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COACHING – A KEY ENABLER OF SME GROWTH
Author : TRIDIB BHATTACHARJEE April 09, 2018
The SME sector is one of the most important pillars on which India’s growth story is based. This sector makes up for around 45% of India's GDP, around three times of what Corporate India contributes. The sector also employs close to 46 crore people, which is expected to grow at 11.5% annually. As the power of Digital, Government's monetary policies, global competition and other environmental factors disrupt the Indian market, the business environment is changing at an unprecedented rate here. The SMEs in India are hence under huge pressure to evolve their business plans, strategies and capabilities. They also need to implement innovative solutions, enhance customer connect and build a high performance organization. The business owners and their leadership teams are required to drive this transformation while ensuring the growth of their businesses. And they need to achieve these results with less people and within less time and budget. This is indeed an extremely challenging task, which can put the best of leaders under huge stress and skew their work-life balance. These challenges can also significantly impede the organization’s growth, profitability, sustenance and even its survivability.
In order to navigate through these challenging phases, business owners across the globe connect with seasoned Business Coaches who have the capability to work as trusted advisors during this critical part of the journey. Effective business coaching around SMART (Specific Measurable Attainable Realistic Time-bound) goals help SMEs
- Increase business opportunities and revenue streams
- Acquire competitive advantage & future-proofing
- Enhance customer experience & increase customer reach
- Streamline operational processes – be more proactive, predictive & consistent
- Enhance employee productivity
- Build connected ecosystem – employees, partners & customers.
- Mitigate existential threats (1/3 of today’s businesses won’t survive the next 10 years)
Business Coaching
SMEs have found Business Coaching to be very empowering in their effort to identify and resolve possible challenges in some of the following areas:
- Creating effective Business Plan
- Getting access to timely finance
- Developing skilled manpower
- Managing Cash flow management
- Risk profiling & Risk management
- Technology support
- Ensuring optimum usage of production capacity
- Strategy planning and implementation
- Developing Leadership capabilities
- Developing Marketing foundation & Messaging
- Business growth and expansion
- Navigating through external challenges
- Enhancing product quality and support
- Customer relationship management
- Managing competition
- Expanding existing Customer base
- Implementation of digital capabilities for improved service delivery
- Managing product defects, customer complaints and resolutions.
- Maintaining competitive advantage
Leadership Coaching
To succeed in the evolving transformed business paradigm being transformed by Digital, it is absolutely imperative for leaders to empower themselves with new sets of skills, digital fluency, business strategies and an efficient organizational support system. However, in many instances, the evolving paradigm makes a leader
- Feel overwhelmed.
- Face difficulty in focusing on the most important tasks.
- Complain about organizational ineffectiveness.
- Look for a scientific framework to create SMART development goals, strategic roadmap and stay focused on the most important priorities.
- Push for acceleration in career or business by connecting with available opportunities.
- Resolve conflicts with own values, vision, career and the organization's needs.
- Mitigate existential threats (1/3 of today’s businesses won’t survive the next 10 years)
The above challenges bring down the effectiveness of a leader.
Properly structured Leadership Coaching helps a leader:
- Acquire skills to fast-track business growth
- Gain huge competitive advantage over peers.
- Get access to emerging and more lucrative business opportunities.
- Develop into a global leader with enhanced ‘Digital Fluency' and be first among equals.
- Remain grounded and focused on what matters most.
- Resolve conflicts with own values, vision, career and the organization's needs.
- Resolve issues of personal conflict with the organization's values, vision, and priorities.
- Get access to simple tools for understanding what the most important things are for success and satisfaction.
To ensure that SME business owners get tangible results from a coaching engagement, it is very important for them to engage with an Advisor/Coach who has a structured coaching process designed to deliver measurable outcomes. Otherwise the engagement will turn out to be a huge waste of time, money and effort. Within our organization we recognize this aspect and have designed scientific frameworks that touch almost all important aspects of business and leadership domains. These frameworks also help a leader connect to their core strengths, develop fresh perspectives on issues and implement focused actions. Our conversations ensure they stay on course till the desired goals are achieved. Our relationship is based on truth, openness and trust.
In any SME Coaching engagement, the effectiveness of Advisors and Coaches must be directly measured by the successes they have enabled SME business owners to achieve.