Coaching: Meaning (information, definition, explanation, facts)

This article refers to the general act of coaching people. For sports coaching, see coach (sport). For other uses of the word, see coach (disambiguation).

A coach is a person who teaches and directs another person via encouragement and advise. This use of the term "coaching" appears to have origins in English traditional university "cramming" in the mid-19th century. (The name allegedly recalls the multi-tasking skills associated with controlling the team of a horse-drawn stagecoach.) By the 1880s American college sports teams had, in addition to managers, coaches. Some time in the 20th century, non-sporting coaches emerged: non-experts in the specific technical skills of their clients, but who nevertheless ventured to offer generalised motivational or inspirational advice.

In organizational development (OD), coaching is an important intervention designed to assess and improve performance of an individual or a team.

Individual coaching

When a coach works with an individual client, the first order of business is for the coach and client to work out a mutual understanding of the scope of work and document that understanding in a contract. Then the coach goes to work assessing the client's current performance and looks for ways to address the improvements needed.

Like individual coaching, the focus is on improving performance. In the case of a team, the coach observes the team's current functioning, assesses the team's strengths and weaknesses, and develops a plan for addressing the needed changes.

This coaching is slightly different. The focus of business coaching is on creating your business into it's own identity. Much of the business coaching philosophy today, is evolved around the e-myth philosophy. The end goal of your business is to create it into a "franchise" model. Get it so that all of the processes are defined in such a way that anyone can step in and take over. It is to truly separate the entrepreneur from the business.

Compare: leadership, mentoring, life coaching, personal coaching, business coaching.