Corporate Coaches: How to Find the Right One

For any business that is thinking of engaging a corporate coach, the most difficult choice is … which one? There are thousands of coaches to choose from and finding the right one for your business is one of the most important things you will do. As with every important decision, time invested in developing the correct strategy to find the right coach is time well spent.
First of all, you have to develop a clear idea of what a corporate coach could and should bring to your organization. And senior management should utilize a blue-sky thinking approach to this part of the selection. Remember that there are literally thousands of coaches all with widely different credentials and experience who will bring different skills sets to your organization. Develop a “must-do, should-do” list of what coaches should bring to your business, their qualifications, and what experience they should have, and then develop this list into a specific guideline for choosing the right coach.
Assess the Needs of Your Organization
After considering the importance of each aspect of your coaching guideline, it’s time to find a coach with the right type of experience to fit your model and your business. Although this is a time-consuming task, you can shorten the time line by using the Internet and searching specialist business publications.
Since many coaches have accreditation as well as some type of business education, it is worth looking into just what their qualifications signify. If the list of prospective coaches is still too long, order some of the literature, brochures, and sales information that these coaches offer and use the guideline you developed to help narrow your list. As with any decision, it’s important to maximize the amount of benefits you get from the amount of time invested.
Pay Attention to Detail
As well as the key attributes of their coaching styles, it’s important to look for the little things that make certain coaches stand out. Testimonials from other businesses who have used a coach will form an important part of the coach’s sales literature, so look to see how similar the other businesses are to your own company.
Read the testimonials to find out what other companies got out of the coaching experience …ignoring claims about enhancing performance, look for qualitative details such as enhancing communication in the workplace to see how these details fit in with your criteria.
Remember It’s an Interview – Not a Sales Pitch
The next stage is to set up interviews with a short list of candidates and subject them to an intensive question and answer period. Executive coaches will be very comfortable with this process and will use this chance to impress you with their vision of what they can achieve with your company and with senior management. You should also find out if these coaches offer other services such as seminars and lectures and, if so, plan to attend to see the way in which each coach works. Again, to find out when a particular coach’s seminar or lecture is available, look on the Internet and in specialist business magazines.
Then, after narrowing your list of coaches to one or two, have a meeting with your executives and talk about the process so far, get their feedback, and make a collective decision remembering that these key people will be investing their time in the process of corporate coaching.