Karen Shankey: Team player

“I’m so excited to see everyone here!” Karen Shankey has no trouble whipping the crowd into frenzied applause at the Third Annual Prism Awards on a May morning at the Terminal City Club in Vancouver. Never mind that it’s 7:30 – most of the audience members are already on their second or third cups of coffee.

You’d think you had entered a Sunday morning revival meeting, but the attendees filing into the club at 6:45 a.m. are here to help the Vancouver chapter of the International Coach Federation honour three Lower Mainland businesses and their coaches. The Prism award is given to the business-and-coach team that has seen the biggest financial gains after at least three months of working together.

This year’s winner, Kate Ross-LeBlanc, co-founder of Saje Natural Wellness, says coaching has taken her business from “barely surviving” 12 years earlier “to surviving to thriving” with a profit increase of 57 per cent in 2007. “I really don’t think we’d be in business right now if we hadn’t engaged in a coaching program,” she says.

Is coaching really that effective? Perhaps, but only if you match your coach’s level of enthusiasm. Brett Lloyd, Saje’s coach, says that management has to be open to the idea of coaching for it to work. “Every group can use coaching,” he says. “But it’s really dependent on people in leadership positions being accepting of it and willing to benefit from it.”

In other words, it doesn’t help to be skeptical. It might also help to be a morning person.