There are a series of triggers and needs which create the need for coaching in businesses. Some of these are more obvious than others but what they all have in common is creating a safe personal space for individuals to set goals, focus on personal growth and develop themselves.
A recent survey by Ivy House assessed a group of high potential employees and 82% of these cited coaching as the thing which would have the biggest impact on organisational performance. Contrastingly the same report found only 3% of their organisations prioritised coaching as a training method.
The benefits of coaching investment have been long proven in studies with meaningful evaluation methodologies.
The types of evaluation which Transform actively encourage, goes beyond coachee satisfaction surveys, and assess material quantitative change via key business indicators.
You may be familiar with the Riddler report which is a respected source for research into executive coaching.
When addressing the question how can executive coaching benefit me or my organization?
Riddler's recent research report offers that that the 3 most important coaching focuses for businesses are as follows:
1) Increase in business performance:
This deals with areas such as time management, decision making, and prioritisation and planning.
2) Develop self-awareness
Within this area coaches work with clients on areas such as cognitive behaviour, assumptions, managing emotions, managing critical conversations, and goal setting we also explore planning and improving communication and listening skills.
3) Leadership skills
In this area we typically work with coachees on vision and strategy to ensure their teams have clarity and are fully engaged towards business results. Emotional intelligence and empathy is also a key area of development and behavioural change. Practical tools such as decision-making and problem-solving are also key. Typically we find one of the fundamentals is fostering the commitment on the part of the leader to embrace their personal journey of behavioural change in order to facilitate long term self-management around crating new behaviours. This element is fundamental and understanding beliefs triggers and personal bias is a key to changing behaviours. We also offer strategies to support effective PDP and PIPs, Guidance on managing up and increasing personal profile. Assessing leadership strengths and development areas, strategic input, and team management.
While I definitely don’t dispute the importance of the Riddler top three, from our experience these 3 focuses are now augmented with 5 further current needs. These are areas Transform are regularly called upon to support.
They are Resilience, Role transitions, Derailing behaviour, Change management and Developing high potentials and future leaders.
4) Resilience & Stress management
People are stressed and in many cases this has led them to struggle in a different way with new ways of working and our changing post-pandemic environment.
We support wellbeing and our sister company The Wellbeings People provides wellbeing programmes and has a broad set of resources in this space.
When approaching the topic within executive coaching we work with coachees on strategies to reduce stress and anxiety as well as building goals around overall wellness and balance.
5) New appointments and the facilitation of role transitions.
Often when promoted or joining a business coachees benefit from building a personal plan with a coach working as a sounding board and supporter to alleviate concerns and plan for hard and soft skills development to enable a faster more value adding employee from day 1.
6) Reduce derailing behaviour
When there is an individual in the team who struggles to manage communication and relationships there is often the possibility to support fast adaptations and improvements.
7) Support senior staff managing change
Change is the only constant and as markets become more complex technology develops executives need support to ensure team members support and ebrace the changes underway. Very few businesses do this well and the engagement skills required are often lacking. A key part of project management and leadership incorporate the skills required to sell change internally across all team members, internal stakeholders, suppliers and clients.
8) Developing high potentials
Potential can only be realised when clear plans are developed to fill skill gaps. It is not only hard skills but also soft skills that are needed if smart capable individuals are to progress quickly up a business management structure. In the absence of this considered effort some are ill prepared from promotion or promoted into a point of incompetence. Being great at one job rarely prepares individuals for the next step without adequate focus and support.
Research in the Riddler report also showed across a large set of corporates some advantages of external coaches versus internal coaches or line managers: Externals were more objective, less judgemental, offered greater safety and trust, more focused time for development, more insight, and better listening skills. In particular external coachees offered greater depth and breadth of industry experience and know-how when it comes to personal growth and handling business challenges.
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