necessarily perfectible- but also requires -to dominate emotional and bodily competences that facilitate him -and the groups in charge - reach situations of optimal individual, group and organizational performance, conducive to achieving high levels of prosperity and happiness.
Happiness - unlike any other human end - is a final end: it is never a means to another end, it is the only end in itself. Hence the need for the executive to achieve -even- spiritual comfort: clarity and tranquility. This implies not avoiding the ethical aspects related to values: conversely, it implies facing them with strength, courage and ingenuity (in accordance with each and every other relevant organizational aspect: symbols, systems and structures, people and competences, and allocation of responsibilities and resources).
The managerial attributes, to exercise leadership successfully, are today much more demanding than before: the demands that the changing environment demands are now greater and very different, as is the type of usable leadership and what it involves.
Far beyond the -progressive- approaches of benchmarking, total quality and continuous improvement of processes and products that have faded images and decreased margins -and of more recent ones such as cooperation and hypercompetence, contradictory to each other- we found ourselves in a global world of information technology and radical innovation in products and businesses that generated distinctive images and unparalleled margins, in record time (Hamel). Will this change what happened on 11.9.01 ?: apparently yes, and in a remarkable way, and at least for a long time. But probably the new type of ongoing confrontations will also generate new challenges and new ways to face them successfully, from all of which we hope that all humanity will be strengthened and benefited.
What will not change is that to achieve and maintain sustained success it is not enough to have persistence and desire to achieve it, it is also necessary to have a common thread, a model, a guide. The action leads with more quality, effectiveness and efficiency -this is productivity- to the achievement of the desired success if you have a systemic vision of what you want to achieve in different environments, but -to achieve it- it also requires having a guide, to transcend the past and -from the present- design, build and travel a path and a process, to achieve and be part of the desired future… despite the foreseeable and unforeseeable pitfalls.
Without a method, to face the complexity of current businesses - large, medium or small - it can cope with us and turn improvised firefighters into putting out fires, more concerned with solving the urgent than busy with undertaking the important thing: radically innovating in the way of do business by successfully leading people, creating human and intellectual capital.
The strategic leader today has more and better tools, instruments, techniques, concepts, systems and managerial philosophies, more adaptable to different environments and situations.
Among them, the Strategic Management approach predominates , which - synthesizing more than 10 schools of thought (Mintzberg) - aims to make strategic managers more successful managers: the most frequently successful are those who most frequently achieve the objectives set.
Managerial Coaching isolated from other managerial competencies does not yield the expected results, as many people have been able to appreciate through their experience in coaching programs with a weak veneer in relation to management, leadership, strategy, and business. On the other hand, business coaching in a strategic management context generates surprising synergistic effects.
Moving a person, group or organization from the situation in which they want to reach is a major strategic problem: it is not possible to achieve it without an ingenious strategic design - impeccably carried out - that delves deeply into the environment of the coachee and in the coachee itself. This implies taking into account both the opportunities and threats derived from the eventual movements of allies, opponents and indifferent as well as the strengths and weaknesses derived from the coachee's own competences and resources - in front of that environment - and depending on whether he realizes it or not. of it… and act or not accordingly… with or without the contribution of your coach…
A manager who wants to act as a coach, but who does not have adequate or sufficient organizational, strategic and leadership competencies, will not be able to make the coachee see everything that would be desirable and that would make his progress towards the desired situation viable: he will probably base his activity of coaching in self-improvement and personal development of the coachee, without any hope of making him emerge victorious in the complex -and sometimes cruel and merciless- organizational battlefield… it is possible that even some coaches with no business experience annul the welcome competitive concerns of your coachees and even weaken your healthy governance purposes by objecting to your initiatives aimed at achieving control of the processes in charge… with examples brought from the hair, in the field of business.
Conversely, a manager ostensibly expert in business strategy and management -without coaching training- can ignore everything related to the effective and emotionally intelligent management of the people in charge and -despite his executive presence and strategic glamor- annul the initiative and creativity of these people, generating levels of laziness or stress, individual or group… harmful and counterproductive in achieving what is being pursued… without benefit to anyone.
When the free and transparent passing of individual or collective existence is interrupted, by positive or negative events of transcendence, that calm becoming leads us to express with sonorous interjections the surprise they generate for us: ¡cáspita !, recórcholis !, etc.. This is what usually happens when we win the lottery jackpot or get fired from our job or our car breaks down on the highway at rush hour and just when we were going to the most important event in recent times, or when we They warn us that we have unexpectedly just won the most important of the bids at stake or lost the dearest or most important customer.It is also usual for us to start private conversations -with ourselves- that try to make what has happened assimilable… but sometimes we get bogged down in them and we do not go out… we persist in congratulating ourselves or congratulating others or exhibiting our good luck, blaming or blaming ourselves others or injustice or bad luck… in the breakdown that overwhelms us in such a way that we do not manage to get out of it… we do not act proactively in consequence of what happened… and we return again and again about the same thing… sometimes contingent breaks they become recurring…blaming ourselves or blaming others or injustice or bad luck… in the breakdown that overwhelms us in such a way that we do not manage to get out of it… we do not act proactively in consequence of what happened… and we return again and again about the same… sometimes contingent breaks become recurrent…blaming ourselves or blaming others or injustice or bad luck… in the breakdown that overwhelms us in such a way that we do not manage to get out of it… we do not act proactively in consequence of what happened… and we return again and again about the same… sometimes contingent breaks become recurrent…
Management Coaching Competencies
Dynamizing the required action -in an effective way, to achieve the expected results- implies coordinating and leading the action in a coherent way with what has been previously planned and organized: this represents a necessary but not sufficient way to successfully achieve what is sought.
