A coach is like an ‘excipient.’ Just as an excipient is a substance formulated alongside the potently active ingredient of a medication, for enhancing its effectiveness and for the purpose of long-term stabilization and sustanability, a coach helps high-potential and high-performing executives enhance effectiveness, bring the best out of them, and ensure long-term sustainability.

Coaching can fuel the courage to step out beyond the comfortable and familiar, can help people learn from their experiences, and can literally and metaphorically increase and help fulfill a person’s potential.

The essence of coaching lies in helping others and unlocking their potential. Sound coaching is never entirely selfless. Investing 10 minutes daily in coaching usually ends up creating “20 minutes of extra time” every day for you, because it helps your team members become more independent, more competent and more able to work on their own.

“Try asking a few good questions where you might otherwise have issued an instruction or leapt into providing advice.”

To be a genuinely helpful and first-rate coach, you must know yourself. Honing the interpersonal skills you need as a coach leads to better customer and client relations and a more devoted and loyal team. Your staff will far better understand how to improve if you tell them precisely why and how they did a good job. Explaining their mistakes and dictating actions for the next time generates poor performance and staff resentment.

“The foundation of all successful coaching is surely an open, trusting relationship with a healthy reservoir of goodwill on both sides.”