What is coaching used for?
Leadership coaching is the art of enhancing performance, development and creativity at work - and in life - by facilitating a change in thinking.
Coaching is the ideal methodology to develop the mindset and capabilities of organisational leaders, middle managers and senior managers in transition towards new roles, or to achieve challenging objectives in changing and competitive environments.
Studies have shown leadership coaching to be a highly effective method of reaching organisational goals. The International Coaching Federation measured the impact of coaching on one hundred senior executives. The results were startling: coaching gave an average of 5.7 times return on its investment.
- 77% said that coaching had improved their relationships with direct reports
- 63% said coaching had improved teamwork
- 53% reported an increase in productivity
- 48% reported an increase in the quality of their work
- 61% report improved job satisfaction
How does our coaching work?
While we take a personal approach to each coaching client, we keep coaching programmes results-orientated, focused on strategic business objectives, enabling leaders to reach their goals and helping them be a more effective leader with their colleagues.
We help leaders get clear on what their most important objectives are and assess the blockers or challenges that get in the way. These can be both external e.g. no available resources or internal e.g. lack of confidence or self-awareness. Then we help leaders construct a creative path forward, tapping into their motivations and disciplines to achieve specific deliverables.
We provide a service bespoke to every client’s needs, taking a conversational, holistic approach, and offering the opportunity for specialist coaching on specific issues.
Getting the right coach
We are proud to offer our clients an outstanding global faculty of senior coaches, recruited and quality-assured through a rigorous international process.
Our coaches draw on a wealth of experience across a wide range of disciplines (education, business science, philosophy, psychology and neuroscience) to support clients all over the world. They can provide expertise in the following areas:
- Leadership development – clarifying and improving leadership style
- Business results - creating robust plans to achieve greater success and achievement
- Values alignment - developing individual behaviours that meet organisational needs
- New role - supporting senior executives to successfully inhabit new situations
- Work/life balance - clarifying challenges and generating fresh solutions
- Strategic direction - developing thinking to create a compelling vision for the future
- High potential - equipping identified high-flyers with the core elements for success
- Skills development – enabling key learning to enhance professional performance
- Conflict resolution – identifying blockages to effective working relationships, and facilitating corrective action
What does a typical coaching programme look and feel like?
During this initial phase, we assess your needs and preferences and select our most suitable coaches. Clients can expect their coach to have experience of similar professional situations. Where appropriate, the coach will also have prior experience of a client’s specialist field.
We suggest 2 to 3 coaches that we believe meet your criteria. The coachee will get a chemistry meeting with each, to give them the chance to select the coach that best resonates with them. If they decide that the coaches we have selected are not the right ‘fit’, we identify a fresh set of potential coaches.
Where it is appropriate to involve a sponsor e.g. the person's line manager or HR representative, we arrange a meeting between the sponsor, the coach and the coachee. This three-way meeting allows us to create suitable goals and success measures for the coaching and to agree the length and conditions surrounding the coaching experience.
Where there is no sponsor required, then the coach and coachee contract around their ways of working and the outcomes to be achieved by the end of the coaching assignment.
Coaching sessions usually last between 1.5 and 3 hours.
We create an appropriate coaching programme that factors in the outcomes that need to be achieved and the context in which the individual is operating. This could be anything from 2 to 10 coaching sessions over a period of 6 weeks to 9 months. A typical programme is 6 sessions over 4 to 6 months, each of 2 hours' duration.
During a coaching session coachees might expect:
- Challenge around the outcomes that they want and need to achieve
- Reflection on past successes and failures
- Exploration of stakeholders and how to manage or engage them as appropriate
- Challenge around assumptions and unhelpful working patterns
- Focus on strengths and how to leverage them more effectively
- Being held to account around agreed actions
- Being enabled to think creatively and differently
- Help with formulating a robust plan of action
- Consideration of how to create more effective and productive working relationships
Sessions take place in a location that best encourages comfort and freethinking. This might be our clients’ offices, a mutually agreed venue, a virtual meeting room - or a combination of these, and respecting social-distance protocols.
At the end of any coaching programme we arrange a debriefing session to revisit the original goals, review learning and gather feedback with the coach, coachee and sponsor (where relevant). We also undertake a Return on Investment analysis to ensure we have met or exceeded your success measures.
Let's talk
Our global team of partners has over 200 years' experience of working with individuals, teams and organisations.
We'd be happy to talk to you about your own requirements and goals, and craft a solution that is specific to your situation.
