You think HR is for softies! Mr and Ms reasonable. The nice people who ensure you do the right thing, the ones who resolve conflict and get managers out of the holes they have dug for themselves. You think HR is about softening the blow of redundancy or putting a human face on absence management. Then you wouldn’t expect a Performance Coach to be part of HR. A performance coach is not a softy.

A performance coach is not a mentor,they do not  take you under their wing and offer you the benefit of their wisdom gained from many years experience. A performance coach is not an executive coach, they do not observe senior managers in action and give them impartial feedback and tips on how to be more effective. The performance coach aims to bring out the killer in you.

If one of your go getting top performing managers seems to be losing their edge, no longer willing to pull up trees and knock down walls in the companies cause or maybe they have lost a little self belief then you call in the Performance Coach. The job of the performance coach is to bring out the alpha male within , the over confident, over ambitious, dominating aggressive individual the organisation needs to drive through the restructuring, impose new working arrangements and enforce the budget cuts.

As such the use of a performance coach should carry a Use With Caution warning. Of course this is the USA  home of macho management and this type of management doesn’t seem appropriate during a pandemic or when organisation’s are expected to show greater concern for employees mental wellbeing. But managers do occasionally need to show their tough side as well as their caring side and sometimes as a leader you want to send your manager out all fired up.

If you want to see just how empowering and energising a session with a good performance coach can be watch the first series,  first  episode of Billions on Sky Atlantic.