The professional coaching industry has undergone a significant evolution over the past several years. The use of business and executive coaches has become mainstream and the results are in—coaching works! Business coaches and consultants are commonly used to help smooth the transition of a new executive, provide hands-on training for a high-potential manager, strengthen relationships between team members, and help business owners achieve higher levels of success. But as the industry evolves, we see several trends emerging; some are exciting while others give us pause.

More and more companies, both large and small, are starting to add another responsibility to busy managers’ plates—coaching. It is common for today’s managers to refer to one-on-one meetings with their associates as a coaching session and for some of these managers to be enrolled in a coach training program. There are three primary reasons for this trend. First, companies want to publicly recognize the capabilities of their best managers by giving them an official designation: Coach. It provides these leaders a platform to solve problems with other leaders and to facilitate teams within the organization. Second, it is a way for companies to give people a level of prestige within the company. Being chosen by your peers as a person who demonstrates exceptional communication skills and finds creative solutions to troublesome situations can place you on the fast track for promotion. Third, it can be a cost-cutting method that enables companies to say they have coaching resources available for their associates without actually spending money on coaching services.

With the broad acceptance of professional coaching among Fortune 500 companies and recent studies pointing to its great return on investment, more and more organizations are tapping into the benefits of coaching. With the cost of top executive and business coaches increasing and the availability of self-employed coaches barely making a living in their practice, there is a simultaneous push to train internal coaches and hire coaches from the outside as internal practitioners.

As the numbers of coaches continue to grow exponentially, supply is outstripping demand. As with any industry, when supply exceeds demand prices drop, often precipitously. There are signs of this in almost every major city with an ever-growing contingency of coaches. With low barriers to entry, the teaching that “everyone’s a coach,” while well-intentioned, is starting to undermine the professionalization of the field. You can barely go to a networking event today without meeting half a dozen people with “coach” on their business card. As the title becomes ubiquitous, coaches face the danger of becoming the “consultant” of the twenty-first century—the title everyone uses when they’re in between jobs.

For many coaches, the words of Charles Dickens in A Tale of Two Cities still ring true: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” While many top coaches are doing very, very well and continuing to land bigger and bigger jobs, the number of coaches who are barely eking out a living is growing. In my previous book, Getting Started in Personal and Executive Coaching (John Wiley & Sons, 2003), I found 53 percent of coaches reported earning less than $20,000 per year, while fewer than 9 percent made over $100,000. Other studies have found slightly different numbers, but the overall growth among the top 10 percent is much higher than the growth of the bottom 50 percent. So the rich get richer, because they are masters in their field, and the poor get poorer, feeding the trends outlined earlier.

In studying business and executive coaches making over $100,000 per year, virtually all of them use a strategy my co-author Bill Zipp calls the “double niche.” Not only do top coaches have a specific area of expertise, such as marketing, leadership development, sales, team building, or diversity (the first niche), they also apply this expertise to a specific industry or profession (the second niche).

The Business Coaching Toolkit is a collection of application-based coaching tools you can use with clients, managers, or employees to help them overcome a variety of common problems encountered in today’s workplace. Whether it’s increasing their time management skills, giving feedback to an employee, or building their leadership team, these proven tools present an endless supply of easy-to-apply exercises.

This book was written for four primary groups:

Professional Business Coaches and Consultants will find practical tools to use with a wide variety of clients. You will find these tools and techniques bring a new dimension to your work with clients and often open up doors to “speak truth” to them at a deeper level. Both authors and all the contributing experts are accomplished business coaches and consultants who understand how to leverage a tool to quickly establish rapport or to create a stronger client-consultant relationship.

Trainers and Professional Speakers often use group exercises in teaching attendees a new skill or to illustrate a point. Many of these tools can be used in large group settings or can be easily adapted for your next small group training event. Both authors are members of the National Speakers Association (www.nsaspeaker.org) and regularly conduct public and private training seminars. We know the importance of making sure every group exercise is a big success. Every single tool in this book has been extensively used and perfected in a wide variety of settings.

Internal Coaches often have the thankless job of providing developmental feedback to a manager or working with a high potential to overcome a specific negative trait. At the same time, they need to present it in such a way that the person will grow past it or change their behavior to avoid the negative consequences of it, such as getting fired, demoted, or transferred. Many of the experts we interviewed for this book work extensively within mid-to-large organizations, including a few who either are, or train, internal coaches. They understand the sensitive nature of being an internal coach, the limitations of confidentiality, and the necessity of building a culture of trust. The techniques we present in this book will not only help you establish your expertise as a creative problem solver, but will also assist you in coaching high potentials to achieve even greater levels of success.

Managers and Executive Leaders are frequently required to act as a “coach” to their direct reports and peers. However, most managers, leaders, or business owners have little to no training about how to effectively help their people overcome obstacles, negative behaviors, or increase their communication skills. If you’re a leader looking for some easy-to-use tools, this book is definitely for you. We have taken the most common situations encountered in a company and found the best tools around to help you successfully coach others in a variety of tough situations.

There are several great books about coaching skills and training tools, but here are four reasons why we believe this toolkit uniquely deserves to be on every practitioner’s desk.

I’m frequently asked to speak at events for coaches, consultants, speakers, and trainers where I often tell their members, tongue firmly in cheek, “The two biggest problems faced by service professionals today is they don’t know how to find new clients and second, they don’t know what to do with them once they land them.” In my previous book, Getting Started in Personal and Executive Coaching (John Wiley & Sons, 2003), I dealt extensively with the first problem. This book focuses on the second.

BUILD A STRUCTURED PROGRAM USING THIS BOOK AS YOUR GUIDE. We have selected over a dozen of the most common skill-based problems a person would encounter that would lead them to seek out a business coach. We have heard from many clients that they dislike the vagueness of the formal coaching relationship and feel frustrated by the lack of structure most coaches use. See whether this conversation sounds familiar:

PLAN A SKILL BUILDING FOR MANAGERS WORKSHOP. Consider creating a daylong Skill Building for Managers Workshop based on several tools from this guide. Teach each skill to the managers or employees and then have them practice in small groups.

Each chapter of this book presents a specific coaching tool. A business case is made for each tool and a business impact story on the real-life use of the principles behind the tool is presented. And, as mentioned before, the first 10 chapters end with the top 10 ways to use the tool. Here’s a brief overview of each chapter and some of the highlights you will learn.

Coaching works, there’s no doubt about that. But the coaching industry is going through tremendous change that all professional coaches will need to address. Getting better at what we do will go a long way to helping us meet the challenge of change. That is what this book is committed to providing you: tools to keep you on the cutting edge of your coaching craft.