Blog

A point of clarification. I do not mean the use of traditional role playing as experienced (usually painfully) by delegates on sales training courses or similar. I am not about to suggest that you and your coachee develop a script and set up video cameras. By role playing I mean the idea of experimenting and trying ides ‘on for size’ and there are two main ways in which this is helpful in a coaching session. Firstly we can offer our coaches the idea of ‘practice without penalty’. If, for example, they have come up with a way forward that involves

  Having defined roles and responsibilities and found an appropriate setting it’s time to get together with your coachee for an introductory meeting. If you’re coaching the same people whom you manage, this meeting will be about introducing the concept of coaching, explaining why you’re using it now and setting out what you hope it will achieve. If you’re coaching people with whom you don’t normally work, this meeting is about establishing a working relationship. Let’s consider both these scenarios in turn as there are common elements to both. Here we meet Simon, Head of Sales for an office supplies

This may seem at first glance to be something of a daft heading. Roles and responsibilities in coaching are obvious and implied in everything I’ve ever posted: we coach, they learn. Simple. But is anything ever quite so straightforward in organizational life? Coaching never happens in a vacuum. If you’re coaching your own team member it may seem that only the two of you are involved, but that’s probably a mistaken assumption. I’m guessing your boss will be very interested in the outcome of any coaching sessions as they too will undoubtedly benefit from improved results and they’ll also be

In my next few posts I want to concentrate on the practicalities of scheduling and running coaching sessions or conducting coaching conversations. We need to consider what needs to happen before, during and after coaching to give us the best chance of achieving a successful outcome. These considerations range from the seemingly simple (though often frustratingly difficult) matter of booking an appropriate meeting room, to more complex and subtle concerns like handling emotion. Before we do that though, I want to examine in a little more detail what precisely is meant by a coaching session. The term covers many different