Dynamizing also requires specific emotional competencies, in order to generate states of mind and emotions that predispose the people in charge to carry out the necessary and sufficient actions in a timely manner, in order to productively achieve the strategically planned results -organized and coordinated- acting accordingly, with joy and energy… despite the difficulties and eventual breaks.
It will be difficult for the manager to achieve this without repertoire or competence to recognize his own emotions and those of others, interpret the body signs that allow them to be identified, associating gestures, postures and breathing, interpreting what he feels and what makes him want to do or not in such and such emotions, to reproduce at will the emotions or signs and to realize what it feels like, to change from one emotion to another by itself and to achieve that others also achieve it, neuro-linguistically anchor the recurring emotions that are required, etc.
Now, our body represents everything that our bio-physical-chemical being allows us, body and psyche mutually influence each other; the same systemic interaction occurs between the corporal, linguistic and emotional. The spiritual is not alien to these interactions.
The manager as a coach - in his relentless search for an optimal performance situation - must know this and make it manageable: he must know how to breathe and show others how to breathe deeply, relax and show others how to scientifically relax, focus and show others how to focus like an aikidoka, synchronize with yourself and with others and show others how to go at the same pace, get energized and show others how to be energized according to the circumstances, and act with physical presence and human contact and show others how to captivate displaying empathy: bodily competencies.
Managers with training in business coaching, by skillfully integrating their language skills with the emotional and body skills, greatly increase their communication skills, which allows them - among many other things - the following:
- Be able to seductively communicate values, vision, mission, strategies and plans, Make known in detail both the context and the pursued and planned, Fully understand all that this entails, and even emotionally Share the satisfaction of achieving what is desired, in order to be able to Achieve passionately engaging each and every one,
In the successful and sustained achievement of the ambition, despite the difficulties and the eventual shortage of resources, with:
- A very high degree of compliance, which - achieved as desired - generates great confidence in -everyone and everyone- and makes them feel -with good reason and at all levels- as a team of very high reliability.
Additionally, the training of managers in business coaching greatly increases their skills in coordinating actions (Flores) - previously planned and organized - facilitating the process, to:
I. Detect in advance the needs and concerns to be satisfied (with the result of the activities), and
II. Explicitly deciding what needs and concerns, and when, would need to be met, III. Contextualize seductively on the subject with those chosen to satisfy them, before asking them to satisfy them (the ideal is to get them to offer us what we are going to ask for, without asking for it), and
IV. Promptly ask them for their satisfaction, specifying the conditions of satisfaction required, and
V. Effectively negotiate the conditions, postponements, denials, etc. that they propose to satisfy the request (or carry out the required actions), until
SAW. Effectively compromise the mutual fulfillment of everything agreed; for later
VII. Periodically monitor the degree of progress, and
VIII. Effectively renegotiate -and consequently with the results that are obtained- the assumption of the pertinent responsibilities in case of abandonment, cancellation, revocation, delay, etc.), finally
IX. Kindly receive what is delivered (if something is delivered), along with
X. Sincerely thank what has been received (or claim what has not been received in time), and
XI. Thoroughly assess the degree of satisfaction… and after detecting and deciding on the necessary adjustments, to satisfy the preconditions and / or those that new circumstances warrant, XII. Contextually feed those responsible, thus restarting a new cycle of coordination of actions.
A good command of the coordination of actions allows the manager as coach a constant strategic learning or double-loop learning (Argyris): it is through successive cycles of trial and error - and due consideration of the impact of organizational defenses that prevent touching certain Issues, confronting certain opinions and openly appreciating what happens- allows you to put your efforts to achieve governance in a distinctive and effective way: effective increase in the possibilities of achieving what you want to achieve, through the organization in charge.
The importance of governance - also the objective of the old-fashioned traditional management control, now called new management control or management assurance - derives from the need for leaders to achieve more governance (the purpose), despite the circumstances that are present (exogenous factors) and the degree of sophistication of management planning and control systems (the means): but increasing governance implies solving more a political problem of power than an instrumental one of technology.
Unlike formal authority, power is not a thing that is granted or bought, it is a judgment about the greater or lesser capacity of autonomous action of an entity(Echeverría). Judgments - children of the declarations and like them - are linguistic acts that can be valid or invalid, depending on the authority or force on which they rely. But the judgments - unlike the declarations - also require to be evaluated as to whether or not they are substantiated, and this depends both on the relevance of the concerns behind the judgments issued, on the areas in relation to which they are formulated, and of the reference standards used, such as the strength of the claims in favor of the judgment, and the comparative strength of the claims against it.
