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.

The nature of most organization’s business is such that their overall success depends on the success of their sales force. An organization’s sales force is its face to the public – and a well motivated sales force can just as easily create a formidable brand as an ill motivated sales force can irreparably break a thriving brand.

It is in recognition of these facts that many organizations are increasingly investing heavily on their sales force incentive programs.

The main aim of launching a sales force incentive program is to keep the force highly motivated, aware of the damage an ill-motivated sales force can do to an organization. The underlying goal of a good sales force program is to get the sales force to have a sense of ownership of the organization they happen to be working for, so that they can see its success as their own success and its failure as their own failure. The opposite to this is having a sale force that doesn’t have a sense of ownership of the organization they are working for, where they get the idea that they are working for their bosses for instance, often leading to disastrous results. This is because in keeping with intrinsic human nature, they might often feel the urge to avenge on wrongs they feel their bosses might have done them during their sales missions, thereby doing the brand they happen to be promoting irreparable damage.

Most sales force incentive programs also seeks to exploit the competitive tendencies that are deeply ingrained in our psyches as human beings. Now this is only possible after first getting the sales force to have a sense of ownership of the organization and the brand. Having gotten to this step, the sales team coach can now get the members of the team to start competing in terms of how much they deliver in terms of sales units, for instance.

The financial incentive plays an important role in most sales force incentive programs too. This is generally implemented through a commission scheme – where the members of the sales force earn a commission on an incremental basis, depending on their delivery. Here we can have, for instance, a member earning commission at the rate of 5% per unit for every 1000 units, with the same rising to say 7.5% per unit for every 2,000 units and 10% per unit for everything above3,000 units sold. A common mistake made with regard to commission schemes however is to set too high targets for the various commission figures. When you do this, the people in question just give up on the whole commission thing – and decide to wait for the retainer (if you offer one) or to go looking for another job if no retainer is being offered.

Beyond the financial incentives, most modern sales force incentive programs also incorporate psychological incentives – where sales force members who are delivering are made to know that their stellar contribution is highly appreciated and that they matter to the organization and the organization’s fate rests with them (where that happens to be the case). And insignificant as this might seem – it sometimes proves to be even more effective than the financial incentive only, especially when properly implemented.

Every prudent business owner recognizes the need to keep their staff happy continually. Disgruntled staff can be a huge liability to the organization, as they are bound to make more deliberate mistakes and to treat customers badly in businesses where there is direct customer-staff interaction, leading to loss of business in the long run.

In a bid to keep their staff happy, many employers invest in the most obvious things – good pay, flexible working hours, a comfortable dress code whenever possible – and so on and so forth. And while all these contribute to keeping the staff happy, there are other smaller things that could influence staff mood and that unfortunately many business owners choose to ignore. Take for instance things like office seating. Unknown to many employers the quality of seating they invest in could have a huge effect in staff satisfaction and performance in the long run.

As more and more employers get sensitized on the role that office seating has on staff satisfaction and productivity, many are finally seeing the need to invest in quality office seating – right from the office chairs used by the ordinary office staff to the egg chairs in some office and the executive seats used by top brass in their offices.

This shift of attention to office seating is in part motivated by the realization that the way a person sits affects their energy consumption in working and that in some cases, energy management can be just as important as time management. It is in realization of this factor that the concept of what has come to be known as ergo dynamic seating – often implement through an office posture chair, came to find widespread acceptance.

The office posture chair works from the understanding that the range of office equipment referred to as ergonomic office seating – right from office chairs, egg chairs and executive seats derive the ‘ergonomic’ quality from the posture in which they allow the people working while seated on them to sit, but don’t optimize on the same.

People who have used the office posture chair have testified to huge energy savings they gain by using the posture that such a chair – which comes with a number of extra features above what an ordinary ergonomic office chair comes with – forces them to work from.

This is a huge departure from what we had in chairs that were said to be truly ergonomic – but whose use still left the users drained of energy at the end of the working day, often leading to resentment and health complaints in the long run.

The beauty of the office posture chair is that it does not cost so much – and it tends to be in fact cheaper than most of the ordinary ergonomic chairs which offer no more extra value for the extra price they are sold at. Even where the office posture chair happens to be sold for a price as high as the price of an ordinary ergonomic chair, it does at least offer some more value to show for the little extra that one has to pay for it – though as mentioned, in most cases it tends to cost less than an ordinary ergonomic chair. Talk of more value for less cost!

Today’s business world generally revolves around the generation and exchange of ideas – and for this reason, the conference room has become one of the most important parts of many organizations’ offices.

It is at the conference room, for instance, where meetings that chart out the course of the organization are held. It is also in this room where meetings and presentations with various people who are important to the businesses success, people like the clients and the financiers are held – and again for this reason, and in many organizations, it is at the conference room that some of the most important deals are signed. The conference room also tends to serve as the venue for executive interviews in the organization, interviews which are usually attended by a panel of the organization’s top brass and interviews in which the organizations also sets out to put its best foot forward, in an endeavor to attract the candidate who could be a highly talented person and whose skills the organization would like to tap into for its success. Now the tricky thing with trying to impress a job candidate (unlike a client for instance) is that impressing a job candidate has to be done subliminally, as you don’t want to sent the wrong message to the candidate. One of the subliminal ways in which an organization can get to attract a particular job candidate is through the prudent choice of an interview room – this time the interview room being the organization’s conference room – chosen to accommodate the many senior people who are normally required to attend high level interviews.

