Coaching Records and Communication
Assuming the initial meetings and proposal leads to agreement to proceed to contracting, High Growth Enterprise Coaches need to provide clients with a series of key documents including:
- Terms of business (setting out the terms of business for the High Growth Enterprise Coaching Programme such as the payment terms, roles and responsibilities)
- Coaching agreement (describing the relationship and obligations and protocols for the delivery of coaching sessions)
- Action plans (list of actions points following planning and coaching sessions)
- Other coaching records (minutes of planning meetings, progress reports and feedback on progression and future plans)
Although such coaching records are required to facilitate the coaching process, they also provide a record of the discussions, agreements and actions in the event that there is any subsequent confusion, misunderstanding or client dissatisfaction. They also enable the High Growth Enterprise Coach and client to review plans, progress and achievements: they are particularly useful when evaluating the impact of the High Growth Enterprise Coaching Programme.
Diverse Communication
High Growth Enterprise Coaches communicate with clients at various levels and need to use a diverse range of communication methods and skills.
Today there are more communication methods available than ever before and it is important that High Growth Enterprise Coaches adapt their communication methods and styles to meet the needs of their clients.
This could mean use of SMS messages to arrange or confirm meetings, or use of Skype, with webcams to hold a coaching meeting with a client. A coach’s willingness or not to embrace new communication methods will itself say something about how forward thinking they are and their willingness to adapt and adjust.
High Growth Enterprise Coaches need also to be able to communicate at any level of any organisation. Ideally they should have the confidence to present to a Board of Directors, but equally to effectively converse with the most junior member of staff in order to elicit information.
Reflecting on The Coach: Client Relationship
Effective High Growth Enterprise Coaches reflect on their relationship with their clients regularly both informally and formally. This can occur during the reviewing and sustaining part of each coaching session, between sessions and also more formally at certain points in a programme of High Growth Enterprise Coaching.
Reflection can be a matter of the coach reflecting on how the relationship is progressing from his perspective but should also at some point involve asking the client for his thoughts. It can also be done more formally through the client being asked to complete a questionnaire.
Some coaches also undertake coach supervision, which is another good opportunity to reflecting on how relationships are progressing and how they could be improved.
Closing The High Growth Enterprise Coaching Programme
Although some business coaching programmes do continue indefinitely, most are for a prescribed period of time and therefore, will come to an end.
It is important for the ending of the relationship to be managed carefully by the coach, as there may be the potential of more projects in the future and the client is now part of the coach’s network and may refer other potential clients in the future.
There are some key areas to be considered at the end of a coaching programme:
- Has the coaching met its objectives?
- Can the relationship be maintained in some form going forward?
- Can the coach gain further work as a result of what has been achieved?
A High Growth Enterprise Coaching programme may come to an end because a project has been completed, funding has ceased or the need for the coaching is no longer there. Whichever of these is the case, the coach and the client should refer back to the objectives to check to what extent they have been achieved and where they have not been achieved, consider the reasons for this and whether it is acceptable. If the coach has been reviewing progress regularly, then no problems should really come to light at the end, as any issues should have been identified and dealt with as the coaching programme has progressed. The final review is more about capturing what went well, acknowledging successes and recognising with the benefit of hindsight, what could have been done better.
Having established all of this, this is then the ideal opportunity for the High Growth Enterprise Coach to ask for a testimonial, for the client to provide references for future clients if requested, or for permission to write up a case study and feature it in promotional material (anonymous if appropriate and with the client’s approval before use). This is a technique known as asking for something when the client is at the ‘peak of their gratitude’.
It can be excellent customer service to suggest that the client can contact the coach at any time in the future for advice or assistance. The key to this is getting the balance right between the client not viewing the coach as a free advisory service, but maintaining the relationship so that when the client is ready for more coaching, he will automatically contract with the High Growth Enterprise Coach again. It is also good practice for the coach to contact the client from time to time to pass on useful information, notify the client of opportunities, sales leads or anything that might be of benefit to him. E-mail is ideal for this. Some coaches also circulate e-newsletters periodically, providing generic information which may be of interest to clients.
If the coaching relationship has not progressed well and one or both parties have decided to end the relationship earlier than planned, it is still important for the coach to reflect on the reasons why and if possible to obtain constructive feedback from the client.
REFER TO YOUR ACTIVITY WORKBOOK AND SOLVE ACTIVITY 5 IN THE LJ4 SECTION.
If any of these are the case, it should still be possible for the coach to gain something from the experience, whether it is identifying additional questions to ask in the engaging stage, to still get a testimonial from the client because the termination was not because of a problem with the coach.
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