Coaching and Consulting on Business & Corporate Strategy

Hello there! Welcome to the course: Coaching and Consulting on Business & Corporate Strategy.

Let’s demystify Strategy and Management coaching & consulting!

Most of the courses focused on coaching are based on explaining why is coaching important, what should be the benefits, general approaches and processes, and similar. And, that might be OK for Life coaching since the Coach is rather focused to help a client to define his own goals, alternatives, and similar, and where a coach does not have to be an expert since he shouldn’t give an advice.

On the other hand, I would like to help you here to become a real Business Strategists, someone’s true Strategy Thinking Partner, or Sparring Partner – whatever you call it. And, I believe that requires going a bit deeper into the Strategy related Content and Processes – not just Coaching or Consulting per se. As a Business Coach, you’ll be required to demonstrated expertize and first-hand experience relevant for managing organizations, and sometimes, to give advice – simply, that requires a Coach who “walks the talk”.

As a Coach Ajit Nawalka once said: “People will not hire you for the time they spend talking to you. They will hire you because of the insights they will get after working with you…because of the results they will see translating into their everyday life, the shifts in mindset and behavior they will experience.” Coaches are looking for occasional insights that restructure thinking, and change client’s behavior. So, we are here to help strategists to synthesize vast arrays of soft information into new perspectives.

To do that – we have structured this course around four Sections:

- How do you compete?

- What does your strategy creation process look like?

- How you are going to coach them? And

- Running Discovery Conversations (or Diagnosing).

In the Section where we discuss how you compete, we are going to set the stage for deep strategy conversations. We are combining theory and business philosophy packed around many useful tools and frameworks that consultants use in their everyday practice – and this should help a coach (or a consultant) to structure his sessions and ask relevant questions for the Strategy related Context and Content. For example, we are going to explore generic strategies, applying different business models, how Design Thinking philosophy can help us with innovations, what does Blitzscaling means and should you experiment with it and when, and similar.

In the next Section where we discuss different approaches to strategy creation – we are focusing on habits of a strategist regarding how he is approaching his strategy creation process – the Coach’s role is to challenge that and broaden the perspectives or possibilities. Here, we are going to present 10 different approaches like Classic, Strategic planning, Positioning, Entrepreneurial, Learning, like a Pirate, and similar. The point is to explore and distinguish different possibilities for the strategy creator.

Next, we are going to help you better understand how to apply coaching skills into the Strategy related topics. We are going to present here:

- Some basic rules of a coaching, including the logic behind great coaching questions;

- Explain how to apply the most common coaching frameworks (GROW, STEPPA, OSKAR, etc.);

- Give you hints how to cope with the most demanding coaching issues; and

- Give you an example of a well-structured coaching questions applied in a “Strategy Stress-Test”, developed by a Harvard Business School Professor;

Finally, we added another Section (or Chapter) in this course, with an idea to have an integrative role, to give you more ideas and guidance, and help you in running your own Discovery Conversations, or Diagnosing talks. You’ll be able to find a lot of useful questions, some interesting distinctions, and similar – all related to different factors affecting Strategy of any business.

But remember, all those elements relevant for the coaching rules, frameworks and hints can be used to design and structure your entire coaching conversations (sessions or meetings), while all the tools and frameworks related to the strategy topics (like business model canvas, generic strategies, BCG matrix, etc.) you can use for some specific sub-topics within that dialog, meaning areas you would like to explore in more details, and then jump-back to the main coaching storyline.

On top of all of that, you can find a lot of supplementary materials within Attachments (or Resources Sections) – hidden here and there. Enjoy!