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EXECUTIVE & CAREER COACHING

Process

	Clarify Goals It is absolutely vital to provide clear goals and objectives at the start of any coaching relationship — both with the individual and their boss/sponsor. The participant’s objectives must be in line with the strategic direction of the organisation AND be measurable.
	Assess Leadership Competency Coaching is about helping individuals achieve their goal of increased leadership competency. However, many individuals have not received comprehensive feedback from others on how they are currently perceived. This therefore is the starting point for most coaching assignments. 360 degree assessment tools can be used to provide this feedback or, if appropriate, selected key colleagues can be interviewed.
	Define Benchmark The next step is to create a benchmark — to define the ideal leadership profile for the participant. This profile should ensure that it meets both the leadership needs of the organisation, role, situation and their own values. In this way, every benchmark profile is totally tailored.
	Analyse Gaps Having identified the benchmark and the current leadership profile of the participant, it is then possible to perform a gap analysis and to identify development needs. We recommend that the participant chooses only 3−4 behaviours, these being the ones which they believe will have the most impact. This ensures that the participant can focus their energies on these critical behaviours.
	Profile Personality Personality profiling can be extremely helpful at this stage to enable the coach to understand how easy or difficult the participant may find the required behavioural changes.
	Develop Plan The participant drafts a development plan, reviews it with the coach and then this is agreed with the boss/sponsor.
	Implement Plan The participant then needs to implement their plan over an agreed period — typically 6 months.
	Review (Iterative) The coach and participant meet on a weekly, fortnightly or monthly basis to discuss the application of the plan to the actual situations they face — rehearsing approaches and then at the next meeting reviewing what actually happened. This iterative process continues until the agreed review time when further feedback is sought — either by a 360 retest or by interview, to ascertain and measure the success of the coaching.