Top 10 tips to help you choose the right coach.

Top 10 tips to help you choose the right coach.

 

A recent Google search for coaches revealed the following results

 

Business Coach                   800.000,000

Dental Business Coach         18,200,000

Dental coach                      39,100,000

 With this quantity of listings it is potentially difficult to find the right coach. Choosing the wrong one can be a very expensive mistake. Simon Coops, Chief Executive of Acuity Coaching, “Coaches are charging up to £1,500 per hour and there are no means of telling good from bad.”

 In this article I give you the top 10 things to consider so you make the right choice first time.

 

• Check their qualifications

Once you have decided that you are ready to make a change and work with a coach, the next step is check their qualifications. “It’s worryingly easy to do a short course and set yourself up as a coach and, even though there are a number of accreditation bodies, they have varying reputations,” says Kevin Bright, Director of Business Psychologists, YSC. Moreover the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) journal, ‘Coaching at Work’, says, “Don’t accept qualifications at face value. Some reputable sounding organisations hand out coaching diplomas for a three-day course.” John McGurk, CIPD Adviser Learning Training and Development recommends, “Find out what training and qualifications they have and if you are not familiar with them, follow them up.”

 
Unlike dentistry there is not yet a universally accepted coaching register and there are many coaches in the coaching market place who have done very little training or no formal training at all.
 

Ask your prospective coach details about their coach training, who they trained with, their trainer’s providence as a coach, how long it was and how much coaching they did as part of their qualifications. 

• Check their accreditation

Once you have ensured that that your coach has qualified from a reputable organisation, such as International Teaching Seminars, you will next need to check their accreditations.

 

John McGurk, CIPD, recommends, “Find out if they are a member of a professional body, and at what level. In other words, have they joined on the web and paid a tenner or does their membership mean signing up to things such as continuing professional development or a code of conduct?”

 

Professional coaching bodies provide guidelines for best practice. They are to coaching what the General Dental Council is to dentists, or the Law Society is to Solicitors. In the UK, professional bodies include the International Coaching Federation (ICF) and the Association of Coaches.  ICF accreditation cannot be achieved without a rigorous level of training, a comprehensive log of coaching hours, adherence to a code of conduct, demonstration of core coaching skills, active supervision, commitment to post-graduate education, a written examination and a practical coaching exam. At present this cannot be said for all other professional bodies which have different criteria for accreditation.

 

• Choose coach involved with mentoring

Coach mentoring is a formal process that your coach should be involved with, regularly working with a more qualified coach mentor, reflecting and evaluating their performance with clients and sharing expertise. Supervision has two purposes, ensuring the continued learning and development of your coach, and providing a degree of protection for their clients by maintaining standards.

 

Coach mentoring is essential for maintaining standards, and yet a recent study by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) has found that only 44% of coaches are involved in supervision although this rises to 75% of coaches who are members of a professional body.

 

Ask your prospective coach about their mentor, their mentor’s qualifications; how long they have been in supervision and how often they meet.

 

• Continued professional development and post-graduate education

By now you have found a potential coach that is qualified, next you need to check that they are involved in a process of Continued Professional Development and Post-graduate Education. Ask your coach what courses, conferences and workshops they attend, which coaching journals and books do they read regularly, are they involved in coaching networks and co-coaching groups.

 

• Experience, references and testimonials

Now you will have honed down the potential coaches you have available to you, and are ready to start asking how much experience your potential coach has. Coaches involved with ongoing accreditation processes will keep a coaching log book and will easily be able to give you an accurate number of how many hours coaching experience they have, the numbers of clients.

 John McGurk, CIPD recommends, “Specifically ask them how many hours coaching they have and how many assignments they have delivered on, including what kinds of issues. If they don’t have a coaching logbook then it could be that they’ve trained and never practiced, which is as useful as a teacher who has never taught.” Some of your friends may be unwilling to admit that they have worked with a coach reluctant to share their great experiences. Your coach will have a collection of testimonial letters and comments. Ask to see it.

 

• Coaching tool kit.

How comprehensive are your coach’s resources and how flexible is their approach to coaching? Be wary of coaches who use one coaching model in all situations, as with clothes, one size does not really fit all. Coaches with NLP backgrounds, particularly if they are Master Practitioners will have a vast number of coaching skills at their fingertips with the flexibility to move between and combine models. This ensures you get what you set out to achieve, coping with what ever issues come up in your session. Ask your coach about their coaching philosophy, style and what range of coaching tools they use.

• Whose agenda does your coach work to?

Coaching is all about YOU and you reaching your goals. Be very vary of coaches that offer a one size fits all solution or who are unwilling to explore different business models, it is your practice and your coach’s job is to help you discover and create the solution that is right for you.

 Make sure that your coach is prepared to work to your agenda when it comes to scheduling sessions, and be flexible in your approach. Do you want a one-off session, and then return again later, or do you want weekly sessions, or a combination of the two?

 Most coaches agree that the clients, just like the patients you treat with active perio disease, that achieve the most and get the best results are the ones that are committed to a frequent and regular sessions. Discuss with your coach what is right for you. Do you want your coach to work with you face-to-face, or on the telephone? You will probably  experience greater insights and get the most benefit insights when you meet your coach away from your home or workplace, and you can be inquisitive about how powerful telephone coaching is, alternatively, choose a combination of the two.

 

• Choose a coach who has a coach.

By now you are coming towards the end of your selection process and are probably intrigued by how committed to the process of coaching your coach is. Would you buy ortho from a dentist with crooked teeth, perio treatment from a specialist with bleeding gums and stinky breath or meat from a butcher who was a vegetarian? Of course you wouldn’t. So if coaching is so great you would obviously want a coach who is committed to the process and has their own coach wouldn’t you?

 Choose a coach who is so committed to the environment of change that coaching provides that they have their own coach. Ask your coach about their coach, how long have they been in coaching, what are their significant outcomes as a result of coaching? Choose a coach with integrity and who ‘walks the talk’.

 

• Know what you want

Before you commission a coach it is a great idea to have thought about the areas that you would like your coach to work with you on, think about the problems you are having and the outcomes that you want to achieve. If you don’t know what you want, but you know what you don’t want, or what you are not prepared to tolerate any longer, that works too.  It could be an issue about a business development, management/leadership performance or even a health or behavioural problem you may have.

 If your outcome is a little hazy, you can relax, a good coach will spend time with you, tuning, tweaking and clarifying so that you are crystal clear about outcomes that fit you.

• Book an initial intake session before committing.

By now you are really be in the place where you are ready to commission your coach. Before you sign up to a coaching programme, it is important to check that you get on with your coach. Just with patients there are some that we get on with and some that we don’t, some that are best treated by a colleague not because you don’t have the skills you just don’t have the personality fit.

 Book and pay for a taster session or an initial intake session. A taster session will generally be a short session of 30 minutes to one hour  and an intake sessions typically a couple of hours. Obviously an intake session and will give you and your coach a better opportunity to find out how well you are going to work together and give you more information about how your coach works and what results you can expect.

Use the time to discuss how you would like your coach to support you, what level of accountability you want them to hold you to, explore what you want to achieve and the evidence for that. This time is for you to design the coaching alliance that will be supporting you in the future.

Now you are happy with your coach’s credentials, experience and skills and you both get on, commission them, start the process and begin to live the life that until now you have only dreamed of. 

If you would like to know more about dental business coaching, training events for dental teams or NLP  for dentists by Dr Jane Lelean, please contact her at jane@IODB.co.uk or on 07989 757 884.