Coaching in a business setting has four purposes:

1. Coaching should improve client coachability.

2. Coaching should help the client get unstuck and moving toward his or her goals again.

3. Coaching should enhance client self-awareness.

4. Coaching should facilitate breakthroughs.

Each time we provide coaching, we should endeavour to meet at least one of these purposes. Great coaching sessions might satisfy two, three, or all four purposes.

Buyer beware: The phrase, “Can I give you some coaching?” is rarely followed by coaching. What you are likely gonna get is advice.

I am sure many will disagree, but I think that the best coaching is informal and doesn’t follow a lot of rules. It’s a conversation focused on helping someone move forward with something that is important to him or her. It’s a coach who is genuinely interested the other person, listens well, and does whatever it takes to ask or say something that will allow the other person to see something in a new light.

I think complicated processes and protocol muck up what can be an elegant and magical conversation.

When I coach people, I want to know what they are up to, what’s very important. What are they aching to accomplish?

How would you answer this question? Share your answer with someone you trust. Getting your goal in the world can put new and exciting things in motion.

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Coaching is different from managing, a different concept and mindset. Blessed is the company that is composed of coaches and teams rather than management and employees.

I’ve been invited to motivate dozens of championship sports teams and I know how the system operates-how and why they win so consistently. Do you know where winning starts? It starts in the coach’s office. You get the sense of the system immediately when you realize that from day one the coach has a photo of his or her team on the wall-everybody from rookies and subs to star players. And that coach has a photo at home, too. You can bet on it.

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1. Teach Employees to Focus on Goals

Encourage your employees to have short- and long-term goals for both their personal business development and their departmental standing. Help them to ascertain whether their goals are realistic and attainable. When your employees have goals to strive for, they are more apt to exert extra effort. The results are more motivated employees and higher company profits. To ensure your company’s success, teach your employees to focus on the specific things that will help them attain the goals they have set for themselves. Perhaps they have to improve their communication skills, gain some specialized training or volunteer to work in another department. By helping your employees concentrate on the steps they need to take, they will have a better chance of reaching their goals.

2. Give Your Employees Permission to Fail

New employees are especially afraid of failing; however, it’s in failing that you learn to be successful. Rick Pitino, head basketball coach at the University of Kentucky said, “Failure is good. It’s fertilizer. Everything I’ve learned, I’ve learned from making mistakes.” His words are so true. Don’t allow your team to be afraid of risks that might lead to initial failures. Encourage employees to come up with new ideas and to try out new things-not to be afraid of failure. When your employees realize they won’t be reprimanded for failing, they will be more creative and more willing to “think out of the box.” In fact, giving them permission to fail is the best way of giving them permission to win.

3. Treat Your Employees as You Want to be Treated

People do their best only for other people who they like and respect. This truth applies to you doing your best for your employees as well as to their doing their best for you. To meet the challenge of doing your best for your employees, choose people with attitudes and profiles you admire. From that point on, continually create thoughtful ways to show your employees how much you care about them, whether it be through quarterly bonuses, company picnics, extra paid time off or any other way to show your appreciation for them. In return, your employees will like you.

When your employees feel appreciated, they will be passionate about the company and motivated to succeed. They will know their mission and they will play to win. Because they like you, they will be empowered to do their very best-individually and as a team.

In too many companies, this mutual respect doesn’t generally happen. It’s often a low-key adversarial scenario in which management– employee communication is not all it should be and creates behind the scenes grumbling on both sides. This breeds uneasiness and job insecurity among employees, and can exact a huge cost in lost concentration, productivity, efficiency and teamwork. It’s amazing how responsive employees will be if they sense that management is doing its best to treat their employees well.

4. Coach Instead of Manage

In today’s business environment, successful companies know that management is dead. They know that to be successful in the future, they must be coaches. This means that the management team makes certain everybody knows the company’s mission and that everybody is there to help the company win. Each employee has his or her particular assignment, and the management team sees to it that employees know exactly where they fit in and how necessary they are to the company’s success.

A successful “coach” brings his or her team together, sometimes every day, to discuss challenges and share ideas on how to build a winning company. And while everybody in the company has a voice, employees are clear on who the leader is. Because of their proactive leadership style, successful coaches don’t have team members who just want to do a good job; rather, the team members want to exceed the coach’s expectations.

Never underestimate the power your employees have on your business’s success. When your employees feel empowered, respected, appreciated and well-informed, they’ll develop a positive attitude about their jobs, which will show when dealing with customers and clients. As a result, they’ll be more productive and close more sales, and your company will thrive.

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Here are some ways you can bring out the leader in each of your employees:

* Be an Encourager. Employees often have fresh ideas or suggestions, but may not voice those ideas because they don’t feel their manager is interested in hearing what they have to say. Encourage your employees, regardless of their status within your business, to contribute their ideas. Even if you decide an employee’s idea won’t work, thank them for their suggestion and encourage them to continue suggesting new ideas.

* Get Everyone Involved. Leaders who aggressively solicit ideas from their staff usually find that doing so improves morale, which in turn creates positive change within the business. Strive to foster a climate of openness within your business. Attempt to engage your employees in the innovation process, and reward them for their input with verbal thanks and positive encouragement along the way.

