Many Managers Struggle to Provide Business Coaching

A manager can often find it difficult to provide business coaching to workers in their particular department. This is primarily because being an effective coach relies on that person being able to sit back and listen to the problems and issues that are affecting the ability of the employee to perform to their maximum potential.

Many managers will be extroverts by nature and will find it extremely hard going to sit back and listen to their employees without feeling the constant need to interject and impose their own thoughts and ideas upon the situation. Whilst this may be useful at the end of the session, to get the most benefit from business coaching it is important for the person receiving the coaching to feel as if they are coming up with the answers to their problems themselves. Otherwise this leads to an over-dependency on the manager who will soon find themselves being approached whenever the person has a problem, which will greatly impact upon the manager's time available to do their own important tasks.

An external business coach will often be much better suited to listening impartially and letting the person being coached take ownership of the session and largely influence the direction in which the discussions go in. They will also encourage them to reach the solutions themselves, only interjecting when absolutely necessary. This provides much greater empowerment for the individual concerned and will make them more highly motivated to implement the suggestions if they feel that they have come up with them largely by themselves with only a subtle yet important influence from the coach.