Coaching
Overview
Organisations today place an increasing emphasis on managers to develop their employees’ individual performance. This is often best done through coaching and mentoring. Coaching and mentoring involves taking on the role of a trusted and experienced advisor and requires a large range of skills. This workshop gives practical guidance in how to manage staff development in order to increase productivity through rehearsing a range of coaching and mentoring situations and skills
One to One Coaching
Planet coaching sessions follow two structures which interlink with each other.
Firstly, the coach uses an underpinning process, which follows these three steps:
1. Know What You Want
This area focuses upon working with the learner in understanding what they truly want (rather than what they do not want), helping them understand that they must own what their outcomes are (or be able to successfully influence other involved parties), helping them recognise what success is and finally working through the questions upfront which could cause barriers in the future to the successful completion of their goals.
2. Pay Attention/Be Aware
This focuses on two key areas. Be externally aware of what is going on and the impact their behaviour is having on self and others. Be internally aware of what their internal dialogue is saying and the impact this is having upon achieving their goals.
3. Be Flexible
Simply put, if something isn’t working to achieve their goals, try something different.
The next stage uses the GROW Process described below:
Goals : | Be clear on what you want to achieve (what is the desired state) |
The GROW is an excellent coaching technique for the “hands-off” coaching style with a proven record of success. The key skills are effective questioning and systematically following the GROW structure during the coaching session. It is often an interactive process and highly-focused.
Other Coaching Techniques
“Practice Spiral”
This technique is most helpful when developing a new skill.
The Practise Spiral starts with an initial explanation and demonstration stage.
This is followed by a stage for reflecting on the learning archived during the initial stage. This is followed by a reviewing stage that focuses on drawing specific conclusions about how much progress has been made towards achieving the eventual goal. The final stage involves planning to practice again. This, of course, leads to another new experience, but this time at a slightly higher level of performance.
The whole process begins again and continues to spiral towards higher levels of performance after each new practice session.
The 3-D Technique
The 3-D technique is another method which can be used to quickly resolve a particular problem. Careful questioning and using the 3-D analysis technique enables the Coach and the learner to quickly identify three elements of the problem under each of the three headings:
- The situation - timescales, lack of resource, geography;
- People involved - unhappy customer, impatient boss, unreliable supplier;
- You - lack of technical knowledge, conflicting priorities, the learner’s general attitude.
With the three dimensions, or aspects of the problem identified, it is usually relatively easy to identify several options to choose from - even if most of them require actions related solely to the learner to address!
The final stage is to choose the “best-fit” option to actually implement.
The technique works best when the coach relies entirely on questioning to encourage the learner to work through the process.
