Unknown to many people is the fact that success coaching – especially in corporate settings – is completely linked to effective goal setting.

To understand the link between success coaching and effective goal setting, it helps to first clarify that goal setting is considered effective only when the goals set are achieved, or at least seriously acted upon. Goal setting, contrary to what many people think is not just about stating what you want to achieve after such and such a period. Effective goal setting is a two (main) point process – starting with the definition of what you want to achieve – and then more importantly, taking the steps required to achieve what you want to achieve and ultimately achieving it – or at least learning why you didn’t in case it fails to work out, with what you learn in this case serving as guidelines for future goal setting.

Further, to understand the link between success coaching and effective goal setting in a corporate setting, it is essential to clarify that an organization is the sum of all its members. This means that the success of an organization is the sum of the individual successes of all its members, while its failure is the sum is sum of the individual failures of all its individual members. There is no better place to see the demonstration of this fact that in a football pitch – where the individual members of the organization in question, namely the players of the team in question, individually contribute to the success or otherwise of the organization and where the a slight failure by one member of the organization (a player) can often cost the team a victory, since games are usually won on very small margins. Of course, every team comes with a leader called a coach whose brief is to teach the members of the organization (the team) goal achievement strategies.

And although a business organization works in pretty much the same way as a football team, not many business leaders – be they supervisors, managers or chief executives – like to see themselves in a coaching role. Many of them describe themselves as business leaders (of course using whatever corporate title their climb has given them), but they don’t go as far as defining what that business leadership constitutes – which in essence should be success coaching.

In fact, it can be argued that the success or otherwise of a business organization depends on the extent to which the people in leadership positions in it see themselves as coaches, specifically coaching the people working under them success skills, seeing that, as mentioned, it is the sum of the individual successes of the individuals who make up the organization (in the diverse small roles in the organization) that will ultimate lead to the success of the organization. Of course for this to come to pass, the organization has to start by inculcating a sense of ownership of the organization to its members – so that they can come to own it the way football players feel the ownership of their team, hence their playing for ‘our team’ to win, as they usually refer their action.