Various Articles

Many companies make the dangerous mistake of hiring someone simply on the basis that they have managed people before, taking for granted that they are an experienced manager who will not require any further help. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Managers are human beings too, and just as making home-cooked meals for a few years doesn't qualify someone to be a master chef, though it might be a good start, becoming a good manager consists of much more than having past experience managing some people for a while.

Management coaches enter at this point. Human resources are most beneficial to companies when they provide management coaching to help turn mediocre or poor managers into world-class leaders. Fortune 500 corporations will spend millions of dollars to train their employees with the best coaches the world has to offer. Bill Gates and Steve Jobs don't know everything either. They know this, which is why they're willing to spend so much money to train their people.

A similar phenomenon occurs in music. Great composers like Beethoven or Gershwin learned from others, even when they were already the richest and best-known composers in all the world. Even world leaders take personal coaching, so there's nothing for you to be ashamed of in taking management coaching. Make sure your management team is all that it can be.

So when you have decided that your company could use management coaching, the question is who should be coached. We would answer that anyone in a position of responsibility in your company regardless of division or number of people managed should be coached.

Everyone who makes management decisions needs coaching, and the reason is that no one is perfect. We all had to learn things somewhere, but changes in the world (especially increases in business efficiency) require us to adapt and stay ahead of the curve. Like the kid's saying "you snooze, you lose", managers who receive no training "lose". They lose their edge, their team's advantage, and, if they are particularly bad managers, they might even lose their workforce.

Competent management coaching ensures that an angry lapse will never destroy a team, that a bad day doesn't mean a bad month, and that teams are led, and not just managed. Raising leaders doesn't happen without investing in them, and management coaches are the most proactive way of doing that -- for a Fortune 500 CEO, and for your management team as well.