COACHING

The future of any organization rests with increasing the capabilities and productivity of its workforce. This is not news. The future of any individual rests with growing their worth to their organization and developing their toolbox of transferable skills to enhance their market value. Most of us understand that these prerequisites for prosperous organizational and individual futures are compatible – but have yet to act on them.

Traditionally, if a manager achieved the desired result no one was too concerned about whether they were addressing the developmental side of their responsibilities. In the future, these developmental demands will grow and become a higher priority. Coaching will cease to be the preserve of the specialists and will become a common practice for managers. Retaining and developing staff will be impossible without relevant facilitated learning taking place.

And that, at its best, is coaching.

Coaching has been recognized as one of the most cost- effective and focused ways of improving individual performance. However, coaching has increasingly become a specialist function brought in from outside, at a cost, and there is often no way of measuring how cost-effective it has been. Coaching has been seen as the responsibility of the human resource department, especially if its purpose is remedial. Managers are increasingly relegated to managing tasks and not people, even though the responsibility for skill and performance improvement has shifted more towards the individual.

The organization may pay and provide for training and coaching but the initiator often has to be the individual themselves. It is their career so it is down to them to make it happen.

Not only does having more skills create opportunities for more choice in your career, but the techniques covered in this book are not limited to organizations. If you have children, friends, peers, parents, partners, or work with activity groups or clubs, all of these skills can be of use in helping others achieve what they want to achieve. Coaching can be carried out in small pieces – a question here, an observation there. It does not have to be an organized process spread over many sessions and incurring high costs.

When you see yourself as a coach you will automatically coach when it is useful. By coaching others you will also learn more about yourself. It is almost impossible to be with someone and not have your internal voice saying things such as ‘this applies to me as much as them’, or ‘I could make those changes myself’.