Increase Accuracy with Business Coaching

Mistakes and Errors Reflect Badly Upon the Reputation of the Business

Accuracy can be an important element of business life. In the majority of professions in fact, getting a figure or piece of information wrong can bring about a significant disaster, either financially or with regards to the health and safety of people.

Even if it is not going to cause a major incident, at the very least inaccurate work can create delays as it has to go back and be corrected, and if seen by customers or members of the public will reflect badly on the company and make them appear as one which does not show enough care in what it does.

In customer's minds, if an organisation does not put time and effort into ensuring that the materials it produces are accurate, would it also fail to put time and effort into ensuring a quality product and service, and looking after their needs?

A Trivial Mistake or an Accurate Representation?

What may be considered by one person as a trivial and unimportant spelling mistake for example will be perceived by another as a major representation of the whole service level of the entire organisation. Therefore, the importance of accuracy at all times cannot be understated, as there is no telling what potential sales could be lost from one simple error. Even missing a single letter or an incorrect usage of an apostrophe can be all that it takes.

So How Can Business Coaching Assist?

Inaccuracy or sloppy work is a problem which needs tackling just like other issues such as low output or poor attendance need dealing with. Fortunately business coaching can greatly assist in rectifying such problems.

The first stage is to identify the specific issues and the possible reasons for them existing. As far as accuracy is concerned, there could be any number of reasons including the employee:

• Having too much work to do and not having enough time to devote to each task in order to complete it properly and check it for errors before release/publication
• Not fully understanding what is being asked or required from them. In this case, they are likely to require further training in the topic to acquire more knowledge about it
• Having a condition such as dyslexia or struggling with reading/writing which is impacting their ability to record things accurately
• Having their work added to, amended or altered by one or more other people/departments which can result in work becoming inaccurate. The more "layers" that are involved in putting together a document or piece of work, whilst there is more opportunity to spot a mistake, there also exists extra levels of complication and potential for errors to be made

Business Coaching to Identify Causes and Solve Problems

There are numerous reasons possible, but the good thing is that business coaching can be used to great effect not only in the identification of the issues, but also for the creation and continuous evaluation of action plans which intend to tackle these issues and overcome them.

Only by taking decisive action and making changes will a situation alter for the better. That first session with a qualified business coach can be the first step in making these positive changes.

Increasing Reliability Through Business Coaching

Managers in Large Organisations Depend Upon Being Able to Delegate Work to Others in Their Team...

Managers can only do so much in the workplace once a business reaches a certain size. As it becomes bigger, there will be a need to recruit employees to assist with some of the workload. In large companies these employees can number in the thousands or even tens of thousands, working in different areas of the business such as sales, finance, health and safety, human resources and manufacturing.

...But Employees Must Be Reliable

One of the most important attributes for an employee to have is being reliable. A manager needs to know that when they delegate a task to someone that person will complete it to an acceptable standard and in a timely manner. If they cannot trust them to do this, the manager will often spend so much time checking the employee's work for errors and correcting it that any time benefits of delegating the task will be negated and the manager may have done it themselves in the first place!

Why are Business Coaching Sessions So Important?

Business coaching sessions between a manager and an employee will be beneficial for two reasons.

Firstly it will allow the manager to obtain a much greater understanding of the employee's capabilities, strengths and limitations in certain areas.

It may be the case that the employee requires additional training in order to acquire a suitable level of knowledge to adequately perform the role of completing the tasks given to them.

For example a relatively inexperienced worker who has being delegated the task of looking after a small team may struggle without first undertaking management training like a first line manager course.

Secondly, it will provide the perfect opportunity for an employee to speak up with any reservations or objections they have about taking on certain tasks. Some of these are likely to be extremely valid such as not having the time themselves with their current workload, or perhaps identifying and suggesting themselves that they need more training.

Providing the opportunity for business coaching sessions will allow the manager to get a much better understanding of the employee's abilities, as well as being able to convey the reasons and importance of work which may be delegated. This can often be a vital step in successful delegation, as without it the employee may think they are simply having all the work the manager cannot be bothered with dumped upon them.

This explanation as to the why it is being given and its importance to the business as a whole can often make a massive difference to the attitude and subsequent dedication to the task which the employee has.

Learning Business Coaching Skills Over Time

The Best Business Coaches Can Call on Many Years of Experience

The skills involved in becoming a business coach are many and are not only learned by attending business coaching courses and gaining qualifications, but also through years of experience in putting them into practice.

In fact, some of the best business coaches are the ones who realise that they should never stop learning new skills and refining their technique.

A Manager Who Increases Their Business Coaching Skills Will Achieve Greater and Faster Results

If you are a manager or leader, by developing your skills in business coaching you will be able to have an increasingly greater influence on your workers and employees, and will be able to achieve better and quicker results with them when it comes to improving their motivation, determining what incentives are likely to have the greatest impact upon them, what is preventing them from achieving more in their job role and how to improve their ability to integrate and work as a team with their fellow colleagues to name but a few.

Coaches Should Attend Training Courses to Learn New Skills and Refresh Existing Ones

Effective business coaches not only ensure that they practice and utilise their skills often, but that they also attend courses and seminars every few years. Ideally these should be from different sources as with this type of training there is no magic right answer, and the ideas shared by one provider are likely to differ slightly than those given by another.

By regularly attending different courses, new skills and ideas can be taken on board and utilised when coaching, as well as re-affirming the ones that have already been gained.

Suggesting External Resources in Business Coaching Programmes for Employees

A significant reason for providing business coaching to employees is to assist them in their professional development to make them more effective in the workplace, which will obviously benefit the company over both the short term and the long term. This business coaching can be provided by an internal manager who holds a coaching qualification like the ILM Level 5 Certificate or through a professional business coach who is external to the company and so can offer unbiased and impartial opinions and suggestions.

As business coaching is not about providing all of the answers for a person, but instead largely focuses on assisting them to devise solutions to problems and constraints with the support of the business coach, a frequently used tool in effective coaching is to suggest external resources and information for the individual to explore. They can then use these recommendations as starting points upon which to begin a journey of self-development and learning. When done in conjunction with regular business coaching sessions, the coach can not only ensure that the individual is going down the right path in terms of what they are researching and learning, but can also help them to turn this newly-acquired knowledge into suitable action plans which enable them to put it into practice when back in the workplace and progressing along their chosen career path.

It is important that the individual receiving the coaching does not get into the mindset of expecting the coach to tell them everywhere to go in order to find relevant information. A large part of the personal development process relies on the efforts of the person themselves to research and discover information in order to take charge of their own progress. The business coach should act as a guide and a sounding board for the person's own initiative, not to provide them with all of the answers.