Making the Connection: Coaching and Healthy Startup Growth
The startup space is a high-octane, fast-paced space. As companies grow, individual performers often become managers and soon, managers of managers. This is why as companies scale, breakneck speeds force personnel to adjust while the company fails to sustain its rapid growth. Because of such conditions, people, teams, leadership, and culture can become progressively more challenging and critical.
Executives, oftentimes, underestimate the value of a cultivated and nurtured employee. To survive (and win in) harsh startup environments, more and more executives are realizing that one of the few things that can consistently keep leadership and culture at the optimum is coaching. But what exactly is coaching?
One of our Startup Executive Coaches, Alice, said it best - "Consulting increases capacity in systems and in the company. While coaching increases learning and capacity in people."
Through effective team coaching, companies will be able to identify key aspects that need to be worked on at a team level. In peer-reviewed study conducted by business and efficiency scholar Wen-Rou Huang (2019), training, which can be delivered through effective coaching, "is an important ongoing investment in human assets to assist employees in learning skills and acquiring knowledge to achieve organizational goals."
Innate within coaching is the ability to take in feedback, process various points of view, and land on clear solutions. Companies are able to realign their teams' visions, purposes, cultures, accountabilities, and roles and responsibilities through the use of coaches and coaching methods. Developing leadership skills and empowering leaders becomes crucial as their decisions often influence peers and the company's strategy.
But more often than not, many new founders feel they don't need coaching, as they want to allocate time and resources to focus on company growth. The irony is that by having a well-trained executive coach - one that knows specifically how to work with startups - they can have a 788% return on their investment (MetrixGlobal). Moreover, according to a study by the ICF Global Coaching Client Study, 99% of individuals and companies who hire a coach are “satisfied or very satisfied” and 96% claim that they would repeat the process.
Effective coaching strategies will allow company leaders to become more confident as they navigate through hurdles with their teammates. Teams will have a durable and synergetic work ethic and, as a result, will become high-performing assets for the company.
Getting to the designated destination as a startup is no small task. But through proactively engaging with a Startup Executive Coach, companies will be able to get things started, create collaborative teams, and measure employee results without experiencing unnecessary volatility. Taking care of personnels' professional development as a priority could be what makes— or breaks— a startup.
Would you risk it?
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Royal Telos Coaching is an executive coaching firm that specializes in helping founders and teams scale sustainably in startup spaces. We support Startups as well as coaches who want to work specifically in Startup spaces. The next Startup Executive Coaching Training opens in January 2022. All students will gain 70 ICF credits upon completion of the program. Spaces are extremely limited. For more information, please apply here!