This foray into the field of linguistic competences was for the defined purpose of - giving an example - delimiting the importance of linguistic acts in business coaching, without going into more detail here… but anticipating that other linguistic acts - which is important that the manager as a coach handles with skill - are the requests and offers, since once they are accepted they become promises that will be fulfilled or not… Depending on the linguistic competence of the parties, but inevitably affecting performance… and the Trust: behind each linguistic act there is a social commitment that we can fulfill or not, and this repeated compliance or non-compliance will inevitably shape our public image.
Let us remember that in organizations activities are developed through intense conversational exchange, which implies competencies to design and carry out conversations that allow things to be achieved - with greater or lesser effectiveness - by using verbal language - written or spoken - and to non-verbal language. All conversation takes place with various backgrounds, the most visible is the emotional: our bodies can reflect our emotions with more or less clarity and give us away before insightful observers, but also the competent use of our bodies can catalyze the emotional reactions of others and provoke or not the desired effects.
The manager as a coach must master the design of various types of conversations, and be very versatile in terms of the modalities of speech to be used in each case -inquisitive or suggestive- together with clearly distinguishing what is said from the linguistic act implicit in what what is said, and what is pursued with what is said (Austin): interactive listening.
The skillful handling of these modalities is fundamental in relation to the art of insightful questioning - typical of coaching - so that the coach achieves that the coachee realizes - himself - what will allow him to successfully and continually overcome contingent and recurring breaks, individual and collective, in which it is immersed.
Language is not passive or innocent, it allows creating and changing situations, ways of being, realities, etc.
The strategic manager trained in business coaching -in a leadership context- acquires special skills in transformative leadership, in order to generate a greater degree of commitment, participation, loyalty and performance -with a lesser degree of stress- despite contingencies, unforeseen or foreseeable emergencies, conflicts, or crises, and depending on the circumstances, to be able to reinforce or change the culture and organizational policy, in a more participative or directive way, and in accordance with their rank and status (Bass). This involves learning to:
- Exert idealized influence: causing identification and emulation in their role of admired, respected, and trustworthy models, with extraordinary capacities, persistence, and determination, who take risks and act consistently and non-arbitrarily, correctly, and with high ethical and moral standards. Generate inspiring motivation: posing persuasive, understandable and meaningful challenges that stimulate team spirit, displaying enthusiasm and optimism, envisioning and committing to attractive and shared goals and future situations, and generating expectations that clearly communicate. Achieve intellectual stimulation: expanding skills and promoting creativity, innovation, the search for solutions and new ideas, even if they are controversial, questioning assumptions, re-framing problems,approaching old situations by new paths, and without public criticism of the mistakes made. Pay individualized consideration: paying special attention to the needs of achievement and development of the potential of each one, acting as a guide and coach, delegating and creating new learning opportunities and a climate that sustains it, recognizing and accepting individual differences regarding needs and wishes, interacting in a personalized way, and supervising without people feeling checked.delegating and creating new learning opportunities and a climate that sustains it, recognizing and accepting individual differences in needs and wants, interacting in a personalized way, and supervising without people feeling checked.delegating and creating new learning opportunities and a climate that sustains it, recognizing and accepting individual differences in needs and wants, interacting in a personalized way, and supervising without people feeling checked.
Transformative leadership is not only the paradigm in vogue - as leadership - but the only one that allows measuring - instrumentally - the degree to which it improves performance and the degree of satisfaction of leaders and leaders. Additionally, it has been demonstrated that it allows achieving levels of performance and satisfaction to a higher degree than the different modalities of transactional leadership (based on rewards that generate positive or negative contingent reinforcement: management by active or passive exception), or leadership of laissez- faire (style in which no decisions are made, actions are postponed, responsibilities for leadership are ignored, authority is not used, etc.). In any case, world practice shows that all great leaders use - in different situations - different mixtures of all of them.
conclusion
Training in business coaching or managerial coaching -in a context of strategic management and transformative leadership- significantly expands the skills of the manager, executive or director, to strategically confront the leadership of people, groups and organizations, in order to radically improve performance and satisfaction levels.
They imply achieving a situation of optimal individual and collective performance, through enhancing competencies in strategic management and learning new linguistic, emotional, and corporal competences, along with other integrative ones: communication, coordination of actions, and leadership competencies. transformer.
All this with the purpose of achieving better performance and greater satisfaction, stimulating a greater degree of commitment, participation and loyalty -with less stress and despite eventualities- and even, depending on the circumstances, trying to reinforce -or change- the culture and organizational policy, in a more participatory or more managerial way.
The executive or manager -to become a managerial coach- requires acquiring mastery in those aspects that beyond his technical and managerial competences enable him as a business coach in a context of transformative leadership of human groups: this is in the leadership of configured human systems by human beings, culturally and emotionally interrelated, by multiple and very complex conversational networks - verbal and non-verbal - that try to achieve individual and collective objectives.
