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What is Coaching?

Coaching is helping someone to focus on specific goals and encouraging and supporting them in working out how to achieve those goals. A good coach will provide extrinsic feedback to the learner during this process, but at the same time stimulate the learner’s own intrinsic feedback as well.

Benefits of Coaching

It is increasingly recognised that individuals and groups perform better with coaching and that this performance translates into business results:

• Coaching for leadership increases productivity, improves communications, increases staff commitment and loyalty, and decreases levels of stress and tension within companies.
• Coaching assists individuals to remain loyal and committed to the new company in the face of demanding global business hours, language barriers, differing work ethics and economic fluctuations.
• Coaching can help prevent executive derailment. Some studies suggest this can be as high as 33 percent for senior executives.
• Coaching helps managers to develop better interpersonal skills. Some common reasons for interpersonal conflict include executives that are too abrasive, too controlling and too isolated. Coaches work with individuals to explore these behaviours, and to recognise and modify their self-defeating beliefs, assumptions and actions.
• Coaching helps leaders to think and plan more strategically, to manage risk more effectively and to create and communicate vision and mission.
• Coaching aids in developing a culture of trust and personal responsibility within the organisation and with clients and customers.
• Coaching enables executives or managers to use their personal power more effectively.
• Coaching can develop those leadership qualities that have been empirically proven to be associated with success. These include cognitive capacity, social capacities, personality style, motivation, knowledge and expertise.

“Inspiring and motivating people to grow their self-awareness and identify their unique abilities is such a powerful process.”

Developing individuals in different ways through coaching:

Coaching Programmes

Our aim through coaching programmes i.e. where we train line managers to act as coaches to their teams, is for them to get more out of their teams by being able to delegate more, develop their direct reports and motivate their individual performance.

Executive or Individual Developmental Coaching

With individual one to one coaching, our purpose is to give individuals control over their learning process, to clarify their goals and develop a framework to make things happen in their lives.

Coaches act as external stimulators to the potential that other people hold within them.

Research into Benefits

Manchester Consulting Inc. have conducted what is believed to be the first major research project to quantify the business impact of executive coaching. In a study of 100 executives who had undergone coaching, return on investment (ROI) was 5.7 times the initial investment outlay. Other less tangible business impacts of coaching included:

• Improved teamwork
• Improve relationships with peers
• Improved job satisfaction
• Reduced conflict.

A study by Gegner explored the outcomes of the coaching progress from an interpersonal and intrapersonal perspective. As a result of coaching, executives reported that they had become more aware of self and others and that they assumed more responsibility for their actions. They all reported positive changes in performance.

Team Coaching

However, coaching can also take place in a team setting. We can coach a group of individuals to ensure their collective development into a high performing team.

Benefits of organisational coaching programmes:

• Employees are focussed on their personal growth and career advancement
• They are challenged to improve themselves, become more self-sufficient and productive
• Their job satisfaction increases
• Employees are inspired to perform at higher levels than they would otherwise have done so if left to their own devices
• Organisations benefit from improved knowledge management as skills and knowledge are passed on
• Communication within and between teams is improved
• Can be linked to fast track career progression and succession planning
• Coaching can be introduced as part of a change management process.

Leadership Development - Mentoring and Coaching Skills

As part of the emphasis being placed on leadership development within SITA, Lis Merrick has been working with a number of senior executives globally to actively engage with them to enhance their understanding and capability of mentoring and coaching.  These are critical leadership capabilities, which used effectively, will greatly augment their leadership skill set.

Lis is holding five coaching sessions with each of them to cover the following areas of mentoring and coaching knowledge, process and skills:

• Mentoring
• Coaching
• Team Coaching
• Using Emotional Intelligence in Mentoring and Coaching
• Advanced Mentoring and Coaching Skills and Techniques.

On a more specific level, coaching provides an answer to some of the new type of challenges facing today’s leaders. It allows leaders to:

• Recognise any new competencies they should be learning.
• Reflect on the leaders of tomorrow and prepare them for the challenge.
• Align their personal commitments and actions.
• Sustain momentum - both theirs and that of others in the organisation.
• Align team members with the goals and visions of their organisation.
• Develop team unity and team spirit and enrol others in new possibilities and breakthroughs.
• Help others expand their levels of responsibility and increase their levels of initiative and creativity.
• Recognise weak links in the organisational system and develop strategies to strengthen these.
• Review the organisations goals - can the leader aim higher and be more successful?

Coaching with WWF

Lis Merrick has been asked by WWF in Gland, Switzerland to coach a number of individuals who have been placed in new challenging leadership positions globally.

This coaching is aimed to improve performance and is conducted as a mixture of telephone and face-to-face coaching.

Whessoe Oil and Gas Ltd

Implementation of a Coaching Culture

Whessoe did not have the budget to bring in external coaches, nor did it want to build external dependency for it’s coaching, so its focus began on the development of their internal coaching capability.

Whessoe developed their own internal system and:

• Introduced coaching training and reinforced coaching skills with line manager coaches, three stages of workshops were designed and were run over a 15 month period
• Feedback was provided to individuals on their coaching style/skills, starting with the MD and moving through the management team and beyond
• Coaching was provided for performance management in particular to ensure that a culture of “don’t walk by a problem” was encouraged
• Encouragement to be coached was offered – “challenge your boss to coach you if they are not doing so!” This is a key message encouraged, in particular as part of their Performance Management programme.
• A mentoring programme was introduced.  Mentoring was opened to the whole company with lunchtime sessions being held to energise and motivate mentors and mentees.
• The senior team are coaching and mentoring role models – every member of the senior team has been individually supported and coached in these areas and is taking responsibility for implementing the learning culture in their area.
• The development of a group of six individuals the “Special Coaching Group” who are enthusiastic in supporting coaching and mentoring further within the organisation, they have been receiving additional skills training and are able to support others within the organisation when appropriate.  These individuals work as “internal coaches” and are available outside of the normal line manager coach type relationship.
• Development of appraisal and personal development plan processes, both supported by line management coaching processes, which also reinforce the use of additional coaching and mentoring relationships to enable individuals to achieve their performance targets and achieve their potential.

Coach Mentoring Ltd worked with the Senior Management Team and HR at Whessoe Oil and Gas Ltd to design and implement these processes and the evaluation feedback showed considerable growth towards achieving the coaching culture that was being sought.

Click here to read the full plenary speech describing this process made by Jon Dale, MD Whessoe Oil and Gas Ltd, at the UK EMCC Conference 03 April 2007