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Coaching, Mentoring And Consultations For Motor Dealers

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What Does Coaching Motor Dealers Mean?

When motor dealers get coaching, it enhances their performance. Coaching can benefit anyone, not just athletes.
As Bill Gates said:

Everyone needs a coach. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast or a bridge player. We all need people who will give us feedback. That’s how we improve.

Just like athletes, leaders are under pressure to perform every workday. And just like with athletes, coaching is the best way to ensure that leaders can perform at a high level.
Workplace coaching is a burgeoning industry with a growing body of literature to support it. Here, we’ll break down workplace coaching, how it works, and how you can use it to help grow your garage.

Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime.

The Importance of Coaching for the Motor Dealers

Coaching enables leaders to deal with the unknown.
The workplace and the market are dynamic environments characterized by variable forces. Pursuing goals and inspiring employees for peak performance can drain the energy out of motor repair business owners. Therefore, getting coached is an important part of their growth. And then, they would want to apply the same approach to their team members.
Coaching can be contrasted with a “command and control” leadership style (Grant, 2017). A command-and-control leader is highly directive, decides without consultation, rewards performance, and punishes failure (Wheatley, 1997).
Command and control can be effective in some situations; for instance, when the task at hand is well defined or the organization is small enough that micromanaging is possible. Another approach is needed when tasks are ambiguous and teams are too large to control.
Coaching allows the leader to elicit the strengths and knowledge of the people they are leading. This frees leaders to focus on the big picture, prevents micromanaging, and allows employees to prove their competency.

A Brief Look at the Types and Styles

Two prominent types of workplace coaching are executive coaching and team coaching.
  • Executive coaching is a helping relationship between a consultant and a client with managerial authority and responsibility in an organization (Kilburg, 1996). Executive coaching occurs for many reasons, including integration into a new role, performance issues, or consultation on strategy. It is often performed by an external coach.
  • Team coaching is a coaching engagement with an entire team, to help team members coordinate efforts and use their resources more effectively (Traylor, Stahr, & Salas, 2020). Team coaching often occurs internally, with the team leader adopting a coaching leadership style.
Herminia Ibarra and Anne Scoular explain the different coaching styles in their 2019 article “The Leader as Coach.” They spotlight four different coaching styles:
  • Directive coaching is akin to mentoring when a manager with years of experience tells a younger employee what to do. This style comes easily to many managers.
  • Laissez-faire coaching involves leaving employees to do their work. This style is appropriate when team members are highly effective.
  • Non-directive coaching draws wisdom, insight, and creativity out of others through listening, questioning, and withholding judgment. It does not come easily to most managers.
  • Situational coaching involves balancing directive and non-directive coaching. The authors recommend that managers first practice non-directive coaching and then alternate between leadership coaching styles depending on the context.

3 Proven Benefits of Coaching

1. Leadership effectiveness

In a study measuring leader effectiveness, Thach (2002) found that executives who received six months of coaching increased their effectiveness by 55% when rated by their peers in a 360-degree feedback survey.
The coaching in this study comprised a series of one-on-one coaching sessions provided by an external coach. This type of coaching can contribute to a company coaching culture, which positively affects the entire organization.

2. Team effectiveness

Teams are at the core of how organizations get things done. A literature review investigating both internal and external team coaching found that coaching had a positive effect on team effectiveness and productivity (Traylor et al., 2020).
Coaching was found to be more effective for teams that were struggling with communication, reflection, and self-correction. Coaching was found to improve productivity through mediating factors such as psychological safety (Traylor et al., 2020).

3. Increased employee self-efficacy

Self-efficacy is an individual’s belief that they will accomplish the task at hand. It is a cognitive estimate of a person’s own ability to perform. This belief impacts both stress levels and actual performance.
In an experiment comparing a control group to an experimental group of managers who received coaching, the coached managers reported significantly higher levels of self-efficacy (Leonard-Cross, 2010).
Coached managers also reported feeling more aware of their strengths and weaknesses after the engagement (Leonard-Cross, 2010). With a more accurate view of themselves, these managers felt more prepared to take on challenges.
Autopilot Sale & Scale Systems for Motor Vehicle Sales, Repair, and Valeting SMEs | The Garage Mentor
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What Does Mentoring Motor Dealers Mean?

