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Executive
coaching
Coaching
for leadership development occurs with selected executives, senior
managers and teams or as part of a company-wide coaching initiative.
Coaches, both internal and external, are also contracted to work
within a specific business unit or with individual referrals. Some
areas of leadership coaching include: leaders in transition, new
hires, high potential individuals being ‘groomed” for promotion,
individuals in new positions, management competencies to complement
technical expertise, developing and communicating a strategic
vision, strategic planning, culture change, ambassadorship, leading
executive teams, overcoming isolation and interpersonal skills such
as communication and dealing effectively with colleagues and with
power.
Business
coaching
Business
coaches work with small to medium enterprises to develop and grow
the business. Coaching entrepreneurs, start-ups, mergers and
developing a business in order to sell it are some of the more
common areas of business coaching. Within these broad categories,
Behavioural Coaches, who usually have a background in small
business, coach for business or strategic planning, developing and
growing the market, staff relations, networking, life balance, time
management and partnership conflicts.
Transformational
leadership
Coaching
leaders for transformational changes involves changing the very way
they think, increasing their ability to deal better with ambiguity
and be more creative and reflective. It effects change in what the
leader knows and enhances their ability to step back and reflect on
assumptions previously taken for granted. These may be about
culture, values, the self, organizational objectives and vision.
Some
documented benefits of leadership coaching include: enhanced ability
to develop and foster trust; increased accountability within the
organization; developing and maintaining more satisfactory
relationships with the Board, shareholders and employees; enhanced
credibility and influence as an ambassador; increased ability to
align others to the company’s vision and mission; successful
change management projects; enhanced managerial competencies; a
growth in self-responsibility in self and others; developing a
culture that truly values learning and development.
The
manager as coach
Coaching
involves managers aligning their team and employees to the
organization’s objectives and vision and fostering independent and
creative problem-solving. Another
expectation of managers is that they develop their staff. There is,
after all, a consistent body of research that shows a direct link
between human capital management and superior shareholder returns.
Coaching
offers managers a methodology for enhancing the individual or
team’s current skills. They thereby develop employees who are
committed and trusted to use their discretion and judgment to act in
ways that are congruent with organizational objectives and goals.
Managers have to manage and coaching is simply a vehicle for them to
enhance their management skills.
Coaching
executive women
Women
executives not only face those issues common to all leaders as
discussed above, but have to contend with other challenges, some
external and some a function of their internalized beliefs and
misconceptions about women in leadership.
Because
of the increasing number of women in the workforce and in executive
positions, there is a greater demand for women to be coached. Some
of the most common coaching issues that surface include: life
balance and the expectations of peers and family, political manoeuvring
and relationship building with key stakeholders, being
assertive, delegating and managing dissent and conflict.
Coaching
Program Managers (CPM’s)
Coaching
Program Managers, trained in Behavioural Coaching methods and
techniques, fulfill many roles. Typically, they are involved in
coaching programs from their inception. As internal coaches, they
often introduce coaching into the organization and oversee and
manage its delivery. They may also be the person designated to
manage a coaching program introduced by an external coach provider.
BC
and Education
One
of the expanding areas of Behavioural Coaching is in the field of
education. Behavioural Coaches provide individuals, groups,
teachers, students and administrative personnel with a wide variety
of coaching interventions. They train senior teachers to coach new
and experienced teachers and students as well as establishing and
monitoring peer coaching programs. Coaches also work with students
on life skills, study skills and social skills as well as career
choice and preparation.
-Coaching
the teacher
BC
is not simply another term for traditional mentoring or peer
supervision between teachers. Instead, coaching focuses on
assessment of the teachers’ strengths and weaknesses, developing a
personalized action plan and working to the coachee’s agenda
rather than that of the governing educational body. The coach’s
role then, is distinct from supervision and is unrelated to
performance evaluation. Of course, if the coachee wishes to set
objectives around performance evaluation, the coach acts in a
strictly confidential role as support, guide and giver of feedback.
-Peer
coaching
Experienced
teachers also derive significant benefits from coaching, especially
in relation to enhancing their skills and general professional
development as educators.
The aim of peer coaching
is to refine present teaching skills and it has proved
particularly effective with senior teachers.