Seeing the importance of a conference room in the modern organization, it is no wonder that that many organizations are increasingly willing to invest whatever is required to have an impressive conference room. Generally how impressive a conference room turns out to be depends to a large extend on the conference room designs employed. Depending on the organizations goals, they might decide to employ a practical conference room design (with a no frills approach), or a more stylish approach with lots of more nuances.

Whatever approach to conference room design an organization decides to take, how it all pans out in the final analysis depends on the furniture employed in the room, and the setting of such furniture in the room. In a bid to create the impression they want to create with their boardrooms, many organizations find it a worthwhile to invest in contemporary executive office furniture, with a particularly careful choice of the meeting room tables (which participants in the whatever forums will be held in the conference room will inevitably get into very close contact with) as well as boardroom and executive office seating items – seeing that it is these that determine how highly a conference room is rated in terms of ‘comfort.’

While all this contemporary executive office furniture does tend to call for a considerable investment in terms of money, it is an investment which tends to pay off in the long run, and which many organizations find themselves having to make anyway, as they otherwise run the risk of portraying the wrong image of themselves.

Presentations have become a way of life in today’s corporate world – to an extent that some executives are always moving from presentation to presentation, where they participate either as the audience or the facilitators. The growing importance of presentations perhaps has to do with the fact that the corporate world is fast moving towards a point where the success (or otherwise) of an organization depends on how well it manages to get pertinent information, and communicate the same information to the people who matter to it. A business organization that has a growth plan will, for instance, increasingly find that its ability to get financing for its project depends to a large extent on how well it can communicate what it is doing to potential financiers, as well as its ability to communicate what value it can add to the lives of its potential customers.

Now communication experts will tell you that your ability to get a message across to whatever audience you want to get it to will depend to a large extend on the media you use for the same. Use a lackluster media – and you risk having your audience sleep all through your presentation, and therefore not getting your message across to any one. Even if you don’t succeed in getting your audience to sleep through your presentation, you might have an even more difficult time trying to convince them about whatever it is that you are trying to persuade them – whether it happens to be to finance a given project or to buy a given product – thanks to your poor presentation equipment.

It is recognition of the role that the media one uses plays in getting their message across that many organizations are increasingly willing to invest whatever is required to get state of the art display equipment – from whiteboards for boardroom presentations, to noticeboards for internal office use and literature dispensers for use at network building forums like conferences. For those that are willing to go high-tech (and many are increasingly willing to go this route because the stakes are high here), there is always the chance to enhance a presentation with the use of equipment such a projectors, which must be used alongside projection screens.

The thing with most of these display and presentation equipment is that prices between the various models of the same item – say prices between two models of projection screens – can be so varied that one wonders which one to buy, given that many people are not willing to pay less and end up paying again a few months down the line – and neither are they willing to pay more just for the sake of a big brand name, without any extra value for the little more that they pay.

Price should however not be the only consideration in buying presentation and display equipment. The most expensive equipment is not always the best – and neither does buying display equipment at the cheapest price always represent a saving. The best way to go about shopping for display and presentation equipment is using references from people who have previously used the equipment (this should be easily available from online and offline forums), rather than taking the vendor’s word (which is bound to be subjective) about their product. In this respect then, shopping for display and presentation equipment calls for an investment of both the money you spent in buying the equipment and perhaps more importantly, the time you spent looking for information – and verifying that information -about the equipment before sinking your money in it.

Most businesses in the world thrive on business networking.

In almost every big city you ever visit, you are apt to see huge skyscrapers, running into tens – or even hundreds – of floors. All these skyscraper floors are occupied by businesses and professionals practicing in various fields. The question that always arises in one’s mind is how these business and professionals working from offices that are not located in easily accessible positions are able to get the message about what they are doing out to the people who could potentially do business with them.

And while a small number of businesses located in non-strategic places do employ the services of the mass media in getting message out about what it is they are doing, the majority simply thrive on business networking.

In business networking, the person running a certain business or professional practice goes out meeting the people they could potentially do business with and letting them know what value they could possibly offer them. The idea is to build a large enough network to yield a continuous flow of customers for the products one is offering.

Business networking – which is the process through which most successful businesses are built – can take place in both formal and informal forums. Consider the case where a person chats with the guy who happens to sit next to them in a bus or at the bar – and ends up letting the new person about what it is that they do. There is a chance that if you manage to communicate well with person well enough, that same person could turn out to be a lifelong customer. Of course there also are formal industry forums that are built specifically with the purpose of helping the players to add more members to their networks – examples being exhibitions and conferences.

One tool that a business person or a professional seeking to build a business network must have is a business card, and a well done one at that. Actually, commentators on this subject say that it is only when you hand a person your business card that you can consider them as added to your business network. For this reason, the role of business cards in business networking cannot be gainsaid.

As it were, human beings love freebies by nature – even if the freebie happens to be something that they cannot actually use. By giving out to business cards to the people, you send them a subconscious message that you are a generous person or business as the case may be – and generosity is a highly attractive feature in a prospective person you are to do business with. After all, you could just have saved the prospect’s name in your phone – but you have chosen to given them a business card that you have surely spend something in making, and for this reason, you are obviously ‘generous’ – though these kinds of thoughts are best kept to oneself. Of course, giving out the business cards to the people you want to include in your business network also sends to the people the signal that you value them and respect them, and increases the chances of them doing business with you – because we are naturally predisposed to doing business with people who (seem to) value and respect us.