Coaching is now the latest and greatest fad in HR training business in India. It must be treated with caution before it gets maligned due to its mishandling by people who are just jumping on the bandwagon because it has awesome opportunities in the market domain.

Coaching is the most potent tool available for transformation and performance enhancement. It is much more than a fancy wrapping for instructions, a package for inspirational slogans or a sugar-coating for orders.

In sports, as a player develops and gets more competitive, he/she spends more, not less time with the coach. Moreover, as he/she gets better, they demand higher calibre of coaching. Thus, the most expert players work with the most expert coaches, and by the time a player reaches the professional ranks, he/she is working with the best coaches in the world.

In business, the reverse happens. As a manager moves up in an organisation, roles and responsibilities grow more complex. The need to engage in innovative thinking increases and the cost of missed opportunities rises dramatically.

As business moves into an era of ever more fierce global competition, the toughest challenge facing managers is to commit time and energy to learning throughout their careers.

The reason that coaching could get undermined is in the danger that the field is now flooded with a host of people who claim to be a coach or are training coaches and better still, certifying them due to a sudden opportunity in the market place. Let us now determine how a leader can become a good coach for his team in the next week.

Vibhuti Jha is the president, Human Potential Project. The views expressed in this column are that of the author only.