* Get to Know Each Employee Personally. It’s impossible to motivate employees without first getting to know them. Make a point of having a one-on-one meeting with each member of your staff. Once you start to gauge the strengths of each member of your team, you can help them develop leadership capacities that suit those strengths, as well as strategies to improve upon any possible weaknesses.

* Reward Great Ideas. It’s important to acknowledge and reward employees whose good ideas help lead to positive changes. You may consider establishing an award or giving a gift of recognition. Then, get out of the employee’s way and let him or her lead the development opportunity (with your support).

* Find Their Motivation. Learn to recognize what motivates each employee, and encourage those things in each of them. This will coax your employees to become leaders instead of followers. With a little perseverance, your team will begin to work collaboratively to lead the business to success.

* Develop a Sense of Urgency. To make leaders out of your employees, each must believe that they have an urgent and worthwhile purpose within the organization. Establishing a sense of urgency and direction will help them know what your expectations are, and prompt them to take on a more meaningful role in the company today.

* Keep Your Employees Informed. Praise your employees for what they’re doing right, and inform them about what they could be doing better. Challenge each of them to be the best they can be. Keeping your staff informed will foster respect and help them better meet your combined goals.

* Provide Positive Feedback. Reinforcement encourages employees to develop their skills to their maximum potential. Use your leadership tools — coaching, counseling, and mentoring — to help motivate them. And walk the walk as much as you talk the talk. Failing to lead by example can foster resentment and lead to low morale.

* Allocate Decision-Making Power. Empower your employees by giving them the ability (within reason) to make key decisions relating to their jobs and duties. The more faith and trust you place in them, the more likely they will be driven to succeed and to impress you.

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The authors say it very clearly, and I’ve said it in the past as well, “Customer service is generally so bad that even a slight improvement can be a huge competitive advantage.” Customer service is critical for client retention as well.

Here are 9 important reminders + revelations from B-A-M!:

1. Tie customer service to revenue & profits. Barry Moltz and Mary Jane Grinstead (authors of the book) make it very clear that the nice, fluffy, altruistic reasons for providing great customer service aren’t enough. You have to tie the support you offer to revenue and profits. That starts by understanding the economic value of each customer, and then understanding how customer service is implicated in generating that revenue (and future revenue). This is all about cold hard cash.

2. Proactive support is key. In many cases, responding after a problem has emerged is too late. In that circumstance you tend to be dealing with angry people. But proactive support is all about reaching customers before the shit hits the fan, alerting them to problems, or reacting to what you see in terms of product usage. So look at what metrics you track on usage, and use those metrics to trigger proactive interactions with customers. For example, you might find a customer isn’t using your product a lot. Having that as a metric versus baseline usage (or expected usage) is a great way for customer support to reach out and ask, “Why? And, how can we help?

3. Think of customer service as a feature. The more you think of customer service as an intrinsic feature of your product and not some ancillary thing you “have to do”, the better you’ll be.

4. Think of customer service as part of your brand. You don’t get to define and control your brand like you used to. Your customers, prospects and users have taken it over. And that means how you service people has become a huge part of your brand awareness and value.

5. Tie customer service to surprise. I’m still obsessing over Surprise and its uses and implications for Web businesses. Surprise should be incorporated into your customer service initiatives. This shouldn’t be done by “under promising and over delivering” (I agree with the authors of the book – this is bogus). But it can be done in a much more subtle (and proactive) way. Matt Brezina, founder at Xobni, calls at least one customer per week to stay close to his customers and make sure things are going well. That’s smart for customer service, word-of-mouth marketing, brand building and PR.

6. Consistency is key. You want every interaction a customer has with your company to be very similar. You don’t want customers having a great experience one day only to be hugely disappointed the next. That inconsistency will make any great customer service you provide a moot point. This means investing significantly in training your staff and having well thought out policies in place.

7. Empower your people. Customer service people are treated like shit. The jobs are often low paying and the work isn’t easy. You need to empower these people to make decisions on-the-fly and respond effectively to customers. If every “tough situation” results in escalation to managers, you’re going to eat into profits and have more frustrated customers.

8. Loyalty programs work. The book has a section on using loyalty programs. They do work. But just to remind us that Barry and Mary Jane aren’t hippie socialists trying to kill companies by forcing them to spend all their money on customer service, I had to include this quote:

“Let’s be clear. We appreciate loyalty. Companies that treat customers with dignity and respect want to reward that loyalty–but the primary purpose of loyalty programs is to create velvet handcuffs to lock our customers in and have them come back even when they have a choice.”

9. You should sweat the small stuff. The authors point out that even “…tiny slivers of a customer’s total experience has the potential to affect the big feeling the customer has for the company.” This speaks to the issue of consistency, and the importance of each and every customer interaction for the overall success of your customer service initiatives, and ultimately your business.

B-A-M!: Delivering Customer Service in a Self-Service World is a fairly quick read with some very good reference material / checklists at the back. In my mind we still have a lot of work to do in terms of elevating the importance of customer service inside the hierarchy of organizations. Too often, customer service is an afterthought, something scrambled together piecemeal to deal with customer complaints. That’s simply not good enough.

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