Coach or Consultant?

With the rise of coaching as a trendy thing to do, many consultants have stopped calling themselves "consultants" and started calling themselves "coaches".

This is both unfortunate and misleading. Coaches and Consultants are not the same. So what are the differences between coaches and consultants?

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Do You Need a Coach or a Consultant?

The previous post on Coach or Consultant? may have mistakenly given the impression that consultants are bad. Far from it. The intent of that post was to differentiate consultants and coaches.

When do you want a consultant and when do you want a coach?

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Are you a Manager or a Leader?

... for the last 30 years, it has been ideas about leadership, not management, that have come to dominate our conversations and our bookshelves. We believe it is time to redress the balance. Leadership is about the traits and behaviors that make us worth following. Management is about how we get work done through others.1

As you read Organisational Coaching, you may notice that I always refer to "managers" and "management". This often causes grief as someone comes back with the inevitable, "we need leaders and not managers".

When did management become such as bad thing?

  1. Birkenshaw J and Goddard J,What is Your Management Model?, MITSloan Management Review, Winter 2009, Volume 50, No. 2. ↩

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Andrew's picture
Andrew September 7, 2009

Prepare for the Cross

A couple of weeks ago I was in court as a witness during a civil case. A friend and business associate became involved in an business arrangement that went sour. It ended up in court so you can guess that they didn't manage to find any easy resolution. As a business associate, I was able to give a valuable point of view.

The first lesson is a reminder to avoid court if at all possible. It is expensive and time consuming and a massive distraction from business.

This was my first experience in a Singapore Court.

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Topic: Strategic Errors, Strategy
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Andrew August 26, 2009

Weather, Global Positioning and Clueless Managers

What data can not tell you.

I don't have a GPS. Well strictly my phone has one and I did play with it for a while however I never got around to subscribing for the map updates and it remains one of my phone's many unused features. Instead Google maps is my friend. So when I'm meeting a new client, Google is open, the destination is found and the route is planned. I don't always estimate the travel time correctly however I rarely get lost.

So it's always been a source of wonder to me how someone can get lost with a GPS.

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Topic: Perception
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Andrew August 18, 2009

Understanding 360 Assessments

We often use 360 Assessments during our organisational coaching engagements. While organisations are considering these tools we often receive numerous questions about the 360 assessments and how they should be applied. To make life easier I pulled a number of the answers together into this article.

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Topic: Feedback, Management Development, Performance Management
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Andrew August 11, 2009

Significance

"He had a way of lifting the most ordinary of colleagues to a new appreciation of their worth." (Contemporary of Wernher von Braun, quoted in Space Race by Deborah Cadbury)

How proud are your staff to be working for you and your organisation? Do they have a sense that they are doing something significant, meaningful, something worthwhile?

Imagine your manager walked up to one of your colleagues and said, "You are just so insignificant!"

Ouch! That hurts. Who wants to be insignificant?

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Topic: Leadership, Motivation
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Andrew August 4, 2009

Five Steps to Build Capability

Here are five simple steps you can take today to unlock more capability in the people who work with you.

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Topic: Building Capability, Management, Organisational Growth
Andrew's picture
Andrew July 28, 2009

CC Wars

Email with CC

I sent him an email and put the boss on cc just to make sure he responded.

Heard that line?

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Topic: Communication, Culture, Email
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Andrew July 21, 2009

The Value of Travel Agents

The report of my illness grew out of his illness. The report of my death was an exaggeration. (Mark Twain, May 1897.)

Let's illustrate our definition of value using the travel industry.

The rise of the Internet threatened to put travel agents on the list of endangered species. Travel agents, along with all the other business in the genus of Middleman were destined for eventual extinction. The prophecy was logical. Airlines, like the over quoted example of Dell Computers, could bypass travel agents and sell directly to their customers.

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Topic: Creating Value
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Andrew July 14, 2009

Creating Value

Creating Value

What is the unique value that your organisation creates for it's customers?

Do you know?

Very few businesses really understand the value they create and so sell themselves short and focus on the wrong areas in building their business.

Here is a definition to get us started on the way:

Value is the tangible benefit that our customers receive from our organisation, that:

  1. They cannot get from our suppliers, and

  2. They can not - or do not want to - obtain for themselves.

Read it again.

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Topic: Creating Value
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Andrew July 7, 2009

If Not Interview, Then What?

What are the best ways to select candidates?

The post, The Interview Illusion, talked about the common self-deception that managers can read people well during an interview. Unstructured interviews are an unreliable way of selecting candidates. So which approaches are stronger?

Here are three suggestions.

  1. Situational Assessments

    The most accurate way to assess whether someone is suitable for a job is to observe them on the job and measure their output.

    This approach suits operational jobs very well.

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Topic: Recruitment
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Andrew June 30, 2009

Customers

Customers

What is the essential, actually mandatory, prerequisite for a business to exist?

I have asked this question of hundreds of managers and business owners and their usual answers include an idea, money, capital, a product, funding, staff, a name, a brand, a registered legal entity and so on.

It is always a surprisingly long time before the correct answer emerges.

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Topic: Customer Focus, Priorities, Strategy

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Contributors

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Andrew

Andrew Wilson is the Founder and Managing Partner of Vaughan Govier Pte Ltd. He is passionate and committed to the development of the management capacity within companies through the craft of...

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