Understand the crucial initial stage of business coaching: alignment. Discover how coaches work with business owners to understand their personal and business goals, identify challenges, and create a clear roadmap for the future.
Video Transcript
Well, I think the first step in business coaching is generally, in fact, in my case, it’s always the alignment. Alignment is simply a word I use for understanding the situation of the business and the business owner’s goals, and becoming fully aligned with them. In other words, I need to know first of all, what are the personal goals of the business owner? Because we can then derive the business goals from the personal goals. If you want a multi-million pound dream house, I need to know that so that we can identify how big the business has to be to deliver the profits to either afford the mortgage or pay for it outright.
So, it starts with what are your personal goals in life? Life’s really short. On average, we live about 4,000 weeks, so we’ve got to make the most of every moment, every week that we’ve got in fulfilling those personal goals. We then develop the business goals that are going to deliver what it is you’re seeking to achieve in your personal life. And then we have to understand what the challenges are. In other words, where are you now? What’s holding you back? What needs to change in order for the business to grow and develop in the way that’s going to deliver your personal goals? That’s the alignment; that’s the first step.
Then, we simply set two, and I draft a simple bullet point plan from that alignment which identifies what it is we’re seeking to achieve over the coming year and how that converts therefore into what we’re going to do in the coming quarter, this next 90 days, 13 weeks. And we set about it, and we do that on the basis of regular meetings, either weekly or fortnightly, primarily fortnightly, occasionally monthly. It’s a bit like a board meeting. So, it works on the basis of a board meeting: “This is what we agreed you were going to get done, or you said you were going to get done last time. How did you get on? What were the issues and the glitches? Or if you’ve done it, fantastic, what’s the next thing?” So, it’s a constant incremental stepwise process of progressing towards achieving the longer-term goals, but obviously, there are interim steps.
Learn more about our approach to an coaching alignment here.
