Guest Column: Eight Reasons to Add Coaching to Your Consulting Business
Through the years colleagues have confided that they have the desire to coach executives and suspect they also have the talent. But they lack the formal training, processes, and credentials to step into the coaching role with confidence, so they hesitate. Even when I assure them that they have already served in the role of coach as a parent, teacher, sports coach, or consultant, they waver—always considering coaching a good idea but never taking the specific steps to add this service to their business. Here are the reasons they should rethink that position:
- Coaching presents a high fee, low labor intensity option that you can write into any proposal.
- It allows clients to have another option to say “yes” to working with you.
- Coaching offers an additional and distinct advantage to a consulting business because consultants typically use their specific knowledge to prescribe a course of action for achieving an objective. Coaching doesn’t deliver a single solution. Rather it helps clients develop their own ability to repeatedly develop solutions for themselves.
- Coaching also offers a clear advantage to a training business because working with an individual provides more direct impact for engendering both personal and organizational change.
- Results-oriented, concentrated, and customized, coaching maintains a focus on the current situation while actively developing plans for the future.
- It offers additional value to the client because it concentrates on strategy and key decisions, not just tactical activities.
- The rapport of the coaching relationship tends to build richer, longer client relationship that can lead to more referrals, repute in your industry, and high-impact results.
- Clients benefit from coaching because it offers a private venue for mitigating weaknesses, identifying strengths, and leveraging them.
- Coaching offers a different sense of accomplishment and level of job satisfaction for the coach.
Successful consultants already have the expertise, experience, and enterprising spirit to affect dramatic change in their client companies. Adding coaching to the mix ensures consultants, trainers, and speakers will have yet another high-stakes impact on key players in the game.
© Henman Performance Group 2015
Dr. Linda Henman, The Decision Catalyst™ and the author of five books, including Challenge the Ordinary, works with leaders who want to think strategically, grow dramatically, promote intelligently, and compete successfully today and tomorrow. She was one of eight succession planning experts who worked directly with John Tyson after his company’s acquisition of International Beef Products. Some of her other clients include Emerson Electric, Illinois Tool Works, Avon, Kraft Foods, and Edward Jones. She can be reached in St. Louis at www.henmanperformancegroup.com.