Peer
coaching allows teachers to share a professional dialogue about the
science and art of teaching. It involves teachers receiving support,
assistance and feedback from fellow teachers. Typically, all
teachers involved in the peer coaching program are trained in the
fundamentals of BC including goal setting, action planning,
interpersonal and helping skills.
-Coaching
students
Teachers,
of course, have to teach and they do not have the resources or time
to individually coach all students. However, two types of coaching,
namely Cognitive Coaching and
Coaching for children with Attention Deficit Disorder have been
translated to the classroom.
Teachers
also employ BC techniques when coaching students in a group setting.
The group may be composed of students who have a common problem to
address or may be part of a life skills coaching curriculum. Indeed,
a study of socially-rejected fifth graders found that coaching
improved their social skills and increased their ability to be liked
by peers.
-Coaching
for academic success
Because
few high schools, colleges or universities have the resources to
offer students individualized attention, more students are employing
Behavioural Coaches to work with them on both personal and academic
issues.
Career
coaching
Coaching
for careers and career transitions offers individuals support,
resources and guidance during what are often stressful times.
Many organizations recognize the importance of career development as
a means of retaining staff. Hence, they offer internal career
coaching programs often conducted by external coaches.
Coaching
in health-care settings
Behavioural
Coaches work with individual physicians, supervisors and
administrative personnel in hospitals and other public and private
health organizations. Some of the coaching areas include: personal
leadership, management skills, managing interpersonal conflicts with
and among staff, career development and career transition. Executive
coaching services around leadership and management skills in
hospitals typically focus on competencies for doctors in management
and leadership positions. These include resource allocation,
strategic planning and meeting the demand for profitability while
maintaining medical values and ethics.
Sales
coaching
I n
Dr
Skiffington's ‘The Complete Guide to Coaching at Work”,
she explores sales coaching
in relation to the following areas: negative beliefs and
expectations that can impact on sales performance and the coach’s
role in working with salespersons in the ‘flow’, ‘panic’ and
‘drone’ zones and coaching skills for the sales
manager. Increasingly, Behavioural Coaches work with
sales managers to enhance their management and coaching
competencies.
Cross-cultural
coaching
Coaching
individuals and teams in cross-cultural settings is a rapidly
expanding niche for Behavioural Coaches. Such coaches are
specialists who know about and can guide and support others through
the complex process of cultural adaptation.
Chartered
Public Accountants (CPA’s) and coaching
Increasingly,
Chartered Public Accountants (CPAs), attorneys and other financial
advisors are coaching other practitioners and entrepreneurs as an
add-on their traditional services. CPA’s particularly, are
recognizing the need to become a trusted advisor to their clients,
being able to work on vision, mission and strategic planning.
Studies show that their clients benefit from coaching
especially in the areas of smarter goal setting and a more balanced
life style.
Others
areas where BC is used:
The
application of Behavioural Coaching is not limited to the above
mentioned areas. It also entails coaching coaches including those in
the executive, business, personal and sports arenas. Furthermore,
Behavioural Coaching is carried out in the military, the civil
service and other public institutions and non-profit organizations
as well as the legal profession. Christian coaching and Spirituality
coaching also employ BC methods, tools and techniques.
In
summary, the application of BC methodologies is employed in a
growing number of areas. These include corporations, small
businesses, public and private organizations such as health and
education and the personal development realm.
Within this vast arena, Behavioural Coaches form an alliance
based on trust and commitment that aims to foster productivity,
growth and well being according to the coachee’s agenda .
Read
More >>
The
Behavioral Coaching Model:
-
Achieving
Behavioral Change with validated Coaching Techniques
(includes
some extracts
from new text book 'Behavioral Coaching' by Zeus and Skiffington
- copyrighted
by McGraw-Hill Professional Publishing)
"The purpose
of coaching is to produce behavioral change and growth in the
coachee for the economic benefit of the client." - Harvard
Business Online, December 2004
The term "behavior" is frequently misused in training and coaching
literature/programs, with little attention paid to
methods of actually changing behaviors and insuring that these
changes are lasting.
