From the Sidelines: Coaching and Mentoring

There are millions of coaches around the world, thousands of them in sports most of us have never heard of. The fact is that the majority of them are probably not particularly good. As in business, outstanding leadership in coaching is rare. Also as in business, examining the practices of some of the best coaches in the world can elicit some useful leadership lessons. As we have argued throughout this book, the high-performance sport metaphor can add another dimension to the way businesspeople think about leadership. In this chapter, we examine the coaching and mentoring aspects of sport. We suspect that business leaders can benefit from a better appreciation of the coaching and mentoring function inherent in sport because it throws new light on one of the most important aspects of leadership, the cultivation of relationships with followers and colleagues. Sport provides a twist to business leadership that neither exclusively prescribes a command nor consensus approach. Instead, it is all about the relationships.