Coaching

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Be careful when you search for the hero inside yourself: in many organisations, the most valued and dominant style is the all-action-hero ‘completer-finisher' rather than the reflective, contemplative thinker: i.e. we often hear ‘she's a thinker, not a doer' etc. By way of illustration, how many of us these days seem to do our thinking on holiday, in the gym or at weekends (and these were meant to be our weekends)? What we need of course are doers who can think, thinkers who can do, and we need them more than ever. This is because organisations have de-layered, and fewer, busier managers with a larger span of control now manage empowered employees who must be able to think for themselves: their managers are too busy to do it for them (but then, it didn't work all that well when they had the time).

A business is essentially a group of people who, through cumulative, small effects create a large effect: the successful enterprise. If managers, team leaders, and team members are given structured opportunities in coaching sessions to think through their business issues, they are much more likely to do excellent work that is more focused, productive, and intelligent: they thus create better cumulative effects that lead to better business results.

In creating those structured coaching opportunities, organisations must respond to two challenges:

• The coaching system must manifestly be focused on getting fast business results. If it isn't focused on the business, and is seen as a bit pink and fluffy, it just won't be credible with the people whose dominant style is task-centred or cost conscious.
• Even if it is a credible system, it necessarily operates in a pressured environment. It therefore requires intelligent planning and implementation. Your best-practice business systems (e.g. your induction procedures, coaching, strategic reviews or regular individual performance reviews) are important but usually not urgent, and are all too easily displaced by important and urgent operational pressures.

We help organisations to design, implement, and evaluate sustainable systems of coaching that sharpen up those cumulative effects for improved business results, fast. We can:

Develop your coaches in methods that focus them and the coachee on direct business improvements to customer metrics such as cost, quality, service, and cycle time.

• Help the coach (who then helps the coachee) to develop systems thinking for a complex, cross-cutting, cross-functional world, so that your people are able to use their time properly to think through the knock-on consequences and implications of their thought and action for their colleagues, customers and suppliers.
• Help your managers and team leaders to establish sustainable coaching systems that don't just rely on line managers for the provision of coaching (not good if your direct reports are numbered in the 50's or hundreds).
• Provide you with facilitated large group events in order to speed up the change management process as the organisation tackles the sustainability issues, especially in demand-led environments where coaching can all too easily be cancelled.
• Support your coaches by following them into their first three coaching sessions. After this, they are much more likely to persevere, and then the skills become wired in.
• Train a cadre of your own trainers so that they become the in-house thought leaders and content experts for the programme.
• Devise apprenticeship models that exponentially accelerate the dissemination of the skills. This augments the training courses provided by your own trainers who will otherwise be overwhelmed if there are significant numbers of coaches to train in a short time.
• Help you devise ways of auditing the observance of good coaching practice to agreed (i.e. locally owned) standards.
• Produce supplementary AV materials that help to disseminate good practice e.g. DVD, CD-Rom, streaming video, and edited transcripts that illustrate the skills of the coach.
• Act as project facilitators for your project team as they implement the coaching system.
• Develop the audit and evaluation programmes that help you demonstrate the effectiveness of the programme and its ROI.
• With our strong psychological background we understand appreciative approaches that build energy, motivation and self-esteem without shirking the performance requirement or being sentimental about it.

Two brief examples of a coaching programme we've provided

We worked with a large multi-national across its European operations to design, build, implement and evaluate a coaching system for managers. Our Consultants provided coaching to the coaches as they worked with their direct reports thus supporting this initiative in the field, which enabled it to ‘take' in the organisation. The subsequent evaluation suggested a percentage return on investment in the several hundreds.

We are currently working with a large NHS organisation in Scotland to design a coaching system that supports clinicians in their clinical work. We have facilitated policy development, trained their trainers, and addressed the change management issues around sustainability, using whole systems approaches. We have advised on a number of evaluation issues and methods which are currently being undertaken.