The definition of behavior to
which behavioral coaching subscribes is: the actions,
responses and reactions of an individual, team or
organization. Behavioral coaching can also be defined as the
science and art of facilitating the performance, learning and
development of the individual or team, which in turn assists
the growth of the organization. The overall goal of behavioral
coaching is to help individuals increase their effectiveness
and happiness at work, study and/or in a social setting.
Everyone involved in personal
and professional development needs to understand and
appreciate basic behavioral processes and how these relate to
individual functioning and organizational performance.
Many organizations and coaches
claim to use behavioral coaching simply because they are
dealing with behavior. On closer scrutiny, however, they are
merely attaching a new name to the old workplace counseling
model; that is, the "coaching" is remedial, occurs
on an as-needs rather than an ongoing basis, involves little
monitoring or evaluation and does not attend to preventing
slippage. Furthermore, some professionals claim to practice
behavioral coaching simply because they employ personality
profiling. Behavioral coaching goes beyond false promises
about change and examines what we can and cannot change. It
presents research-based and scientifically validated means of
instilling
new optimism for coaches and their clients about achieving
change.
Behavioral coaching integrates
research from many disciplines into a validated, user-friendly
model of practice. It incorporates knowledge from psychology
(behavioral, clinical, social, developmental, industrial and
organizational), systems theories, existential philosophy,
education and the management and leadership literature.
One of the reasons why
behavioral techniques are so widely accepted is that they
allow for data to be gathered on specific, targeted behaviors
impacting the application of a professional skill.
By using appropriate validated, behavioral change instruments,
these targeted behaviors can easily be measured and evaluated
in a rigorous manner. Behavioral coaching, with its emphasis
on research and evidence, provides individuals and
organizations a validated and proven system that greatly
increases their chances of effecting lasting behavioral
change.
Changing behavioral patterns
cannot be achieved by using the many simplistic, outdated
models of coaching still widely promoted in the
coaching industry/literature. Many so-called "certified
coaches" churned out by the "coaching
associations" are simply doing more harm than good. Meantime,
many large, high-profile coach training schools are still
teaching simplistic models of coaching that employ
re-labeled, old performance counseling strategies or, in
some cases, scientifically unproven fuzzy techniques.
Because coaching is still in the
early stages of its development, there is no agreed-upon,
all-embracing model of the coaching process and practice. To
date, most efforts to construct a comprehensive coaching model
have emerged from sports coaching.
A coaching model cannot be
procrustean. It requires an in-built flexibility and
adaptability so that coaching programs can be tailored to fit
the specific needs of each client and coachee. For example, a
coach needs to take into account their own, as well as the
coachees', differences in personality, knowledge, skills and
abilities. Coachees also vary in motivation and preparedness
for change.
As well as individual factors,
each coachee exists within various systems, both personal and
professional. These affect how a coaching program is
conducted, as do factors such as the organizational culture
and structure, available resources and the organization's
business objectives.
The behavioral coaching model
emphasizes the following aspects of behavior and learning:
.
"Formal
training in leadership and interpersonal skills and follow-up behavioral
coaching, has been shown to increase productivity
by 30% in the first year, as related to that area of
training. Continued improvement in performance
is seen with feedback and behavioral
coaching. Without such follow-up, the performance
level is just slightly higher than before
the
training.
Behavioral coaching has
consistently been shown to result in the perception of enhanced
leadership effectiveness by 99% of those observing the person. Also
99% of individuals who follow the prescribed program improve by
at least one full point on a six-point scale as determined by
their co-workers." -Personal
Leadership Development Study -2002. Michael Woods MD, Welyne
Thomas PhD
Many vital coaching practice
protocols, models, techniques and assessment instruments a
professional coach requires are only available to coaches
trained and mentored by a facilitator who is also a licensed
clinical psychologist. For example; Dr Skiffington's
invitational, fast-tracked, 4 Day, Very Small Group Certified
Master Coach Course (N.Y., London & Sydney) meets
the critical needs for business and executive coaches to be
trained and mentored in the use of validated, reliable
psychology-based coaching models, tools and techniques.
Further Reading:
- Evidence
Based Coaching versus Belief Coaching
-
Validated
Coaching Tools
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