4. Seek support

The difficulty with starting and sustaining significant improvement within an organisation lies within the paradigms held by the leadership. Built up over years of experience and validated by reaching the privileged position of a leader, the way work is approached today will need significant incentive to shift .

There will of course have been many useful paradigms created along the way but equally there will be much to unlearn and to do this confidently will require help.

World class individuals and teams in any discipline employ at least one coach to guide their development. Seen as mandatory in top level sport but strangely still questioned in other endeavours, a good coach leverages the full potential of those they work with.

The importance of finding someone that has experience in transformational levels of change and will help you believe in yourself to achieve something truly great cannot be understated.

You are not looking for someone that bridges a specific knowledge or capacity gap, rather someone that can draw out the knowledge you already have, helping YOU to embed change long term.

There is an abundance of people who are willing to try and support your work; some great, some terrible and most, of course, somewhere in-between, so finding someone you can trust and that will deliver for you is not easy.

Your first port of call should be friends, colleagues, partners, suppliers, even customers, that have used someone before and can vouch for them. It’s the quickest way of making contact with someone with proven expertise. If this is not possible, then you are looking for someone that can demonstrate the following attributes.

1.        Personality & Experience

Firstly, someone that you like and who you can work with is paramount. They need not be someone who has done what you do. It is remarkable that almost none of the worlds best coaches were actually world class in their field. And, in fact, many world class sports stars have turned out to be terrible coaches. You are looking for someone that thinks differently to you while still aligning with your values.

They should ask more questions of you than you ask of them and be interested in who you are and your ambitions.

They should be inspirational and motivational on first meeting. Often this can come from them sharing stories drawn from their personal experience, their successes and their failures, demonstrating their own learning and why that is of benefit to you.

2.        Results

Ask for quantitative and qualitative proof of work they have done. They should be able to provide specific numbers about improving the key metrics important to you. Growth, Speed, Cost, Quality, personal and workforce morale. They should be able to put you touch with someone they have previously worked with so you can understand how it felt from their point of view.

You define the value from your coach, not them. Tell them your ambition and with a good coach, you will achieve it – and more.

3.        Approach

You are looking for someone that tailors their approach to you and your organisation. If they are not asking about your problems and trying to understand where you are early on you are probably getting a product rather than a service. You may disagree with their approach but if the first 2 boxes were ticked. Trust it.

Finding and employing a coach should not be seen as a necessary evil to get over a particular immediate problem, rather an ongoing development of your skill.

A great coach will build on your expertise, often by showing you the need to break some of your previous thinking and build again with new techniques. This should be welcomed.

With support, you will be tested and challenged, you will be enlightened on how much you didn’t know you didn’t know and you will obtain the confidence to take risks.

As a result, you will be continual rewarded with a renewed and reinvigorated understanding of your work that allows you to achieve something really meaningful that is both felt in the workplace and seen in the organisational metrics simultaneously.