Mentoring is a protected relationship that supports learning and experimentation and helps individuals develop their potential.
A mentoring relationship is one where both mentor and mentee recognise the need for personal development. Successful mentoring is based upon trust and confidentiality.

Definitions of Mentoring

“Mentoring is for the mentee. Most of all, for the mind of the mentee. I think that Mentoring needs to focus on and develop the mentee’s finest independent thinking about their work, their career, their life, their dreams.The Mentor’s perspective is an important ingredient in this special relationship. But it feeds. It is not the feast"

“To help and support people to manage their learning to maximise their potential, develop their skills, improve their performance, and become the person they want to be.”

“Off-line help by one person to another in making significant transitions in knowledge, work or thinking.”

The different types of mentoring

Mentors may enter a long term mentoring relationship or may be called upon to act as a one-step mentoring advice point for a specific topic. In all roles, the mentor will act as an independent source of career advice and support. Training is available for both mentors and mentees and is strongly advised before entering into any form of a mentoring relationship.

Long-term formal mentoring

Long term formal mentoring involves a number of meetings with the same mentor over a period of time. As either mentor and mentee you will be participating in a formal University of Southampton mentoring program and you will both have agreed to a level of commitment to the program. This gives you both the chance to get to know each other, and therefore the mentor can tailor how they share their experience and give encouragement.

One-stop mentoring advice

If you have a specific need you can select a mentor with experience in that specialist area to meet with once (or more if you wish!)

Informal mentoring

There are currently many informal mentoring relationships within the University. An important advantage of having undertaken mentoring training, even for informal mentoring relationships, is that there will be a shared understanding of the mentoring process for both mentor and mentee.

Difference Between Coaching and Mentoring

To distinguish between coaching and mentoring, let’s look at the roots of these approaches.
Coaching usually bolsters an existing skillset, and it is more formal. Coaching helps people to hone the skills they already have and excel at something they are already doing.
Mentoring is a more informal process where the mentor is an expert in a particular area and passes on know-how and skills the mentee doesn’t have in a more directive manner.
Top performers are unlikely to engage in mentoring but may engage in coaching.
Importance of mentoring motor dealers - The Garage Mentor
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What Does Consulting Motor Dealers Mean?

Consulting is more than giving advice.
Consulting includes a broad range of activities, and many consultants often define these practices quite differently. One way to categorize the activities is the professional area of expertise (such as competitive analysis, corporate strategy, operations management, or human resources).
Another approach is to view the process as a sequence of phases—entry, contracting, diagnosis, data collection, feedback, implementation, and so on. However, these phases are usually less discrete than most consultants admit.
Clarity about goals influences an engagement’s success. Here are consulting’s eight fundamental objectives:
  1. Providing information to a client.
  2. Solving a client’s problems.
  3. Making a diagnosis, which may necessitate a redefinition of the problem.
  4. Making recommendations based on the diagnosis.
  5. Assisting with the implementation of recommended solutions.
  6. Building a consensus and commitment around corrective action.
  7. Facilitating client learning—that is, teaching clients how to resolve similar problems in the future.
  8. Permanently improving organizational effectiveness.
Motor Dealers Consulting Scope | The Garage Mentor
The lower-numbered purposes are better understood and practised. They are also more frequently requested by clients. Many consultants, however, aspire to the higher levels on the pyramid than most of their clients target to achieve.
Purposes 1 through 5 are generally considered legitimate functions, though some controversy surrounds purpose 5. Management consultants are less likely to address purposes 6 through 8 explicitly, and their clients are not as likely to request them. But leading firms and their clients are beginning to approach lower-numbered purposes in ways that involve the other goals as well.
Goals 6 through 8 are best considered by-products of earlier purposes, not additional objectives that become relevant only when the other purposes have been achieved. They are essential to effective consulting even if not recognized as explicit goals when the engagement begins.
Moving up the pyramid toward more ambitious purposes requires increasing sophistication and skill in the processes of consulting and in managing the consultant-client relationship. Sometimes a professional tries to shift the purpose of an engagement even though a shift is not called for; the firm may have lost track of the line between what’s best for the client and what’s best for the consultant’s business.
But experienced consultants do not try to prolong engagements or expand the scope. If the needs grow, both parties may move on to other goals.
At The Garage Mentor, we understand your points and objectives and apply the most suitable approach to assist you in achieving the desired results.
Importance of consulting motor dealers - The Garage Mentor
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