Application Of Coaching To Increase Female Entrepreneurship

Application of Coaching to increase Female Entrepreneurship.

Women accounted for only 31% of the 40.6 million entrepreneurs in the EU in 2015. This leads to slow economic potential growth for EU countries.

Galloway et al. (2005) argue that entrepreneurship education requires significant knowledge, skills and attitudes of concurrency, which recognise the entrepreneurial management theories and practices of synergistic relationships. These authors distinguished the skills that are important to business creation and development: initiative taking, organizational skills, good communication, problem-solving skills, perseverance, self-confidence, creativity, leadership skills, ability to work in teams as well as independently, negotiation skills and financial management skills. The capacity of business management consists of planning, decision making, marketing, and accounting. Personal entrepreneurial competences include an internal control, risk-taking and innovation. Rae (1997) argues that entrepreneurship development requires communication skills, persuasion, creativity, critical thinking and evaluation negotiation skills, leadership, problem-solving, social networking and time planning.

Due to inequity between genders, there is a value placed on female entrepreneurship development and it includes:

• Career planning (analysis of the situation; the capacity necessary for career, education).

It has been noticed, that in recent years specific policies or programs to promote women in business have been developed in Lithuania, as well as in EU. Although these initiatives were focused on business development, none of them concentrated on entrepreneurship competency development exclusively, at least in Lithuania. As discussed in literature review, entrepreneurship is a personal trait, and ongoing initiatives have been more focused on the provision of business knowledge and how-to tools (such as taxes, registration, finance, management etc.).

During a review of the documents and initiatives in the European Union it can be said that, entrepreneurship development, however, is targeted and purposeful. There are clear guidelines and operational ground rules on how to promote female entrepreneurship, but it lacks a perspective that entrepreneurship is not just running a business, it is also a skillset and competency.

The concept of coaching is interpreted differently: some authors stress the more personal and professional development training, others consider coaching to be a sort of psychotherapy. In the case of one or the other, coaching is a process that helps a person to discover an inner potential, helps to achieve goals and to find positive solutions. Coaching is a method of education, a way of creating a path to achieve goals for a person or group of people, and also to acquire new skills. Coaching is also widely used as a management tool in organizations, that helps to empower employees' personal development, learning, communication and competence. Recently, coaching has become particularly popular. Coaching is becoming attractive because of its potential to help find a way out of the situation both in personal life and profession and making the right decision (Jatkauskienė et al., 2008).

All theories also emphasize that coaching is a process and it is hard to see the result right away. Although it is not a therapy, very often you can see one‘s change in thinking, actions, behaviour and improved skills after working with a coach for a longer period.