What Can a Coach Do For You?

What’s your image of a coach?  Bob Knight?  Maybe it’s your H.S. cross country coach who drove the car and smoked cigars while you and the rest of the team huffed out your 5 or 6 miles through town.  Or maybe it’s reruns of the TV show, Coach.  But a job coach, business coach and/or leadership coach is a whole different animal. 

So forget the yelling and suicide sprints.  If we look at the lexicon on the word coach we would find that it is derived from the word Kocs, which is the name of a small village in northeastern Hungary, where carriages and carts were made.  The slang term Kocs meant “tutor”.  It was said of university instructors during the 1800s, who took such a personal interest in the progress of their students, that the students would say that they seemed to be carried through their exams as if they were driven in the professor’s carriage (or coach). 

Maybe you had a coach different from the ones mentioned above.  If so, please comment and share how they helped you perform better. 

Also, think about your role as a leader.  Are you measuring performance well enough to understand the gaps between your team’s current performance and the performances goals?  Do you know the team’s hopes, feelings and attitudes that may make it difficult for them to accept any needed help or to pass along that help to others when they are exceeding those performance markers? 

Consider this as you are thinking about those annual performance appraisals coming up at the end of the year. 

If you would like to bounce some ideas around, give me a shout or stop by. 

Mr. Anderson

Source:  The Dance of Change, Peter Senge