Coach, Consultant or Trainer?
“I don’t know which we need; I only know we need help…”
“It’s frustrating trying to figure out who we should be working with…”
“I don’t think any of these will solve the whole problem…”
“Doesn’t anyone do what we need?”
Ever uttered any of the above or one of a thousand variants expressing the frustration of trying to figure out what kind of help is needed for your business? Talk to a business coach and it sounds like whatever your problem, that’s the solution. Talk to a business trainer and it’s all about training. Talk to a consultant and you’ll find out that’s all you need.
Just to make it even a little more involved, there are also CEO Round Tables, Forum Groups and Business Improvement Groups which will offer to deal with your problems.
For many, the subtleties and distinctions between these various business services are lost. (And we haven’t even looked at how many varieties of coaches there are.) What we know is that our business has either problems or opportunities (two sides of the same coin) which would provide real benefits if we could just find the right help “for us.”
So this article is a brief attempt to explore the process of analysis which can help us make such a decision. It is a process developed for use by corporate Performance Coaches – that is – people whose role was performance improvement whether via coaching, consulting, or training – supplied either by inside personnel or outside resources.
This process involves four steps:
1) Identify the “desired state.”
Very simply, this is a matter of what you want things to look like down the road – the company, the market, sales, profits, etc. It is a Vision, Mission, and Main Thing expressed operationally rather than theoretically.
2) What is the “current state?”
For each element of the desired state, what is the situation today? If a particular sales level is in the desired state, what are sales today and what is the trend. If a particular level of customer loyalty or retention is desired, what level do you have today?
3) What is the “current performance?”
That is, how are the people who must do the work performing? There are a variety of ways to measure this, but one of the best is to analyze the work environment using a set of questions such at those identified by the Gallup organization in their survey of the American Workforce. [You can find these in the book: “First Break All The Rules”, by Buckingham and Coffman – available on Amazon or at your local bookstore.]
4) Finally, what is the level of “required performance” needed at the desired state?
This is probably one of the toughest, yet most essential steps. There is little point investing time and money to attain a level of performance that doesn’t yield what we are looking for. And that is where most businesses get off track.
If you’ve ever heard a business executive complain that training or coaching “doesn’t relate to the reality of MY business” – that’s what is missing – the identification of the level of performance required to reach the goal.
Once the four measures are available, we simply must determine what will move the current performance to the required performance level. Can we train people to operate at the higher level – usually this requires that the training be customized to our business rather than “off the shelf” – and that is what makes it effective. If it’s not a training issue, is it holding people to standards of performance – which is probably a coaching issue – or is it a matter of getting a consultant who can help us through a process change?
It sounds simple, which is not to say easy. Yet in years of working with these issues, I’ve never found anything better to identify how we must approach performance improvem
