What Is Coaching?
Coaching is a partnership between coach and client. The coach helps the client to achieve their personal best and to produce the results they want in their personal and professional lives. Coaching ensures the client can give their best, learn and develop in the way they wish.
What Is the Essence of Coaching?
- Coaching helps a person change in the way they wish and help them go in the direction they want to go.
- Coaching supports a person at every level in becoming who they want to be.
- Coaching builds awareness and empowers choice and leads to change.
What Is the Purpose of Coaching?
Coaching aims to produce optimal performance and improvement at work. It focuses on specific skills and goals, although it may also have an impact on an individual’s personal attributes such as social interaction or confidence.
What Is Coaching in the Workplace?
Workplace coaching is a professional helping relationship, focused on the goals of the coachee (Passmore & Lai, 2019). It is based on reciprocal actions between the two parties.
Information passes two ways: the coach responds to information about the coachee’s needs, while the coachee receives help, in the form of active listening, thoughtful questioning, or concrete guidance, from the coach.
Workplace coaching unlocks the potential of the coachee. Coaching is a facilitative approach, in which the coach enables future self-directed learning and development (Passmore & Lai, 2019).
What Are the Benefits of Workplace Coaching?
- In a study measuring leader effectiveness, Thach (2002) found that executives who received six months of coaching increased their effectiveness by 55% when rated by their peers in a 360-degree feedback survey.
- The coaching in this study comprised a series of one-on-one coaching sessions provided by an external coach. This type of coaching can contribute to a company coaching culture, which positively affects the entire organisation.
- Teams are at the core of how organisations get things done. A literature review investigating both internal and external team coaching found that coaching had a positive effect on team effectiveness and productivity (Traylor et al., 2020).
- Coaching was found to be more effective for teams that were struggling with communication, reflection, and self-correction. Coaching was found to improve productivity through mediating factors such as psychological safety (Traylor et al., 2020).
- Self-efficacy is an individual’s belief that they will accomplish the task at hand. It is a cognitive estimate of a person’s own ability to perform. This belief impacts both stress levels and actual performance.
- In an experiment comparing a control group to an experimental group of managers who received coaching, the coached managers reported significantly higher levels of self-efficacy (Leonard-Cross, 2010).
- Coached managers also reported feeling more aware of their strengths and weaknesses after the engagement (Leonard-Cross, 2010). With a more accurate view of themselves, these managers felt more prepared to take on challenges.
How Does Coaching Improve Leadership?
A coach can help a leader identify skills to be developed, key strengths, and strategies for improvement. Coaching can focus on achieving goals within a leader’s current job or a move in new directions. Derailing executives can benefit from coaching to improve performance, too.
- Greater self- and contextual-awareness: Coaching is about you and where you work. You’ll gain insight into yourself as a leader within your organisation.
- Greater understanding of others: A coach helps you understand why others might think and act the way they do. You’ll learn about actions you can take to help team members or to focus them in a direction that’s better for the organisation.
- Enhanced ability to communicate: A coach works with you to find ways to improve how you convey what’s important to you, to the business, and to employees.
- Enhanced ability to coach others: Once you’ve experienced the value of coaching to improve performance for your own development, you’ll be much more prepared to notice and leverage coaching opportunities with your team. This capacity will be a key differentiator between a good leader and a great one.
Key Questions to Reflect on as a Leader:
- What is your purpose as a leader?
- What are your goals as a leader?
- What are your leadership values?
- What are your leadership strengths?
- What are your areas for development as a leader?
- Who are your critical friends as a leader?
- How might coaching support you as a leader?
- How might taking a coaching approach support your team?
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What People Say
If you are looking to work with someone who has an infectious passion for making positive change happen, you will love working with Hannah. She has a wealth of experience at a senior leadership level and is hugely committed to the diversity agenda. I have benefitted personally from Hannah’s wisdom and guidance on these issues on a number of occasions.
Andy Buck
Founding DirectorLeadership Matters
When it comes to authentic and courageous leadership, Hannah is unbeatable. Her value-driven approach allows her to be precise and focused whilst taking an empathic approach. One of the leadership traits I admire the most in Hannah is her commitment to asking the difficult questions that others avoid, and this has been evident in her work encouraging Diverse Leaders. She is fearless and highly skilled at driving change, even in complex situations. Hannah is a catalyst and can cause a mindset shift in one conversation. Her leadership creates leaders.