Empathy and expertise at scale

Coaching is a thought-provoking, creative process, working together unlocking full potential, both personally and professionally, to beware of and achieve desired outcomes.

Coaching is all about a journey and nothing about instruction or teaching. It is as much – if not more – about how things are done as about what is done.

Coaching focuses on future possibilities, not past mistakes. The coachee does acquire facts and develops new skills and behaviors, not by being told or taught but by discovering from within.

In practice a coaching process fosters evolution, emerging from within. Coaching creates conditions for learning and growing.

Ethos you might think? Coaching is not merely a technique to be wheeled out and rigidly applied in certain prescribed circumstances. It is a way of thinking, a way of being, a way we relate to one another, a way of treating people, a way of leading and managing.

As with any new skill, attitude, style or belief, adopting a coaching ethos requires commitment, practice and time before it flows naturally and its effectiveness is optimised.

It is a pathway to a new breed of leaders, leader coaches, practicing a completely different type of leadership or management that takes their abilities to a whole new level, adequate to the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity (VUCA) businesses face in the twenty-first-century challenges.

Knowing how to lead in a coaching style to unlock potential and deliver highest level of performance is a skill that is increasingly in demand.

Employee engagement has been proven to be linked to performance, and so all the behaviors that underpin engagement – which are all coaching behaviors, such as collaborating, meaningful goal setting, delegating and accountability – have found their way into business language and, more importantly, into behavior!

Adopting a coaching ethos and a coaching leadership will impact the bottom line through sustainable change of behavior, increasing bottom line performance by up to 30 percent.

Emotional intelligence can be described as interpersonal intelligence or, even more simply, as personal and social skills, grouped into four domains: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and relationship management. (Daniel Goleman, PhD in clinical psychology and personality development, Harvard University)

Transformational coaching is the practice of emotional intelligence. It is found that emotional intelligence (EQ) is twice as important, 66% to 34%, as cognitive ability (IQ), ie. academic or technical knowledge, for success at work, for everyone, not just leaders, and in terms of both relationships and productivity.

For leadership roles, the ratio is even greater and accounts for more than 85% of star performance in top leaders.
(Coaching for Performance, Sir John Whitmore, 2017)

Some people use the term mentoring interchageably with coaching. However, mentoring is very different to coaching, because coaching is not dependent on a more experienced person passing down their knowledge – in fact, this undermines the building of self-belief which creates sustained performance.

Instead coaching requires expertise in coaching, not in the subject at hand. That is one of its great strengths.

Good coaching and leading, and good mentoring for that matter, can and should take a coachee beyond the limitations of the coach, leader or mentor’s own knowledge.

Organizational behavioral scientist Amy Edmondson, Harvard University, first introduced the construct of “team psychological safety” and defined it as “a shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.”