Coaching

David Pardey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781136416903
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Learning Made Simple books give you skills without frills. They are matched to the main qualifications and written by experienced teachers and authors to make often tricky subjects simple to learn. Every book is designed carefully to provide bite-sized lessons matched to readers' needs. Using full colour thoughout and written by leading teachers and writers, Learning Made Simple books build on a rich legacy of over 50 years as leading publishers helping to learn new skills and develop their talents. Whether studying at college, training at work, or reading at home, aiming for a qualification or simply getting up to speed, Learning Made Simple Books will give readers the advantage of easy, well-organized training materials in a handy volume you can refer to again and again. These titles will be promoted direct to training companies and learners, and individuals will be urged to buy them not only by college lecturers but also by trainers at work. These titles will be core stock for years to come. The books are written by experienced HR trainers and will be typeset by PK McBride (an experienced teacher and author of several Learning Made Simples himself). PK McBride has a thorough understanding of the ethos of the LMSs books and his involvement will insure that all titles have a layout and style consistent with the brand.

1 What is coaching?

			What do we mean by coaching?
			Different types of coaches
			Skills or personal development
			Colleague or independent coach?
			Why is coaching so popular?
			Effectiveness
			What is your role, as a coach?
			Why do you want to be a coach?

What do we mean by coaching?

Coaching is a simple enough idea yet experts seem to love to argue about small points of detail as to what it is. One of the UK’s leading authorities on coaching, says that coaching is:

A process that enables learning and development to occur and thus performance to improve. To be a successful a coach requires a knowledge and understanding of process as well as the variety of styles, skills and techniques that are appropriate to the context in which the coaching takes place.

Eric Parsloe, The Manager as Coach and Mentor, CIPD: 1999

Two other writers describe coaching very similarly, as:

A process whereby an individual, through direct discussion and guided activity, helps a colleague to learn to solve a problem, or to do a task, better than would otherwise be the case.

David Megginson and Tom Boydell, A Managers Guide To Coaching, CIPD: 1979

These are both fairly brief descriptions compared to the definition used by the Coaching and Mentoring Network, although some of the key points are the same.

The Coaching and Mentoring Network definition of coaching

Coaches:

◆ Facilitate the exploration of needs, motivations, desires, skills and thought processes to assist the individual in making real, lasting change.

◆ Use questioning techniques to facilitate client’s own thought processes in order to identify solutions and actions rather than take a wholly directive approach.

◆ Support the client in setting appropriate goals and methods of assessing progress in relation to these goals.

◆ Observe, listen and ask questions to understand the client’s situation.

◆ Creatively apply tools and techniques which may include one-to-one training, facilitating, counselling and networking.

◆ Encourage a commitment to action and the development of lasting personal growth and change.

◆ Maintain unconditional positive regard for the client, which means that the coach is at all times supportive and non-judgemental of the client, their views, lifestyle and aspirations.

◆ Ensure that clients develop personal competencies and do not develop unhealthy dependencies on the coaching or mentoring relationship.

◆ Evaluate the outcomes of the process, using objective measures wherever possible to ensure the relationship is successful and the client is achieving their personal goals.

◆ Encourage clients to continually improve competencies and to develop new developmental alliances where necessary to achieve their goals.

◆ Work within their area of personal competence.

◆ Possess qualifications and experience in the areas that skills-transfer coaching is offered.

◆ Manage the relationship to ensure the client receives the appropriate level of service and that programmes are neither too short, nor too long.

So what does this all tell us? Coaching is a process that mainly uses:

◆ Questioning

◆ Observing and

◆ Listening

to guide someone towards an agreed set of goals, usually to improve their performance or behaviour in a work role. Although coaching can be used with groups or teams, it is usually done on a one-to-one basis, and its success depends very heavily on the quality of the relationship between the coach and the person being coached.

However, it’s important to recognise that there are different types of coaching, and that the type of coaching you are engaged in affects the process involved, the skills you need, the goals you will be agreeing with the person being coached and the relationships that you will be establishing. Before going on to look in detail at how you coach, it’s important to establish what kind of coaching you are going to be doing. Although many of the skills you need to use will be the same, how you use them differs considerably between say, executive coaching and skills coaching.

Different types of coaches

One of the reasons for the different views about coaching is that there are now a whole range of people who work as coaches but who do different things to help different types of people address very different issues. Sometimes coaches use different titles to describe their role, such as:

Executive coaches

Almost always external to the organisation in which someone works, this type of coach works with senior managers to support them through both personal and business development. (In large organisations which are divided into semi-autonomous operations, executive coaches may work for a central HR function.) Very often the managers using coaches tend to feel isolated in their role and value having someone to discuss the decisions they face and the stresses that this puts on them.

Business coaches

These types of coaches are usually employed to help managers facing significant business developments, such as a major project or structural change in the organisation, e.g. a merger or takeover. Business coaches are often external, but can be senior figures within the organisation, and should offer a combination of business advice and personal support to the individual. They are often specialists in the task or business area concerned, because of the advisory part of their role.

Performance coaches

These focus primarily on performance, and are found in business as well as in sport and personal fitness. Performance coaching involves developing specific skills (like skills coaches, below) but also looks at wider behaviours and relationships (lifestyle issues, such as eating habits, leisure activities, work/life balance, etc.) that affect performance at work or in sporting activity. Performance coaches can be internal or external to the organisation. Increasingly, coaching subordinates to improve their performance is seen as a central part of the line managers’ role.

Skills coaches

Skills coaching is much more focused on specific aspects of performance and the skills needed to ensure someone can perform a specific task. The skills coach will normally be technically very proficient in the performance of the task or very knowledgeable about it. Skills coaches can be internal or external to the organisation, and skills coaching is often a responsibility of team leaders and first-line managers, to raise the skills levels of the people they lead or manage.

Life coaches

Life coaches focus far more on personal development needs, on relationships and lifestyle, and only address work issues insofar as they have an impact on the achievement of personal goals. They are often approached by people facing difficult personal decisions or who are feeling stressed by competing pressures and are looking for help in resolving these. Life coaches can use techniques and address problems similar to those encountered in counselling, although a good life coach will be careful not to stray into areas that are really the concern of professional counsellors. Life coaches are almost exclusively external to an organisation.

Summary

What you can see from this is that coaching:

1 Ranges in focus from the skills needed to perform specific tasks to personal development and lifestyle relationships.

2 Sometimes relies on the coach being wholly independent of the person and employer, and at other times is a central part of the role of managers and team leaders in organisations.

Despite these differences, what unites the different types of coaching is that they all tend to rely on very similar skills, and it is these skills that we will mainly be looking at in this Learning Made Simple. However, before doing that, we’ll look in more detail at the two dimensions of coaching mentioned above, the focus on skills or personal development and the degree of independence of the coach.

Skills or personal development

When we talk about skills development, we usually think of training. Because of this, coaching is often seen as a particular form of training that is done on a ‘one-to-one’ rather than a ‘one-to-many’ basis. But how does coaching differ from standard training and can it do things that other forms ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. What is coaching?
• 2. Learning and motivation
• 3. Getting started
• 4. Building relationships
• 5. The skills of coaching
• 6. Reaching the end
• 7. The working coach
• Index