SME network meetings can be very useful, and sometimes amusing, as well as being a considerable consumer of time and patience. They often seem to be infested with ‘life coaches’ and various brands of ‘personal coach’.

Coaching plays a crucial role in all our lives, our parents give it to us, those around us at work give it to us, our boss gives it to us, and if we are very lucky, we find at some point, or points in our lives, a mentor who is able to lift our performance significantly. Even Roger Federer, the greatest tennis player I have ever seen, has a coach.

However, at a network meeting I attended, I found myself chatting to someone who had a business in ‘corporate wellness’ who doubled as a ‘personal coach’ in everything from physical training, to it seemed, marriage counselling.

When asked, he was not able to define what a ‘Wellness coach’ did, and did not even have an elevator pitch that made any sense. It seemed he was there to make peoples life easy, help  them deal with stress, to anticipate stress and encourage practises that would help when stress came around again. It seems that he is doing OK, nicely dressed, a  nice car, but who knows, perhaps his mum gave them to him.

Maybe it is just me, but I failed to understand what he did, and why someone would pay him to do it.

When he finally asked me what I did, after blanketing me with fluffy bullshit for 10 minutes, I told him it was the same thing he did, but I had only two tools:

Communication and Transparency.

Communication.

Encourage and coach the leadership of businesses to ensure they have a coherent, well thought out strategy, along with the plans to implement and adjust as they manage their business across all the functional areas in as close to real time as possible. In addition, they have to accommodate the pressures from outside over which they have no control, but which will influence performance.  Then they need to communicate all that to everyone in the business, from top to bottom, so all know it, and understand it, relate,  and live to it.

Transparency

Transparency leads to accountability, due diligence and honesty, all of which adds up to trust.  It leads to understanding of what good performance of the business, their work groups and themselves specifically means, and what the impact of their performance has on others.

Easy.

Do all that and the need  for corporate wellness coaching goes away, as stress is managed and shared.

Recently I labelled myself a cranky old curmudgeon to a long term mate in a conversation after a ‘sherbet’ or two. He clarified by pointing out I had also been a cranky young curmudgeon. A bit harsh, although perhaps true, but I would prefer to call it ‘leadership’.