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of a Consultant and Coach
Role
The
The Role of a Consultant
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A consultant provides expert opinions, analyses, and recommendations to organizations or individuals, based on their own expertise and background. A consultant helps diagnose the problems or opportunities that organizations face and provide solutions to help the client resolve a particular organizational challenge or strategy.
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Consultants collect and analyze data to better understand the problem/opportunity and identify a recommended course of action. In consulting, the focus is on the problem, and the consultant offers up best practices and implementation strategies to address the challenge.
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Organizations hire consultants to get an objective, outsider opinion on processes or systems; solve for internal blind spots; receive expert guidance on solving a problem or implementing a solution; and fill a temporary staffing gap in a scalable way.​
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The Role of a Coach
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A coach partners with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential. Coaching is client-driven and focuses on setting goals, creating outcomes, and managing personal and professional change.
The role of a coach is to discover, clarify, and align with what the client wants to achieve; encourage client self-discovery; elicit client-generated solutions and strategies; and hold the client responsible and accountable. Coaches partner with clients to determine the biggest questions they want to explore and create an experience for the client to arrive at their own answers, based on what the client believes will work best. In coaching, answers and solutions are self-generated by a client with the coach as facilitator.
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Note: Coaching is not therapy, consulting, mentoring, or training.