Every Elite Athlete Has a Coach. What About You?

When to hire a business coach? The answer is simpler than most leaders assume. You hire a business coach the moment you want more from yourself and your team than you can reach on your own. That moment can arrive when things get hard. It arrives just as often when things go well and you can feel there is another level in you.

Two kinds of business coaches

The term business coach covers two worlds.

The first kind focuses on the commercial side of running a company. Think marketing, sales, product development and finance. Most valuable for entrepreneurs who want to grow their business.

The second kind focuses on leadership and management. This coach helps you get better at leading people. That matters for anyone in a leadership role. From a junior team lead at a small company to the founder of a scale-up. Anyone who leads others, in short.

This article is about that second category.

The biggest myth about coaching

Many people think you hire a coach when things go badly. You can, of course. A coach is valuable when you get stuck in your role, struggle with a team, or keep putting off hard conversations.

But look at elite sports. How many top athletes work without a coach? Zero. How many amateur athletes work without a coach? Almost all of them.

That is the difference. The top treats coaching as an essential part of development. Anyone with real ambition sees coaching as part of growth. When things go well, you actually get the most out of a programme. You have the calm and the energy to work on your development, rather than on damage control.

Five signals that it is your moment

Every programme starts with its own trigger. Still, five situations keep coming back in my practice.

You have just stepped into a bigger role and want to lead it well. Your team grows faster than you can keep up with. You have been avoiding certain conversations for weeks. Your results look fine, yet you sense you cannot grow much further the way you work now. Or you know you have more potential than you are currently using.

Recognise one or more? Then this is probably your moment.

What to look for when hiring a business coach

Coaching is an unprotected profession. Anyone can call themselves a business coach tomorrow. So it pays to choose carefully. And yes, I am a coach myself, so read this with a critical eye. You can check every one of these criteria with any coach.

First, look at whether the coach is certified through an official professional body such as NOBCO, EMCC or ICF. In the Netherlands, only a little over 5 percent of coaches are. Certified means someone completed a serious training, built up a minimum number of coaching hours, received supervision, and passed an exam on ethical standards and conduct. It is the best quality guarantee you have up front.

Then look at real leadership experience. A coach who has led teams for years recognises your situations from the inside. They know how a reorganisation feels, or a difficult review.

Ask about the method too. I work with Co-Active. It was the first coach training programme ever accredited by the ICF, and the Institute of Coaching, affiliated with Harvard Medical School, regards the method as the gold standard in coaching. The premise of Co-Active: every person is naturally creative, resourceful and whole. A coach strengthens what is already there.

Also look at flexibility in the approach. Sometimes you need a coaching question. Sometimes the view of someone who has been there. And sometimes just a concrete model for that one conversation. So I combine coaching with mentoring and training, depending on what you need at that moment. If you mainly want to train specific skills, a 1-on-1 leadership course is a logical route.

Finally, check three practical things. Does the coach have a few years of experience as a coach? What do reviews from earlier clients say? And is there a click? You feel that last one in an introductory call. Almost every coach offers one for free. Use that call to get clear together on what you want to achieve. A good programme starts with a clear goal.

Choose your own moment

The best leaders I know invest in themselves while they are growing. Exactly the way a top athlete does.

Want to look at this together? For leaders early or mid-career, I work as a business coach for junior to mid-level managers. If you lead at director level, my role as a business coach for executives is a logical next step. Feel free to plan a free introduction. Then we look together at where the most value is for you.