Are your managers performance coaches of future growth and opportunities or micro managers and stewards of the never changing past? How are you developing the next generation of leadership? Are they ready to lead a multi-generational global workforce? How would you evaluate your leadership team in these critical capabilities today?
The three things SME business leaders agree on today are:
- Change and disruption is happening at accelerating rates
- Organizations don’t have enough high-quality leaders to take their organizations to the next level.
- Successful leaders need to learn how to do handle the first two challenges while they continue growing their organizations
Strategic performance coaching is designed to leverage an individuals’ strengths, gifts, and life experiences to build stronger leaders and more powerful teams. I believe when done correctly it can become a giant killer for SME entrepreneurs.
What is a strategic performance coach? More importantly, why do you need one? Today I’ll share several key concepts that can help transform your business. Then on Thursday’s tweet chat, you’ll learn practical ideas to help get you started.
Strategic performance coaches accelerate your team’s learning by providing positive real time feedback on your team’s performance. It provides you an opportunity to be both more anticipatory and agile in how you go to market. Successful performance coaches leverage internal capabilities, unique best practices, and market knowledge to create a stronger, more successful organization.
Performance coaches focus on winning performance. They leverage your winning teams’ performance and new opportunities to provide exponential growth for your organization. Once you’ve identified the critical behaviours you need for growth you can deliver better results faster and more consistently through performance coaching.
At times, performance coaches transfer ideas and best practices from other industries and markets to help you create a unique position in your clients’ and partners’ minds. Successful performance coaching is a great tool for digital transformation because it focuses on things that are in control of the leaders. Superior performance coaches understand how to bring out the best in people at any given time. Trust is the foundation of a great performance coaching.
Performance coaching allows for people to be coached through critical activities by people who are successful at these activities. Accelerated learning can become a strategic advantage for your team!
Performance coaches can help develop mentoring relationships up and down the organization. Involving younger team members can help increase the technical proficiency of senior members of your leadership team. Your senior leaders can help engage and retain more junior members of your team. The more connection your next generation of leaders feel to leadership the more likely they are to stay with your organization.
Many digital natives feel stymied because their organizations are not leveraging current technology capabilities in a wide range of positions in your organization. Many of these younger and young at heart workers are used to using mobile technologies to manage their finances, schedules, communication and collaboration, and learning activities. Creating multi-generation mentoring opportunities helps create more empowered and engaged workers throughout the organization.
Finally, you can set up more flexible working relationships by having your retiring team members coach and bring new team members up to speed more quickly. Your ability to structure this type of arrangement can allow your new team members a higher level of success faster because they learn from people who see the bigger picture and can help ensure that critical handoffs happen in a timely, well thought out manner.
When handled correctly they can build deeper, longer lasting relationships with your key clients and partners. When done correctly done I’ve seen client retention skyrocket. Don’t worry, over the coming weeks and months we will share how to build a more flexible workforce. It can be a lot easier than you think. You can get some great tips this Thursday!
Hopefully we’ve just got you started thinking about how you can build a more agile, anticipatory organization. I’ve seen performance based coaching help build many successful organizations. These new performance based coaching programs help accelerate growth and profits.
Performance Coaching is the foundation of building a successful organization that is ready to disrupt and transform your markets. I’ll share more about how you can build a performance-based culture in future blogs.
In the meantime, we have several great tools to get you started. Sage has made a number of resources available for growing your business including several award-winning blogs specifically for your SME business. You can get them delivered through your email! Sign up here and you can also get Sage’s “The ultimate business growth guide” to help you grow your business today!
Our next twitter chat, which is all about growth is “Growth is the goal, but how can you achieve it?” The Q&A is on August 9 at 5:00 UK time and at 12:00pm (EST) on the @sageNAmerica channel. The hashtag for the live event is #sageinspire on Thursday. See you there!