Advanced Coaching Skills & Techniques

Introduction

Coaching is the practice of supporting an individual, referred to as the client or coachee, through the process of achieving a specific personal or professional result.

The structures, models and methodologies of coaching are numerous but are predominantly facilitating in style: this means that the coach mainly asks questions and challenges the coachee to find answers from within himself/herself based on their values, preferences and unique perspective (also called the “Socratic” approach or “La maíeutique”).
 

Managing is making sure people do what they know how to do. Training is teaching people to do what they don’t know how to do. Mentoring is showing people how the people who are really good at doing something do it. Coaching is none of these – it is helping to identify the skills and capabilities that are within the person, and enabling them to use them to the best of their ability (“Few things can be taught to a human being that he does not already know”- Aritstoteles).

Multiple factors effect coaching such as motivation, cultural differences, goals, and feedback. Whereas control theory only focuses on goals and feedback. The basic premise of control theory is that people attempt to control the state of some variable by regulating their own behavior. Through coaching, people would successfully attempt to control these variables to a large extent.
 

Objectives

In This Seminary You Will:

• Understand the often misperceived meaning of coaching.
• Determine why it is important for every one to develop coaching skills.
• Understand why the manager cannot be the only coach and, moreover, why managers should often not be the designated coaches.
• Develop better working relationships
• Gather better information (collaborative approach means people are more confident to share the good and bad news)
• Do better time and people management – less micro-management
• Identify when a coaching approach is an appropriate intervention
• Put emphasis on developing their own coaching style and focus on the use of coaching in real life change execution situations – techniques for overcoming resistance to coaching.
• Apply best practice coaching models for maximum impact
• Plan and prepare coaching projects and then every coaching session.
• Determine adequate “aiming points” (objectives) for the coaching.
• Evaluate the evolution of the coachee.
• Use some proven techniques for developing coaching skills.
• Develop their own coach’s profile.

In This Seminary Participants Will Learn:

• What is Coaching? Importance of separating coaching from mentoring.
• Becoming aware of the benefits of coaching for the consultant and the coachee
• Trust and Coaching / Building Trust
• Getting a Picture of Where You Are
• Does a manager become automatically a coach when he becomes a manager?
• What are the indicators and/or evaluation criteria to use in order to select the person to coach (i.e. “the coachee”).
• Step-by-step process to become a coach.
• Can a manager delegate coaching? To who?
• Identifying Obstacles
• Empowering coachees to enable them to take action and remove obstacles
• Exploring the Past then identifying possible paths
• Learning and applying best practice coaching models
• Introducing the GROW Model
• Goals in the context of GROW
• Identifying Appropriate Goal Areas
• Identifying the First Step
• Helping coachees to recognise what internal and external resources are available to them
• Using effective questioning and powerful speaking to create breakthroughs, manage resistance, gain commitment and generate action
• Setting SMART Goals
• Getting Motivated
• Creating a platform for a strong coaching relationship through verbal and non-verbal techniques
• Choosing Your Final Approach
• Structuring a Plan  and creating the Final Coaching Plan
• Providing Constructive Criticism
• The “Feedback Sandwich”
• Encouraging Growth and Development
• Re-Evaluating Goals
• How to Know When You've Achieved Success
• How does the coaching process change when the coaching's objective change?
• Transitioning the Coachee
• How to follow-up on coaching.

Training strategy

• Duration: 25 hours, 3 full days.
• Maximum number of participants in any training group: 15.
• The training style will always be extremely interactive.
• 40 to 60% of the duration of the sessions of any training topic will be used in exercises and/or role plays (in many of our training sessions, we will tape role plays performed by trainees on a digital camera and we will then show them during the session for detailed comments; we would also show speeches by world-leading trainers and lecturers or we would show scenes of films and comment them or do team work on them).
• The language I will use will always be easy-to-understand French / English / Arabic.
• A detailed guideline shall be distributed at the end of the sessions. The guideline shall be distributed in CD format.
• Certificates of attendance for each participant shall be distributed at the end of the sessions.