Coaching for High Performance

How to develop exceptional results through coaching

Sarah Cook

• Publisher: IT Governance Publishing
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781849281041
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Management

A practical guide to improving your team's performance

Coaching helps people to define desired outcomes for themselves and encourages them to take responsibility for developing strategies and actions to achieve them. It's about helping people to learn rather than teaching them. By applying sound coaching skills within in the IT workplace, you can enhance the quality of your team's work, increase people's ability and confidence, and create a climate of high performance.

If you are an IT manager and work with IT professionals on a regular basis, Coaching for High Performance will inspire you with practical advice and tips on a range of soft skills areas to help you create the ideal coaching environment for your department.

Use your easy to apply coaching skills to get the best out of all of your interactions from five minutes chats, direct reports, one-to-one meetings, performance reviews, to IT project meetings.

Benefits to business include:

• Help people to unlock their potential
• Quickly and easily get the best out of every situation in as little as 15 minutes
• Enjoy better on-going professional relationships that help people achieve extraordinary results
• Accelerate individual's progress and help them achieve personal and business goals
• Cement your relationships by helping people to learn

Order this practical guide to creating a coaching environmenttoday.

CHAPTER 1:
WHAT IS COACHING?

In this chapter I provide you with:

• A definition of coaching and how this is different to training, counselling and mentoring.

• An overview of the benefits of coaching.

• An illustration of where coaching may be useful for you.

• An overview of how coaching is linked to performance management.

Too much to do, too little time

Marvin was struggling. Although an experienced IT manager, he was new to the organisation. He had inherited a department consisting of a mixture of ‘old hands’ as well as several graduates and project managers who, like himself, were new to the organisation. The business had an aggressive agenda for change encompassing several major IT projects. The trouble was, although everyone had the best of intentions, no one on Marvin’s team seemed to be pulling their weight. Deadlines were being missed, tempers were becoming frayed and Marvin seemed to end up doing more and more of the work himself in order to keep things afloat.

Marvin realised that something had to change if his department was going to achieve the Key Performance Indicators it had been set. In desperation, Marvin called one of his former colleagues who was now heading a successful IT team in another firm. How, he wanted to know, had his ex-colleague been so successful in creating a high-performance team?

And this is how Marvin discovered the benefits of coaching. This book shares Marvin’s journey of discovery; it outlines what coaching is, the benefits of coaching, the process and skills of coaching and how it can be used successfully in an IT environment to bring about sustained levels of high performance, personal achievement and growth.

My hope is that in reading this book you will benefit from the power of coaching.

What is coaching?

There are various definitions of coaching:

• ‘An ongoing professional relationship that helps people achieve extraordinary results’

• ‘Helping people to unlock their potential’

• ‘The process of accelerating an individual’s progress to achieving personal and organisational goals’

• ‘The partnership between a manager and an individual, whereby the manager helps the individual to learn’.

In essence, coaching is forward-looking and goal-oriented. The purpose of coaching is to help individuals define desired outcomes for themselves, to create awareness of the options open to them in achieving their desired outcomes and to help them take responsibility for developing appropriate strategies and actions to achieve them.

Coaching versus other disciplines

Coaching is different to training as the latter involves teaching something, usually a skill. The coaching process assumes that the coachee has the ability to find the resources they need to achieve their goal. Coaching is about helping people to learn, rather than teaching them.

Coaching is also different to counselling as it is forward-focused and goal oriented, whereas counselling tends to focus on the past. Counselling typically helps people to work through problems in their past which are impacting their current performance.

Coaching is different to mentoring as mentoring usually involves a more experienced person offering advice and acting as a role model to others. In coaching the coach does not have to know the answers as their role is to help the coachee find their own way.

Coaching	Counselling
Focus on a goal	Focus on a difficulty
Direction is to achieve the goal	Direction is to overcome the difficulty
Future-focused	Focused on the past
Discussion around possibilities	Discussion around problems
Clarifies objectives, encourages action	Focus on healing

Solution-oriented	Fixes the ‘problem’
Coach helps the coachee move towards a solution	Counsellor helps the client move away from a problem

Table 1: Key differences between coaching and counselling

What are the benefits of coachi...

Table of contents

• FOREWORD
• PREFACE
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• CONTENTS
• CHAPTER 1: WHAT IS COACHING?
• CHAPTER 2: THE SKILLS AND STYLES OF COACHING
• CHAPTER 3: MODELS OF COACHING
• CHAPTER 4: EFFECTIVE FEEDBACK
• CHAPTER 5: CONTRACTING AND GOAL-SETTING
• CHAPTER 6: LISTENING AND QUESTIONING SKILLS
• CHAPTER 7: GENERATING OPTIONS AND ENCOURAGING CHANGE
• CHAPTER 8: INTRODUCING COACHING TO YOUR ENVIRONMENT
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• GLOSSARY
• ITG RESOURCES