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Many companies hire managers for no reason other than that they have managed people before, in some capacity at some point, and are therefore assumed to know what they're doing. They then discover, to their cost, that their managers' knowledge is outdated or not relevant to the situation that they find themselves in. Training is necessary to become a good manager. Management skills don't come any more naturally than cooking skills, and require assistance to maximize.

This is the time that management coaches come in. One of the most important resources human resources can provide is the kind of management coaching that turns a mediocre manager into the leader of a all-star team. There's a reason that top CEO's of Fortune 500 companies spend a combined total of millions in one to one training with the world's most elite coaches. That reason is that even someone with as many successes as Bill Gates or Steve Jobs knows that he doesn't know it all.

An analogy can be drawn with the field of music - George Gershwin took lessons in harmony from other composers, at a time when he was the most famous and well-paid living composer in the world! If the leaders of the world take personal coaching, isn't that a good indication that management coaching is an important part of bringing out the best in your management team?

The only question is where to draw the line. Does everyone who is someone's supervisor need management coaching? What if someone is only a project leader? Lead engineer? Merely "senior" engineer, managing no one but himself or herself? The answer is yes, yes, yes and yes.

No one is perfect, and thus everyone who makes stressful management decisions needs coaching. Changes in the world, particularly increases in business efficiency, require active adaptation in order to stay ahead of the curve. Managers unable to adapt to this new business climate are going to lose out - it is as simple as that. They lose their edge, their organization's advantage, and, in the worst cases, their workforce and their business as well.

Expert management coaching ensures that an angry lapse will never destroy a team, that a bad day doesn't mean a bad month, and that teams are led, and not just managed. Raising leaders doesn't happen without investing in them, and management coaches are the most proactive way of doing that -- for a Fortune 500 CEO, and for your management team too.