About Coaching: For Business Owners and Entrepreneurs

 

You have professional advisors to pay attention to the legal, financial, and other aspect of your business. Who pays attention to you? Who helps you build the success of the business by building your skill as a leader?

 

A leadership coach pays attention to who you are as a leader, and helps you shape your leadership style to be more effective.

 

Ann Kruse has been advising and guiding leaders in organizations for over 20 years. When she practiced law, her clientele were primarily entrepreneurs and owners of small businesses. She herself founded and managed both a law practice and a consulting practice. She has been active in and held leadership positions in chambers of commerce and other business organizations. She understands the challenges of starting and sustaining a business.


How Leadership Coaching Works

Coaching is both a relationship and a process. 

 

As a relationship between you and your coach, it has these characteristics:

  • Focuses on you, your needs, and your goals.  You are a unique human being.  Coaching draws on your innate wisdom, creativity, resourcefulness, and energy to reach the goals you have chosen.
  • Results-oriented.  Early in the process, you will decide what results you want to achieve.  The coaching program will be designed to support you in achieving those results. 
  • A journey of self-reflection, experimentation, growth, and change.  It takes a while.  There will be barriers, setbacks, and frustrations along the way.  The coach’s role is to ask tough questions and demand more of you than you demand of yourself, which will enable you to stay in action, get past the setbacks, and achieve the goal you have selected. 
  • Action-oriented.  Learning occurs when you take action and observe the results your actions produce.  Your coach will assist in designing actions for you to take that will help you learn, move forward, and reach your goals. 
  • Requires commitment, accountability, and willingness to accept feedback.  For the coaching process to be successful, you must be willing to set goals to which you are committed, take action in a disciplined way, accept feedback and be held accountable.
  • Builds a foundation for continuous and sustained change.  By drawing on who you are (and not trying to imitate someone else), the process creates a stable foundation for future growth and change.

 

As a process, coaching has four stages:

 

  • Exploring.  In this stage, you and your coach work together (often using assessment instruments and surveys) to get a clear understanding of your current situation and desired future state, including the capabilities the organization requires for leaders in your position. 
  • Commitment.  In this stage, you choose goals for the coaching program and make a commitment to achieve those goals
  • Action.  During the program, you will take actions to achieve your goals.  Your coach will support you through regular conversations to design the actions, discuss the results, and provide feedback.
  • Sustaining.  The value of coaching lasts long after the conclusion of the formal program.  By that time, you will have developed powers of self-observation and self-awareness that you can call upon to meet new opportunities and challenges as they arise. 

 

Coaching adds the most value when certain organizational stakeholders (for example, your board of directors, other advisers, and your direct reports) are actively involved in the process.  The coach will work with you to design the most effective ways for these stakeholders to support you during each stage of the coaching process. 

 

For more information on how coaching works and the benefits of coaching, read About Coaching:  For Leaders, About Coaching:  For Organizations and Coaching FAQs.

 

Ready to get started?  Or do you want more information? 

 

Contact Ann Kruse at 425-391-1882 or click here to send an email.  We’ll discuss your situation and how to design the coaching program that will add the most value.  There is no charge for this consultation.


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