I’ve created a few interesting businesses in my time. Three of them went on to be worth more than a billion pounds. The fundamental principle behind their success, I believe, was the creation of an environment designed to unleash the human spirit at work.

In some ways the approach – to liberate energy, creativity, innovation and commitment – was a reaction against traditional large organisations, where the fundamental principle seemed to be a nose-to-the-grindstone culture where people are invited to trade in their quality of life for career advancement. Let’s be clear – such businesses can produce high performance. I just wouldn’t want anyone who I care about to work for them.

With this in mind, whether in creating my own businesses or in applying the same principles to transforming large well-established businesses, I have always made extensive use of business coaches. This has, predominantly, been in the following three ways: First, to help people create motivating personal goals aligned with company goals. This includes helping them discover how they make decisions, how this habitual way of working sometimes helps them achieve their goals and sometimes gets in the way, and how to deal with problems and breakdowns. At its best this sort of coaching can give people a deep existential understanding of the way they are living their lives; at worst, it can provoke resistance and accusations of manipulation or irrelevance. It all depends on the quality and credibility of the coach.

Second, to facilitate meetings that focus on developing plans and strategies, dealing with urgent or intractable problems and/or serious brainstorming. Coaches who do a good job at this are usually highly valued and hard to find.

Third, to help develop a leadership team into a high-performance unit capable of building an extraordinary business or growing an existing business at extraordinary speed. I have only found a handful of people worldwide I would trust with this work.

It is the third use of coaching that interests me most. It involves elements of the former two, but goes well beyond conventional coaching. I call it “high-performance coaching” – an intervention designed to get large, measurable and rapid results that can include explosive growth in profitable revenues; a rapid increase in innovation and in customer satisfaction; and finding ways to do more for less. Quite often it involves all of the above.

High-performance coaching is a mix of traditional coaching, mentoring, training and development. But the coach also requires expertise in the design and operation of high-performance businesses. This expertise allows the coaching to be combined with mentoring (advice from someone who has done it before), training (transferring the expertise) and development (becoming masterful with the principles and tools of high performance).

For start-ups and smaller companies, one can plausibly seek to transform the entire company around the principles of high performance; for larger companies it often makes more sense to create pockets of high performance, rather than try to boil the ocean with a company-wide transformation programme.

I can point to successful examples of high-performance coaching worldwide, including at the North American clothing manufacturer Lululemon (which used the principles of high performance on its journey from start-up to a £3 billion public company), and in the UK at first direct, Mercury, Egg and Garlik. I also used the same approach to create pockets of high performance in RBS when I was chairman of the group innovation function between 2006 and 2009. The following learning points summarise what, for me, a high-performance coach seeks to instil in the businesses being coached:

Behaving like an iconic brand
The business does not have to be an iconic brand, but it does have to behave like one. At the heart of an iconic brand is a promise of a valued experience to all who touch the organisation, a promise that must be consistently kept. For example, at first direct we built the brand around a promise of heroic customer service that left people feeling totally taken care of. We tried to ensure employees, business partners, shareholders and customers all felt totally taken care of in any dealings they had with first direct. The brand experience was the heart of the company, the driving force behind its culture.

You don’t need to be Virgin or Apple to create a brand promise (also known as “a mission”) which shapes every action you take and gets you out of bed every morning fired up. Your brand promise can include the relentless search for new ideas to meet appropriate (and currently unmet) needs and wants of customers. Essentially, it’s about creating a brand experience and a culture that is addictive, infectious and irresistible.

Leverage
Using leverage involves organisations communicating what they offer and who they are in a way that aligns with the unmet needs of actual and potential business partners. That way the business can leverage the needs of others to power up its own performance. This requires the identification of potential partners who have problems or needs to which there might be a solution. Once you understand those needs precisely, you can begin to be creative in devising solutions that are of service to others and yet work economically for the business.

Outcome-based strategies
High-performance businesses get committed to an extraordinary result without worrying about how they’ll get there; as a coach I would say there’s nothing that you already know that’s always guaranteed to work, so keep your mind and eyes open and create the route as you go along, informed by the results you get. This involves developing expertise in continually creating new approaches and new responses to changing circumstances, rather than relying on old approaches. This is far more uncomfortable for people brought up in a conventional business environment where creativity is often discouraged in favour of sticking to the rules.

A key tool in this approach is what I call “smart risk assessment”. This allows anyone to approach strategic goals one achievable step at a time. A smart risk is one where we expect to succeed, but can afford to fail and where the upside is worth the investment in time, money and reputation. Personally, I use a checklist of questions designed to objectively and thoroughly assess these points on any major decision I take. At Egg, for example, using such an approach avoided what would have been costly mistakes in investing in digital TV, buying a UK investment business that was for sale and entering the US internet banking market. It was particularly interesting that a conventional investment assessment had given the green light to each of these and my own inclination (before I applied smart risk assessment) was to support them.

Precision engineering
A thoughtful approach to designing the way a business works, and in implementing it, is key to high performance. A formula one car takes longer to design and build than most cars yet it is faster than any other. Many SMEs and even some bigger companies resemble an old jalopy!

In a high-performance environment, precision is critical, with particular attention paid to precision in agreements and accountabilities. The design of processes, systems, recruitment, training, remuneration and communication require equal care and thoughtfulness. I’ve often found that entrepreneurs tend to create a new business in order to sort out their lives. Then they find their lives being ruined by the business, and most often it’s a lack of thoughtful design that is the cause. If businesses don’t carefully design an environment to get what they want, what they actually get is totally unpredictable.

Balance
This is the aspect of high-performance coaching that most closely resembles conventional coaching. Jim Collins, in his book Good to Great, determined that the most effective leaders stay perfectly balanced between an unshakeable belief that they will prevail in the end (somewhat irrational) and a willingness to confront the facts of the current reality, however grim (totally rational). It is my observation that most leaders soon overbalance into resignation or delusion about where they are today. When coaching I often draw comparisons with high-performance sports or surgical teams to illustrate this point. Usable coaching on how to stay in balance whatever fate throws at you, however, is highly individual and a very skilled job.

Simplifying conversations
In creating a high-performance environment, particular care is taken by the coach to simplify coaching conversations – they don’t need to be complicated or mysterious to get results and simplicity leads to greater speed. A coach will urge the same approach in all business conversations. So much time is wasted in business by unnecessarily complicated conversations and meetings.

Practice
Athletes and stage performers know that mastery only comes from constant repetitive practice. Even those at the top of their game practise for hours a day. Mastery in business can also only be obtained by practice and repetition.
As an example I run a seminar on “perfect pitch” where attendees develop and practise communicating like an iconic brand until it becomes entirely natural to them. Their ability to enrol others (whether investors, partners, employees or customers) is dramatically increased by this practice.