The Value of Business Coaching for Individuals

By leveraging their experience, skills and knowledge, a WABC business coach partners with people to identify gaps and strengths within themselves, their teams and their businesses and organizations to access new insights, unblock their performance challenges and seize new opportunities.

SUPPORTING AGILITY AND RESILIENCE

Enhance Your Performance and Achieve Business Goals

As the business world accelerates in complexity, it is paramount for business leaders and individuals to identify opportunities quickly and shift to meet new performance demands.

Adaptability, agile decision-making, resilience, managing paradoxes and building accountability are just a few of the key issues that people face to succeed in an environment of unprecedented global change.

Setting a strategic course and rising to meet these evolving
needs takes disruptive thinking, a learning mentality and the
sustained commitment to change at every level of an
organization. Yet aligning business priorities and individual
performance presents challenges that flex organizational
muscles in new ways.

As leaders and managers seek interconnected
development strategies to equip individuals with new skills,
business coaching can support the activation of individual
and team performance towards organizational goals.

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New Insights & Seizing Opportunities

Business Coaching Drives Higher Performance and Tangible Business Results

At its most fundamental, business coaching takes an individual, team or organization from where they are now, to where they want to be.

By leveraging their experience, skills and knowledge, a qualified business coach partners with people to identify gaps and strengths within themselves, their teams and their organizations to access new insights, unblock their performance challenges and seize new opportunities.

DUAL-FOCUSED FOR RESULTS

Business Coaching is a Distinct Discipline

Business coaching is a distinct discipline that addresses the needs of both the individual and the organization they work within.

A business coach may go by many names, including executive coach, leadership coach, corporate coach, organizational coach or SME coach, yet each one is focused on achieving desired business goals—those shared by both the individual and their organization, no matter the client. This dual focus separates business coaching as a distinct practice from all other kinds of coaching.

Business coaching can be performed in any type of business, organization, or institution. By nature, business coaching is a disruptive, collaborative and supportive role designed to enable change, drive desired results and increase accountability.

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Business Coaches Can Help

All Organizations, Roles, Levels & Industries

BENEFITS OF BUSINESS COACHING

Address Your Diverse Needs

Business coaches are strategic partners who build your business and operational success. Among the broad array of service offerings, business coaches may help:

Navigate the toughest challenges in organizational leadership

Streamline business processes and systems

Rejuvenate business growth

Improve morale

Build interpersonal competencies

Direct and support organizational change

Prioritize goals and develop strategies to achieve objectives within set timeframes

Collaborate to create and execute personal/business development plans

Enhance organizational capabilities

Deliver feedback

Develop skills and knowledge base

Conduct needs analyses

Deal with conflict

Develop and interpret performance assessments

WABC Advantage

We Hold Ourselves to a Higher Standard

At WABC, we believe that business is a potent force for solving social problems, and we are committed to building the credibility of business coaching as a global industry.

As the first global organization to create evidence-based standards for business coaches, we expect all WABC credential holders and members to adhere to our standards including the WABC Professional Standards for Business Coaches and WABC Code of Business Coaching Ethics and Integrity.

These standards are not only essential to how we conduct our business, but how business coaching should be performed at the highest professional standard.

TARGETED BENEFITS OF BUSINESS COACHING

Driving Results at Every Level

For Leaders

Lead with Courage and Clarity

Navigate ambiguity and quickly evolving market conditions with the support of a trusted, safe confident and sounding board. Business coaches help leaders find or reclaim their resolve, courage and confidence to face issues head on, challenge the status quo and transform how organizations are run, including future-proofing the business model your company is built on. Clarify your vision, align your organization, and embrace considered change for sustainable success.

For Managers

Transform Your Teams for the Better

Foster enhanced productivity, greater collaboration and improved engagement with your employees and within teams. Better align your objectives with your organization’s strategic priorities, and build transformative action plans to best your measures of success.

For Consultants

Mobilize Your Clients Towards Action

Determine your client’s needs more clearly and help them realize the strategies, priorities and initiatives for success. Identify the root cause of leadership and structural issues to better address challenges and facilitate business-model changes and organizational transformation. Activate the perspective and behavioral changes to align your client’s business around common goals.

