Performance Coaching

The term performance coaching refers to coaching approaches that focus on very specific improvements. These may be in sports (e.g. shaving a few seconds off a down-hill ski run) or in work (e.g. achieving higher sales, or higher customer satisfaction scores). The core of performance coaching is that the outcome is measurable in a quantifiable manner.

Performance coaching can be used with less tangible goals, such as, say, being more confident at meetings. Here the basic technique is to use a scale of 0 to 10 to help the client imagine where they are now, where they want to be and how they would be able to measure progress at each step between.

One of the weaknesses of performance coaching is that it tends to take the goals as given, rather than question them. So it’s possible the client may be pursing the wrong outcomes. So it’s important to spend time exploring the client’s circumstances and values.

Nigel MacLennan, in his book Coaching and Mentoring (Gower, 1995, p61) describes the process of performance coaching in these terms:

• Focus increases awareness
• Awareness increases understanding
• Understanding increases control
• Control increases performance
• Performance increases results.

Useful coaching questions include:

• What is important for you to focus on?
• What does this focus make you aware of, that you had not recognised before?
• What questions does this new awareness raise for you?
• What new understanding comes from considering those questions?
• What choices does that understanding create for you?
• How willing are you to follow those choices? (i.e. to exercise control over them)
• What else would help you exert control over yourself and what happens to and around you?
• How specifically will these different behaviours and thinking patterns raise your performance levels?
• How clear is the link between this new level of performance and the results you want? (i.e. will this level of performance be good enough?)

© David Clutterbuck, 2014

Prof David Clutterbuck
Coaching and Mentoring International Ltd
Woodlands, Tollgate,
Maidenhead,
Berks, UK. SL6 4LJ

www.coachingandmentoringinternational.org
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