Most business coaching engagements are bespoke. Projects depend on the leadership team’s objectives and can span over the entire organisational structure for large change management projects, to addressing specific goals like improving staff motivation or creativity in a single department. As a description of our business coaching services, please consider some of the typical implementations outlined below:
Organisational Change Management:
Accepting change is all about perspective – the way you look at things. Organisations that are unable to adapt to their competitive environments, changing customer needs and social structures will find it difficult, if not impossible, to survive. Sustainably successful companies have employees that are able to embrace change.
Business coaching in this context is about aligning corporate and personal perspectives. It involves obtaining a credible reconciliation between employee goals and aspirations and those of the changing organisation. For more details about the process, please refer to our business change coaching article.
Organisational change coaching projects range from 6 – 18 months. We typically work alongside the leadership team driving the change and management consultants who support the process. The process increases buy-in to the change and can significantly reduce the employee stress associated with corporate restructures. Please contact us to explore how we might work together if your organisation is currently undergoing a change project or intends to launch one.
Leadership training:
Effective leaders are able to get the best out of their staff and contribute significantly to their retention. In this respect, coaching skills are relevant to everyone from new managers through to the executive team.
We offer a standard 3-day basic coaching skills course that balances theory and practical aspects. Participants are taught the core coaching tools and are given an opportunity to practice them using case studies. If you have a more specific requirement, we can also tailor training programmes appropriate to your organisation’s needs.
Creativity & Innovation:
Creative problem solving and innovation are the subjects of one of our most popular courses. The course runs over 2 days and applies some core coaching techniques designed to get teams and individuals to think from different perspectives. The course focuses on the practical applications of the techniques to business problems and can ideally be structured around some real challenges the organisation is facing.
Sustainable Employee Motivation:
The holy grail of organisational success is a combination of having the correct resources, optimal deployment of those resources and sustainably motivated staff. While organisations typically fare well on the former two because they have defined processes to support them, they don’t do as well on the latter.
For a more generic description of such a project, please read our Business Coaching for Sustainable Employee Motivation article. Projects of this type need not be organisation-wide culture change projects – they are often applied within a business unit, department or team in which morale is low.
Staff Coaching Support:
We offer ad-hoc coaching support for staff structured as per the company’s requirements. These services range from having a business coach on retainer for executives, to having a coach available for a day a week as part of an organisation’s employee assistance programme.
Please contact us to discuss how we might most effectively work together to support your staff.
Team Development:
Teamwork can be significantly more effective with the use of coaching processes such as appreciative inquiry and techniques to provide constructive feedback. Whether your goal is to enhance the working of an existing team or to dramatically reduce the time it takes for a newly formed team to gel, business coaching makes the process smooth and painless.
Performance Management:
The key to employees achieving their full potential within the context of an organisation is allowing them a safe space to understand their own capabilities and their development needs. To create this safe space, the HR team and the managers conducting the appraisal process need the correct coaching skills to support each employee. These skills include providing feedback in a way that does not demotivate an employee but rather drives them to perform better.
Another important part of performance management that is sub-optimally handled in many organisations is incentives. While the carrot and stick approach does generate short term results it may have quite a negative impact on motivation. This is further validated by a recent Harvard study on employee motivation which demonstrated that staff feel more motivated when they see themselves progressing against their own goals rather than just pocketing additional incentives.
An example project in this area would be to conduct an employee motivation study and match the results with the current incentive scheme. The result would be an optimal restructure of the appraisal process and incentives and that meets both the organisation’s and the employees’ needs.
If you require further information or would like to discuss how business coaching can assist your organisation, please contact us.