For HR Professionals

Enhance Corporate Culture and Employee Wellness

Foster an aligned corporate culture to better support employees and effectively deliver on business strategy. Attract and retain top-tier talent while you improve employee engagement and satisfaction and create more healthy workplaces. Propel behavioral shifts to guide individuals in achieving personal and professional success.

FOR INDUSTRIAL ORGANIZATIONAL SPECIALISTS

Stimulate Your Clients’ Personal and Professional Growth

Strengthen adaptability and boost resiliency in businesses and organizations. Further your clients’ ability to integrate their holistic selves and make choices that align with organizational goals and their professional aspirations. More effectively synthesize client business goals and create actionable plans to achieve them. Communicate the value of mental health within a business environment.

Frequently Asked Questions

Learn Even More

How did business coaching begin?

We believe there are three broad categories of coaching in the marketplace today: sports, personal and business.

Business coaching is used as an umbrella term to include all types of business and organizational coaching. Thus, business coaching includes both internal and external coaches who work as business coaches, corporate coaches, executive coaches, leadership coaches, organizational development coaches and many more.

The first research papers on business coaching can be traced to performance improvement for sales teams in the 1930s. Business coaching is a hybrid profession informed by related disciplines including coaching, psychology, organizational development, management science and consulting, human resource management, ethics, applied theology, adult learning and training and development. The interdisciplinary nature of business coaching makes it more challenging to define its body of knowledge.

Who uses business coaches?

Business leaders, owners, CEOs, entrepreneurs, directors, managers and high potential talent use business coaching. Anyone who has a business-related personal or professional objective and is ready to take action can be a coachee.

What’s the difference between a business coach, a life skills coach, a mentor, a consultant or a therapist?

business coach engages in meaningful communication with individuals in businesses, organizations, institutions or governments, with the goal of promoting success at all levels of the organization by affecting the actions of those individuals. 

life skills coach (also referred to as a personal coach) collaborates with their coachee in a highly interactive working partnership for the purpose of assisting the coachee to clarify what they really want from life. Life coaches are seen as strategic partners to enhance life satisfaction.

Together, the life skills coach and coachee work on setting more effective personal goals and new strategic actions, staying focused and accountable so that the coachee may lead a more successful and satisfying life. The coach and coachee co-design a direction and the coachee commits to taking action to succeed. Accountability in coaching is shared between the coach and the coachee.

mentor is usually an older and/or more experienced person who provides advice, guidance and support to a younger and/or less experienced person for the purpose of personal, professional, spiritual or life growth. In business settings, those groomed for advancement are often formally or informally mentored by senior executives. Mentors are seen as experts and show protégés “the ropes.”

consultant provides advice or expert knowledge to a client in a particular field or discipline. It’s predominantly one-way communication, with accountability on the consultant for delivering on the outcome. The client is expected to implement the consultant’s recommendations. Business consultants are seen as experts and advise on business issues.

counselor or therapist focuses on psychosocial issues and/or psychological disorders with an emphasis on the diagnosis and analysis of the client/patient. The focus is exclusively on the client/patient and there’s a low possibility that the counselor or therapist will request feedback. Counselors or therapists are typically seen as experts and try to heal psychosocial dysfunctionality.

Your Next Steps

Choose Excellence for Your
Professional and Organizational Goals

Business coaching offers myriad ways to achieve your peak professional performance and organizational objectives. Take the next step towards sustained success on your terms.

Hire a Qualified Business Coach

Search the WABC Business Coach Locator to find your qualified coaching partner in accelerating your professional or organizational achievement.

Become a Business Coach

WABC offers four levels of credentials that are designed to meet the diverse needs of practicing business coaches.

Whether you are beginning your coaching journey (RCC), enhancing your professional services (CBC), mastering coaching specialties (CMBC®) or taking on the most demanding coaching assignments in the market (ChBC®), WABC has a credential to suit your ambition, professional goals and client needs.

Recommend WABC to Your Employer

Are you a champion of business coaching within your organization and want to introduce WABC to your employer to see what’s possible?

Whether your organization has a business coaching program or is interested in building one, WABC accredits in-house programs to ensure that your employees are trained to coach using the latest research-informed best practice and global standards.

Consult with WABC to Leverage Business Coaching More Effectively

Many organizations see the value in using business coaching to unlock the potential within their organization, but don’t know where to start.

WABC offers a range of consulting and business services to identify opportunities and improve business coaching within organizations.