Coaching Life Skills
Coaching Life Skills
Roots
Coaching has its roots in the area of sports dating as far back as ancient Greece and the Olympic games. However, in relationship to the workplace its history is much more contemporary. From the 1940′s to the late 1970′s coaches were usually organizational consultants with backgrounds in either psychology or organizational development (OD). During this period the focus was on organizing was mainly of OD issues.
Then from the 1980′s to the mid 1990′s, fuelled by the increase of downsizing, mergers and acquisitions, and outplacement the field expanded exponentially to include areas such as outplacement, career and life coaching. This was a time when the role of leading began to drastically evolve to take into consideration the pressure and ambiguity of growing global competitiveness. It was also a time of placing much more emphasis on the softer skills of both leaders and managers.
From the mid 1990′s to now the coaching field has continued to grow and shows no signs of slowing down. Today coaches come from a multiplicity of professional backgrounds such as business, human resources and teaching.
Purpose
Learning and development is one of the main purposes for entering a coaching relationship today. Coaches assist leaders, managers and high potentials transition into promotions, sideways or global positions. Coaching is also useful to improve performance and skills at all levels of the organization or to assist individuals to achieve career aspirations and goals. Life coaching focuses on an individual achieving goals and aspirations outside of the workplace.
In late 2007 and early 2008 the conducted a study into the Current Trends and Future Possibilities of Coaching. There were 854 North American and 176 international respondents.
The participants were mainly in senior to mid-management positions.
The main purposes of coaching coming out of the study were:
Improve performance 79%
Leadership development 63%
Skill development 60%
Organizational development 56%
Address workplace issues 44%
Boost workplace engagement 41%
Improve retention rates 38%
Improve employee performance through coaching their supervisors 26%
Improve recruitment outcomes 24%
The influence of globalizing business
According to a report in Harvard Management Update (2007) the globalizing of business is accelerating the use of coaching. It assists leaders to quickly and effectively develop the comprehensive skill set required in today’s face-paced, highly diverse, global organizational environment.
Return on Investment
Correlations are not synonymous with causation.
However, it is imperative when organizations use vital resources to support anything from individual to organizational-wide coaching programs there is a clear purpose for doing so. If this clarity of purpose is missing then so will any view of the program’s success.
Although there is not a universal method for evaluating coaching benefits and success, clarity of how each organization will measure the success of their specific intervention needs to be there from the outset.
Like the Cheshire Cat explained to Alice if the organization and the individuals involved in the coaching program have not thought about where they want to end up, that is, their goals and objectives for coaching, then it won’t matter which route they take.
In my experience, to be most effective in measuring the success of coaching, there needs to be a benchmarking point of comparison, that is, a before and after picture. Some of the elements that could be benchmarked and measured are performance indicators, productivity indicators, impact of the engagement/productivity of direct reports or impact on retention.
This seems to correlate to two of the findings in the American Management Association study cited above. The first finding was that the more an organization had a clear reason for using a coach the more likely that the coaching process would be viewed as successful. The second finding was that the more frequently respondents reported using a measurement method of evaluation, the more likely they were to report successful outcomes in their coaching programs.
However, we must always be mindful that evaluation of any kind should be used as a learning tool both at an individual and organizational level.
Evaluation is not at its most proactive if used simply as a means to justify unproductive ways of dealing with employees.
It is best used as a means of developing organizational cultures and environments which support the enhancing of skills already present within an individual or the organization and developing others that may be less apparent.
Two significant areas of ROI reported by the organizational respondents in the study above that
were presently using coaching more than in the past were:
1. They are more likely to report higher levels of success in the organizational areas being coached
2. They are more like to say that their organizations are performing well in the marketplace, in the combined areas of revenue growth, market share, profitability and customer satisfaction.
If you would like to discuss the details of this evaluation or any other coaching-mentoring program evaluations that Ruth has carried out please feel free to contact her.
Do older scouts really run the programs and decide what they want to do?
The scoutmasters and leaders serve as mentors and guides and the scouts actually get to decide what they want to do. In sports the players follow the game plan set up by the coach. They don’t get to decide how they will run the game. Can it really happen in scouts and be effective for teaching leadership, respect, honor and life skills?
In a properly run troop, the first batch of Scouts was helped by adult leaders. As they got older, they led and taught the younger, and so on and so on. A properly run troop is indeed youth led.
The role of the adults is to act as a safety net, guides, mentors, enablers, etc. The Scouts figure up what they want to do, the committee makes it possible, and the adult leaders supervise from a distance.
Coaching Skills for life – Letting Go – with Career and Life Coach
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