What Do Coaches Do?

People often asked me what do I as a Business and Executive Coach do. Do I teach people, motivate people and counsel people?  As a coach, what make me able to help people that are more experienced than me?  Do I only cover soft skills and not focus on hard skills?  Why should anyone pay me to coach them?  Can people do self-coaching?'

The answer to the above questions is simply this: a coach does one and only thing: solve problems. We help our customers solve their problems.

Note that we don't help people solve the symptoms of their problems, which is what most consultants do. For example, if your company's sales is down, consultants and trainers would tell you to train your salespeople, make your products and services more attractive and so on.

As a coach I go to the root of the problem, which could be simply your company is serving the wrong market and your sales compensation scheme is not attracting more sales.

How do we go to the root of your problem?  By asking questions.  We also do 'imagine what if' scenarios. Most importantly, we go to the root of the problem by doing numbers. That's right, we do calculations on what will happen if you solve your problem in a certain way.

At the end of the day, numbers will not lie. Our clients will pick the solution based on not what they like but how the numbers work out to be.

Let's take a case study. ABC Company wants to increase its sales but thinks that the solution lies in lowering its prices. So we do a computation on what will happen to its sales when the price is lower, and we test the solution by gong to the real market and offering lower prices to existing customers. If the response is good, we compute what will happen to the profits with a lower price.

On the other hand, we challenge our clients to adopt other solutions that solve the root of the problem. The root of the problem could lies in focusing on a bigger market. So we get our client to offer to a big market and see what happens. We compute the risk-reward ratios, do a probability analysis and compute the bottom-line. Only when the bottomline is attractive will we adopt the solution.

In essence, what a coach does is to solve the root of problems. We do that by going to the real situation and use numbers to help us select the right solution.

By Andy Ng, Business and Executive Coach with Asia Trainers, more at www.asiatrainers.com