The Business Coach Learning Cycle

Business coaching helps to take people through a practical learning process, in a methodical manner, with the main objective of improving their ability to apply inherent skills to deal with certain issues. Business coaching is a powerful tool for the enhancement of the most important reserve of any business, the employees.

Many business coaches have resorted to using and implementing David Kolbs learning cycle. If you are looking for a coaching technique that can help improve the employee work performance, this is a learning cycle known to produce great results.

. Life provides us with little gifts, which are presented to us in the form of opportunities. These opportunities are provided for us to experience the potential of our capabilities that many a times we are not even aware of.

. Business coaching equips us to accept the criticism and feedback that result from these experiences. By clarifying and questioning, we can get a better idea about our performance. Without feedback we would never know where we are going wrong.

. On further questioning and probing, we can receive clearer insight and understanding. This enables us to reflect on our experiences, the action that we took and the consequences that resulted from the action.

. From these personal insights and discoveries, conclusions can then be drawn. If they are sufficiently influential, you can even use these conclusions to relate to either past or present circumstances or situations.

. The important lessons that are learned by this particular method can then be preserved for future use, in the case of unexpected events.

. From these valuable experiments, more opportunities come along.

It is important for the employees of an organization to be able to learn from mistakes and experiment with change in attitude and approach. This experiment with human resources, with a little patience and effort, could result in profit for the business and the personal growth of the employees.

Problems should be regarded as opportunities that allow us to learn more, work harder, gain more experience and become smarter. They equip us to handle issues and situations on the personal and professional front. In any case, the best way to learn things is not by reading or studying, but by experiencing life and then reflecting on the lessons learnt. The process enables you to draw conclusions from these reflections and ultimately experiment with the unknown.

As a business coach, it is important to regularly practice experimenting, in order to ensure significant success. If we fail to learn from our experiences, we could be open to committing the same errors again. If the learning cycle is not effectively implemented, employees will never be able to relate to their mistakes and in turn, they will not be able to grow within the organization. This would result in emotional and intellectual stagnation. From the coaching point of view, the Kolbs learning cycle is a lot more effective and successful. It helps incorporate the doctrine that empowerment leads to involvement, which in turn leads to commitment that again results in increased performance.