What do Tiger Woods, Patrick Kane, Brian Urlacher and Shaun White have in common?

The answer is they all have one (if not more!) coaches.

You see, even the best need help. They need a coach, someone to assess their performance, someone to show them how they can improve. They need someone to give them objective advice, and who will push them forward onto even greater achievement.  And business people are the same.

Business Coaching is an effective means of improving business results and is rapidly becoming a best practice in business. It offers individual attention and focuses on how developing each leader and manager to be their very best. A business coach works with individuals to recognize current behaviors and patterns and identify new choices that may be more effective. Emotional (and unconscious) barriers often deter even the best leaders from changing behaviors and attitudes. Business coaching addresses these barriers, and leaders are encouraged to stretch current performance boundaries.

A study by the Center for Creative Leadership identified several intangible benefits to business coaching, including increased employee engagement, increased job satisfaction and morale and increased retention. To attribute a financial benefit to these intangibles can be challenging, but experts estimate the financial benefits add up to more than 2-3 times a person’s annual salary.

“Coaching helps focus on each individual employee’s challenges and goals. A face-to-face meeting holds each person accountable for constant improvement,” explains Susan Riddering, vice president of NorthStar360.

An experienced Business Coach creates a trusting, collaborative and stimulating environment. The coach listens to the individual employee’s concerns, and offers practical processes that enable them to explore the issue. It is an achievement-oriented partnership focused on improving the individual and organization. The result is improvement on real business issues and a rapid and significant return on investment.