Selecting a Coach: A Good Time to Think About Feedback

Once you have decided that coaching is the focus on the development you want to take, the next step is to choose the right coach for you. Recommendations from colleagues are helpful in coaching effectiveness, but the coach selection also requires some important personal considerations.

Will you benefit more from a coach with an outside perspective or internal common experiences in your organization? How would you feel when you work with your coach? Would you like a peer or an authority? How gender, race, industry experience or other characteristics affect how you will work with your coach? How important is it to you that your trainer has a primary relationship with you and do not share your views to your manager or HR department?

In Executive Coaching Solution (Davies-Black, 2007), the writer Joan Kofodimos tells that a coach should do the following:

• Provide structure in the development process
• Maintain confidentiality
• Balance support and is challenging to you
• Help you ask for and receive feedback
• Assist in clarifying your true strengths, values and purposes
• Broaden your perspectives
• Teach concepts and skills
• Influence how others view you

In addition, experienced coaches are also cautious not to hinder your ability to learn, grow and change. They want you to work independently and do not be your cheerleader, your therapist or de facto manager or boss. And most importantly, you want to select a coach who could increase their developmental issues, as one of the objectives and can show you how your actions affect others.

Coaches must demonstrate that they understand and respect their values and interests. You are more likely to open the coach who creates a safe, confidential and non-judgmental environment. However, it is equally important that the coaches of the tasks that motivate you to perform beyond their normal habits and behavior. Will be higher than your coach role will deal directly and encourage them to see the impact of their actions and probe their motives and behavior assumptions.

Returning to Joan Kofodimos' list, it is important that you understand how a coaching experience is structured. The usual steps are:

1. Establish the coaching relationship
2. Set expectations and the time frame
3. Seek feedback from others using instruments, interviews, or other tools
4. Review feedback
5. Create a development plan
6. Work the plan including implementing new behaviors
7. Hold regular coaching meetings to review and assess

As far as feedback is very important that you receive feedback faith from which to build your development plans. Skilled coaches understand the confidentiality and how to elicit important data from your peers, subordinates, superiors and other stakeholders. Over time, one of the results you would expect from an experience of coaching is to grow in your ability to build relationships where you can ask for honest feedback on an ongoing basis.

Instead of encouraging dependency, your coach should be taught how to manage development in the future. After an initial assessment, a good coach shows how to form bonds with colleagues and teach them how to frame useful, specific feedback instead of vague sentences.

Your coach will teach you to seek feedback and manage the debate without being defensive. This includes learning how to determine which feedback is important and valid, must set priorities to address and find out how to deal with them.

Now that is a clearer understanding of coaching and the central role of the coach is to call to help you create feedback loops, you should have a better idea of what the car brings out the best results.