Nowadays, lots of people try to do coaching because it is so popular to be a coach. Also, it is very popular to be coached. But do we actually know what coaching really is? Do we need it and why?

Let’s return to basics. Who is a coach? Coach is a person who helps the client to be aware of his priority. Also, he helps the client to organize those priorities and build the system that helps to achieve goals. Coach creates a world to which others want to belong.

Working with clients fullfils the coach, both in spiritual and development areas. It could be fun, but also hard, depending on the topic or clients’ temporary mood.

Work with the clients demands a lot of preparations and understanding between the coacher and clients. The most important coaching qualities are:

• Rapport, recognizes clients’ needs and provides deeper access to inner capacity
• Respect, client and coach build a relationship full of respect and the same is with partnership
• Respect other learning. This may be the most important coaching quality. Clients’ development depends in most cases of ‘’learning speed”. The faster they can learn, the faster development can be. Through learning we develop mastery in certain area.
• Respect other’s vison. Every person has his own vision. Coach mustn’t judge any vision, he supports the client.
• Inspires. Main duty of a coach is to inspire his client in order to achieve his goals.

After all this preparation activities, coach starts the coaching process with the client. He uses a lot of tools and processes to create a safe environment for the client. Only in that environment the client can give his best. Everything else is history.

Now, let’s return to the subject of this article. What about the team? How can a coach work with a group of totally different people? He can’t. Only if he creates one team spirit and treats it like a person. Yes, team can be personified into any being, not only in human.

For example, during one of my team coaching sessions, the team has created a black horse to symbolize its team’s spirit. This horse symbolizes power, speed, energy … When you create something like this you can easily access the team values. But, first things first.

Coach has a lot of methods to work with teams.

Regarding the fact that a coach should work with team values, he needs to start with the identity of the team, who the members of the team are together, what they represent in one person. At this stage, coach encourages team members to be maximally creative and make brainstorming. A lot of visioning and imagination at this stage of coaching is necessary.

After the team discovers who they are in one, coach works with the values of the team. The most useful tool at this stage is wheel of values. Team should understand what the purpose of team action is and coach uses lot of WHYs. At this stage, values may appear very fast and coach should collect them very fast. He can do a lot of things with them later.

The third phase in team coaching is HOW? At this stage, coach uses created identity and values and challenges the team with the question “How can you achieve this?”. This stage is full of strategy and thinking how to prepare the environment for the action.

The forth phase is WHAT? Team tries to find the best solution for action steps necessary to be taken in order to achieve goals. This stage is firmly on the ground and it’s easily developed by team members.

The final phase, WHEN? calls for immediate action to be taken. At this stage, team also cares about environment and want others to be influenced by their action.

At the end of the coaching process, the coach asks from the team for some small steps to be taken in order to step up to the road to success.

Every team has a different construction. The main characteristic of a sales team is that teams work in lower logical levels, mostly in WHAT and WHEN levels. That is because of constant need that sales force stays firmly on the ground. The biggest challenge is to raise their mental activities to the higher level, especially on the forth level, the level of purpose.

Team members will resist to be there and try to escape to action levels. Coach is responsible for asking continuously WHY, WHY … to help them find the purpose of the action. Once when team understands the meaning of why and discovers the root cause of its action, it will be unstoppable and unbeatable. Also, the result will be sustainable for much longer period.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row]