The importance of coaching

This week’s guest blogger is my colleague James Baehr, a Senior Advisor at Greybeard Advisors LLC, and a contributing author of the new book “Next Level Supply Management Excellence.” Jim can be reached at [email protected].

In an earlier piece we addressed the importance of execution. There’s a great quote from William G. Pollard, Physicist and Clergyman – “It is not always what we know or analyzed before we make a decision that makes it a great decision. It is what we do after we make the decision to implement and execute it that makes it a good decision.” This thought reinforces the importance of execution – it takes work to reach a decision point and even more work to make a decision reality. This is the challenge faced by many Supply Management organizations when they make a commitment to take on Strategic Sourcing.

Supply Management groups that see the value – the real value of reduced cost and improved processes that come with Strategic Sourcing - will complete an assessment of their current state and identify what they need to become more “strategic”. They will then take the next step to train, or retrain, their professionals on the principles and techniques. But, all too often, this is where the commitment can lose momentum. The educated and energized professionals return to their duties and then find themselves faced with the challenge of independently applying Strategic Sourcing practices. Their energy can fade quickly if they struggle with the process and the only resource available is a training manual (or an online course). It’s likely at this point that they will return to the comfort of dealing with conventional purchasing duties. It won’t take long for what was acquired through training to be lost.

This scenario is what makes the role of a coach or advisor so important. While this may sound self serving for an advisor to make this declaration, the hard reality is that coaching can make the difference between a good decision, and a not so good decision. Why? Because, one of the primary functions of a coach is to alter existing behaviors. Having a competent, experienced advisor available serves to: continue the instruction started in training; reinforce the learning achieved during training; provide subject matter expertise; avoid the pitfalls that only experience can identify; and, encourage the use of the Strategic Sourcing process in real-life sourcing projects.

“It is what we do after we make the decision to implement and execute that makes it a good decision.”

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