Helping Your Organization With Coaching

Overview

Coaching is made up of a collection of paradigms and models, skill sets, methods and practices which together support individuals and organizations in being more aware, pro-active, resourceful and effective.

There are professional life coaches and there are also professional business or executive coaches. Some, like myself, work in both spheres. In practice, whichever area coaching is used in, the foundations are the same because you are dealing with people. The coach listens and asks questions to help the client raise their awareness and responsibility, tap into their own resources and wisdom, generate their own solutions and then take action to achieve results and make changes.

Maintaining a resourceful state and taking an empowered stance are essential for everyone, whatever they are doing. It is equally important that you stay connected with yourself and your truth and support yourself through the ups and downs that are a part of both life and business. Much of business coaching involves some element of personal coaching and it is often the case that the challenges showing up in a client’s business life are reflections of the challenges that show up in their personal life.

The first and most important way to use coaching principles, to help your organization, is to apply them to yourself. If you have a strong relationship with, and sense of, self then you will be more effective at whatever you are doing. From this place, you can then support others in realizing and expressing their own potential.

The people factor

Just as the self factor is the foundation for a healthy and successful individual, so the people factor is the foundation for a healthy and successful organization. The progress of an organization depends largely on the resourcefulness and effectiveness of the people involved.

There are a number of different ways in which coaching, and related approaches, can be implemented to utilize and develop the people factor so as to achieve better results more effectively and happily.

Individual coaching

When an executive, or other member of an organization, receives individual coaching then it can be set up in a number of ways including:

• The client arranges and pays for coaching themselves
  • This leaves the client free to set the agenda and to work on both personal and work areas. They can also use the coaching for career planning, whether within or outside their present organization.
    
    
• The client arranges coaching and the organization pays all or part of the fees
  • The client is again free to set the agenda, although they may have discussed this with their organization.
    
    
• The organization contracts an external coach to work with individuals
  • This only works if the individual client wants coaching and sees the benefit for themselves. In this case, the agenda is usually jointly agreed with the client, the organization and the coach. It may be agreed that other issues, important to the client, can also be looked at provided that the joint agenda is not forgotten.
    
    
• The organization uses its own internal coaches to work with individuals
• This can work well provided that confidentiality and other boundaries are clarified and agreed at the outset. The remit of an internal coach is usually narrower and focused solely on enhancing work performance. Sometimes clients may be reluctant to express their doubts or problems with someone from their own organization, and feel freer when working with an external coach. It is important that internal coaches have proper training and some form of on-going supervision or mentoring from an experienced coach.

Individual coaching and mentoring is often done by telephone. This makes it much more time-efficient and allows the client to be in touch with the coach wherever they are. Like many other coaches, I now do most of my work by phone and have an international client base.

Coaching and training

Coaching can be used in the way that training is delivered and it can also be used to complement training and to make it more effective. Trainers who use a coaching approach will make their courses more interactive and tend to build on the participants’ own experience and ideas. The more that participants are involved in generating new ideas and procedures, the more likely they are to take responsibility for making them work when the time comes to apply them for real. It is also becoming increasingly common for trainings to be supplemented by follow-up, individual coaching. This gives participants support in applying the material and in dealing with the practical challenges that invariably crop up.

Developing a coaching culture

At its heart, coaching, as I apply it, is a way of interacting with yourself, your life and your business from a responsible, positive and pro-active point of view. It supports you in appreciating people, building on their strengths and making the best of shared opportunities. When organizations incorporate this approach they become more pleasant places in which to work, as well as becoming more effective.

Coaching skills for managers and executives

One of the most effective ways to promote a coaching culture is to train managers and executives in this approach. To a certain extent, this happens by osmosis when they themselves are coached over an extended period of time and, seeing the benefits, start to apply some of what they have experienced with their teams. Alongside this, many organizations, as well as business colleges, now provide, or buy in, coaching skills training for managers. The manager, as coach, is more able to empower individuals and to develop better teams.

Appreciative Inquiry

This is an innovative approach to organizational visioning and strategy which has a similar perspective to coaching. Appreciative Inquiry is most effective when it involves the entire workforce, from board members to people on the shop floor. Rather than starting by focusing on what is wrong in an organization, it looks for what is already good and gives the organization its vitality. Building on this, it then establishes a shared, desired vision. And then come the shared strategy and action plans, which are again created with everybody’s input. This approach creates a positive ‘we can do it’ feel. Also, the fact that people have been jointly involved in creating a vision and strategy means that they are far more likely to be fully behind it and to make it work. Appreciative Inquiry has been used successfully by a very diverse range of organizations including multi-nationals, small businesses, schools and colleges, charities and aid organizations. The Dalai Lama used it as the basis for an ecumenical meeting of religious leaders and, in Nepal, it was used as the main approach for a women’s literacy program involving over 200,000 women.

Amongst the services that we provide for organizations are:

• Coaching for CEOs, executives and managers
• Coaching skills training
• Mentoring and supervision for coaches
• A variety of trainings, from a coaching perspective, including:
  • Time Management
  • Leadership Training
  • Communication Skills
  • Visioning and Planning
• Appreciative Inquiry
  

Contact us to set up a conversation about how we can best support you by emailing us at: