WANT A COACHING QUALIFICATION

For 21 months, I have been working towards the ILM – Institute of Leadership and Management Level 5 Certificate in Effective Coaching and Mentoring. This has been a substantial undertaking but then, the ILM qualifications have been described as the gold standard. Let’s look at what is involved in gaining this qualification.

Book Reviews

For the level 5 there are two book reviews required and I chose:

• The Inner Game of Tennis by Timothy Galloway
• Coaching for Performance by Sir John Whitmore

Assignment 1 – Theoretical Understanding

There are twelve questions related to the theory of coaching within an organisational context. Specifically, this is about understanding the skills, principles and practice of effective coaching (and mentoring) within an organisational context. Each answer is to include a reference to someone else’s writing (using the Harvard style of referencing).

My answer to assignment 1 took 82 pages.

Assignment 2 – My Coaching Practice

This captures evidence of my undertaking of effective coaching and mentoring within an organisational context. For each individual my coaching practice consisted of chemistry, goal setting (only if wanted), contracting, coaching sessions and reviews.

My answer to assignment 2 took 169 pages.

Assignment 3 – Reflections, Learning, Improvements

I reviewed my ability as a coach (and mentor), evaluated the benefits of the coaching, detailed how I developed as a coach, and how I plan to improve going forwards. This involved reflecting on each coaching session and identifying possible improvements .

My answer to assignment 3 took 44 pages.

Supervision

All coaching should receive supervision from another coach to talk over any challenging situations and generally reflect on how things are going. When contracting clients are made aware that everything is confidential but also that it may be discussed with a supervisor. I received a total of four hours supervision.

Documented Coaching Hours

The minimum requirement is 24 hours of documented coaching sessions. This is in addition to chemistry, contracting and reviews. You need to plan for each session, reflect upon it afterwards and get feedback from the coachee. I completed 42 hours with six clients.

CPD – Continuous Professional Development Plan

If you are passionate about coaching, then you will want to keep learning. The ILM requires you to have a 12-month CPD plan to further develop you.

Five Days of Formal Training

I received five days training in coaching from Coaching Focus and they are supporting me in working towards the qualification. https://www.coaching-focus.com/

Conclusion

The ILM 5 provides both knowledge, experience and expertise to provide a professional coaching practice. I would highly recommend this but don’t underestimate the effort required (it took me 21 months but it is not unusual to take 3 years).

Performance Coaching, The What, Why and When.

There are times when its fine to skim over what you reading until get get to the part you are interested in, the key information you want to know. Well here is the key information, the key takeaway, possibly the most important thing on the website… High Performance Coaching Can Be A Game Changer.

In 1943 ‘A Christmas Carol’ by Charles Dickens was published. The main character ‘Ebenezer Scrooge’ is shown by a ghost what the future will be, given his current choices. If today, I had the ability of that ghost, I would have you see someone before and after a coaching session. Before a coaching session, you would observe the individual, with a goal, uncertain of how to get there (uncertain of their next action). Then after, transformed, with absolute certainty of their next action and when they will take it.

For a moment, use your imagination. A group of us are lost and I offer to lead the navigation, to get us to the desired destination. Before you judge whether I’m the right person for this role, you get to ask my immediate family about my navigation skills. They will be pleased to inform you about the time… I got us lost in Belfast (Northern Ireland) , because I decided I knew better than the satellite navigation system. I got us lost camping in the New Forest (Hampshire UK) when a short walk took over an hour because I did not need a map or compass.

But the most memorable was in Vienna (Austria) city centre where I lead a larger family group around in circles until almost exhausted, looking for Café Central. Finally, I got two vintage taxis to take us to our destination. Once seated in the restaurant, an inexperienced waiter tripped, resulting in my wife being covered in the contents of the tray he was carrying.

Now fast forward a few days and we are back in central Vienna. This time its different, I can easily identify where we are, our desired destination and the possible routes to get there. Within a short space of time, we arrive at our desired location, without one wrong turn. So what happened? My wife had purchased a suitably scaled map of the city centre, and with this navigation became easy.

In a coaching session, I’m helping you to get your map. By my listening and asking questions of you, you will start to clearly see where you are, where you want to be and the options (and obstacles) for you to consider. With this map its easy for you to decide the way forward, your next action and when you will take it.

Ongoing coaching provides continual accountability, and confidentiality.

For some coaching is interesting, in theory. But for me this is what I have experienced, I have witnessed those I’ve coached get promotions or move to better positions. If you are not currently providing coaching to your high performers, then like Ebenezer Scrooge, you can choose change that and see a better future.

Scrum Is A Waste Of Time!

Knowing I’m a Scrum Master causes others to enlighten me as to why Scrum is a bad idea. One such example of this was a team leader who in passing commented to me regarding the time spent in meetings. And specifically, the whole day of meetings we have when transitioning between sprints. I’m sure they did the maths and calculated ten developers for eight hours and spotted that’s two weeks of working hours! And furthermore, they had observed that we have daily team meetings which often result in some of us having further meetings. After sharing their insights they returned to their own team.

If however, instead of assuming, they had enquired as to what we do, why, and the results, they could have gained a new perspective.

Start With Why says Simon Sinek.

Agile is about better ways of working when producing software. Scrum is designed to produce value to customers faster. There is the concept of the Scrum Team – a self organised team who together, jointly own the work.

Daily Scrum (aka stand up): We meet for 15 minutes (maximum) each morning to share our plans for the day, and any impediments (obstacles). We do this whilst displaying the Scrum board, providing instant transparency and an opportunity to adapt. From this the whole team have an awareness of each work item’s progress and what each member is doing. Where there are impediments, a smaller number of the team may have a follow on meeting to plan the way forward.

Backlog Refinement: Our sprints last two weeks. Half way through we meet for one hour (maximum) to refine the highest priority items in the product backlog. This gives each team member an awareness of the next sprint’s work. Each item is clarified to ensure it is well defined, ready to be started and estimated.

Sprint Review: At the end of the sprint we meet for a review – an opportunity to demonstrate working software, and to examine how the work went. We can discuss obstacles faced and how they were overcome. We review our velocity (a measure of the amount of work done) against previous sprints and discuss it. This lasts a maximum if two hours (and is often under one hour).

Sprint Retrospective: Then for a maximum of 1.5 hours (often much shorter) we have a retrospective – an inspection of how we work in terms of people, processes and tools. Here we are looking for improvement and any actions from this may be included in the next sprint(s) work. During this event we share with the team our personal growth achieved during the sprint – new skills and experience gained.

Sprint Planning: Next is sprint planning, where the team commits to the work items for the next sprint. Officially this can last up to four hours but in reality we find one hour sufficient. The amount of items to include in the sprint is forecast by considering the velocity achieved in the last few sprints (and also the availability of team members). If high priority items have been added to the product backlog since the last Backlog Refinement session then they are made ready for the sprint.

It is true that on sprint transition days we have a number of meetings (Scrum events) and they consume approximately half of the working day. For transparency, its worth mentioning that on some of these days we also include a half hour team building activity.

The real issue here is the ability to see the value in these Scrum events, to understand their purpose and what they achieve. The following comes to mind:

Planning: Outside of these Scrum events, very little (if any) planning is required.

Accountability: With shared ownership of the work, the team hold each other accountable. The daily Scrum forces each member to share their plans for the day. I argue that this reduces the need for a manager to step into the situation. It also immediately flags to the manager when there is a need to intervene (such as when a member repeatedly fails to make it to the daily Scrum).

Communication: Lets be honest, providing clear and sufficient communication is an ongoing challenge. And, part of the problem lies with those of us who are managers (myself included) in not ensuring our direct reports clearly understand information/news that is helpful to them. However, ask my Scrum team to reflect on the level of communication gained through Scrum events, compared to not having them. There is no question that Scrum has greatly improved this.

Teamwork: Developers may have experienced the feeling of being blocked for days, waiting for some assistance or even for someone to be willing to stop their work in order to review their code. With Scrum, the work belongs to the team. If someone needs help because they hit an impediment, or advice in general, the team step in to assist. If some code is ready for code review, it usually gets done that day (or the next after being discussed at the Daily Scrum). Furthermore, the whole team have an awareness of all the work items to be done in the Sprint.

Kaizen (continuous improvement): If you don’t do Scrum then how do you achieve Kaizen? What does your team do regularly (at least monthly) to explicitly look for improvement? When was the last time you incorporate work items that have the sole purpose of improving something (maybe related to people, processes or tools)? And how are you getting on informally coaching your team to ensure personal growth?

Agile in a different way?

A supple leopard is no doubt very agile – it has not only speed but it can change direction quickly. Moving up to the tree canopy and now we are equally impressed, observing the agility of the monkey moving with ease. The required attributes to provide agility differ, depending upon where we find ourselves.

On 2nd June 2020 a group of Scrum Masters across the UK and Europe commenced two days of training with John M^cFadyen of the Agile Centre. Under the current government restrictions on meeting together, due to Coronavirus (COVID-19), this was delivered live on-line.

This is not a beginners course; there is an expectation that you know about Scrum and teams of people working together. But not just Scrum, as anything Agile, seemed fair game to be asked about. From the start we were set challenges in groups and each was time-boxed. For example 12 minutes to plan a Scrum event, and then feeding back what we had done to the larger group.

There was a lot to take in (it was very intensive) and felt like a semester of university lectures rolled up into two days. In addition, I’ve come away with a reading list of books to digest and apply that I might further add value to my Scrum team.

And the further challenge is for Scrum Masters to go beyond the team and serve the wider organisations we find ourselves in.

I would highly recommend the Agile Centre, having previously done Scrum Master and Product Owner training with them.

The Agile Lean Startup

Agile software methods are about providing value to customers faster.

A lean start up will figure out the right thing to build, that customers value enough to buy and do this fast.

Our plans are agile when we can quickly and easily make changes as needed.

In this sense, The Lean Startup method is agile, using a feedback loop to repeatedly build, measure and learn.

Step 1: Build: Produce a business model design, using Alexander Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas. Out of this take your hypothesis and an MVP (minimal viable product).

Step 2: Measure: Test these hypothesis quickly with customers using the Customer Development process.

Step 3: Learn: If the MVP is working persevere with it. Otherwise, pivot and change something; change the product or the target customers.

Rather than aiming to produce the perfect product, the aim is to create a MVP.
Give this to early adopters, to try, and to get their feedback.
Adapt the product in response and then repeat this process.

You could describe this as applying Kaizen (continuous improvements) to the product.

In Scrum we are looking for continuous improvements in the way we work, in terms of people, processes and tools. Scrum has a formal event for this, known as a retrospective.
This is achieved by having a short regular pause (say 1.5 hours every two weeks), when we reflect on what could be improved. We talk about what we might like to try, to stop, or to continuing doing. At the next retrospective we review it and again look for further improvement going forwards.

Understanding Complexity

The Stacey Matrix, developed by Ralph Douglas Stacey, may be used to aid understanding of a project’s complexity. A version of this is used with software projects has the two axis:

• Requirements – at the lower end we have ‘Close to agreement’ which is reliant on having all the necessary information available. At the higher end we have ‘Far from agreement’. One of the issues with software development is scope creep. We can deal with this by having a clearly defined set of requirements that is not allowed to change. The challenge with this is that new information may emerge during user acceptance testing by the customer.
• Technology – in terms of the technologies we are going to use. At the left we have ‘Close to certainty’ and then at the right ‘Far from certainty’.

Software projects are considered to be complex task – requirements are not clear, and they change over time. This impacts the choice of technology as without knowing a problems we are solving we cannot be sure of the technology we will use. The legacy approach known as Waterfall involved everything being planned upfront, following that plan, and then testing at the end. This lead to many failures. The agile approach, including Scrum was developed as an alternative.

A modern (agile/lean) approach to software development includes the following:

• Fast feedback – producing small chunks of features every two weeks, that may be tested by a customer, allows for immediate feedback.
• Planning every two weeks (a Sprint may be 1 to 4 weeks) allows for changes – changes in the features required (as highest priority) and changes in the direction of the product.
• Building in quality at the time of developing the software, through automated behavioural tests of the system and test of software methods. These tests are run often, provide confidence that the software is working, and also allow the software to be maintained without the introduction of bugs.

CYNEFIN DECISON MAKING

How you see a situation, how you perceive it, how you judge it impacts the decisions you make. In 2005 Dave Snowden developed the Cynefin framework (kuh-nev-in) – a tool to help decision making.

above image is from https://www.managementyogi.com/ article on the Cynefin Framework

For a detailed article see Harvard Business Review https://hbr.org/2007/11/a-leaders-framework-for-decision-making

Dave offers us five decision-making contexts:

• Clear or Simple – the situation where there are obvious cause and effect relationships. It is easy to observe and see what is going on.
• Complicated – strong cause and effect relationships do exist but there are many interactions happening simultaneously.
• Complex – there is only a weak cause and effect relationship.
• Chaotic – these seem impossible to understand.
• Confusion or Disordered – there is confusion about what type of problem we are facing. We can’t tell if it is Clear, Complicated, Complex or Chaotic.

The suggested solution approach for each context:

• Clear or Simple – repeatable best practices may be developed that will produce the desired outcome. I suggest asking yourself whether anything here might be automated, including the use of AI – Artificial Intelligence.
• Complicated – Unlike the Clear context, what is going on is not immediately obvious. However, if studied by an expert, cause and effect predictions may be predicted. It is not possible to use a simple best practice but good practices may be applied to understand the situation.
• Complex – The are not easy to predict, even if studied by an expert. Instead to produce a solution, the Complex requires a team. This sounds to me, a use case for systems thinking and causal loop diagrams.
• Chaotic – They require testing, observing results and they require a novel solution.
• Confusion or Disordered – carefully assess the situation to determine whether it is Clear, Complicated, Complex or Chaotic.

See YouTube video by Mike Clayton that further explains this.

PRE-COACHING QUESTIONS

If you are interested in me coaching you then I’ll ask you to complete a pre-coaching questionnaire.

Not only does this provide me with information but the questions are a form of coaching. To explain, one aspect of coaching is to raise awareness. As I ask you to identify your goals, for the coaching and longer term, these are designed to raise awareness and help you gain clarity.

Questions:

Your Name

Your Role

Key Responsibilities

Are you clear on the difference between High-Performance Executive Coaching, Mentoring, and Counselling?

Why do you want coaching?

Describe your current situation?

What are your goals for the coaching?

In terms of your career, where do you see yourself in five years?

What are your strengths?

What are your weaknesses?

What career opportunities are there for you?

What threats do you face in terms of progressing your career?

Details the results of any psychometric personality preference assessments you have taken.

What coaching do you want to contract for: ad-hoc sessions as needed, or a fixed number of sessions as you work towards and overarching goal?

How often do you want a coaching session (the default is once a month)?

LAUNCHING YOUR COACHING PROGRAMME

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Ensuring you come prepared for each and every meeting will allow you to get the most out of them.

Coaching Goals

Prior to contracting you need to decide what your goals are for the coaching programme. I offer a Goal Refinement session to allow you to talk over these. However, you need to decide (and own) any goals and for each, you need to specify how you are going to measure success (measure progress made).

Diagnostics

I will ask you to undertake psychometrics – personality preferences assessment, The Quest Profiler to provide you with 35 pages of results, helping you raise you awareness.

Prior to contracting, you will need to do a SWOT analysis, and consider what else you want to record, such as something that stood out to you from psychometric results.

Contracting

Prior to this meeting you will have clarified your goals (success measures), and completed diagnostics.

You will have decided how often you want to meet, how long each session will be and and the duration of the coaching programme. By default I suggest an hour, once a month, over eight months. The time between each session needs to be sufficient for you to take action.

Coaching Sessions

Come having taken the action you committed to in the previous session (you won’t make progress without taking action).

Come prepared with a topic to talk about, bringing pen and paper to make notes during the session.

At the end of the session you will send me an email including:

1. A summary of the session
2. The next actions you are committing to
3. Feedback for me – what went well? what did not? what would you like me to change in future?

Reviews

Prior to mid-term and end-term reviews you will have considered and noted your progress towards your goals.

WHAT IS COACHING?

You have decided you want to progress in your career. You want to perform at a higher level. You have goals to work towards and you have been told coaching can help. The term coaching has many different meanings.

Coaching Definitions

Often it is helpful to explain what coaching is not.

An executive high-performance coach is not a teacher, trainer, who is in charge of a team.

An executive high-performance coach need not have any relevant expertise in the area you want to develop. Instead, they need expertise in coaching skills.

An executive high-performance coach does not tell you what to do to overcome obstacles. Instead, they are non-directive.

Coach versus Mentor versus Counsellor

A mentor has relevant experience and expertise in your area of interest. They may be directive in telling you want to do. I suggest to my coaching clients that they find a mentor (or several) to learn from these individuals who have already done what you want to do.

A counsellor is a trained medical (mental health) professional therapist. Often they are helping individuals overcome issues from the past which are holding them back. Please do not bring into a coaching session issues that need counselling, expecting the coach to help with these.

A coach is trained in listening skills, in the use of reflection, in awareness raising techniques, in use of non-directive language and in following the client’s interest. A coach collaborates with the client’s mind, challenging and encouraging the client to take action.

What is this coaching Neil provides

Agile Coaching – Agile Consulting

Yes, I can offer expertise in agile (which comes from Agile Software Development and includes concepts taken from Toyota AKA Lean). I suggest that agile coaching actually means agile consulting. They share experience and expertise in the area of agile (including scrum master knowledge) and lean. This should include working at a team level and at an organisational level.

High-Performance Executive Coaching

Yes, I can contract with you, to provide coaching for a specific goal, for a specific duration (for example one hour a month over eight months). I will provide you with encouragement, accountability, and use coaching skills to drive you forward. Some refer to this as career coaching because I’m helping people develop in this area.

Business Coaching

No. I do not have experience in leading a business. If you need business advice, I would direct you elsewhere. You might like to consider using Tony Lynch https://www.keepthinkingbig.com/

Life Coaching

No. I’m not offering to coach you on anything outside of your professional work life.

COACHING SESSION STRUCTURE

What can you expect from a coaching session with me?

I aim to follow your interest and finally invite you to state what next actions you are committing to.

Connect

Firstly, as the coach (after initial greetings), I want to determine whether the client is emotionally ready for a session. Occasionally a client is distressed by something that happened earlier that day (such as having to dismiss a team member at short notice) and if so it is prudent to move the coaching session.

Review

Knowing that the client may be entering into the session following on from another meeting, I will provide a reminder of the topic of the previous session.

Together we then review the actions that the client committed to at the previous session. Here I’m providing accountability.

Topic

The coach now enquires as to what topic the client has prepared for the coaching session. It is essential that the client comes prepared, having considered in advance what their topic is going to be.

Goal – Desired Outcome for the session

After exploring the topic for a few minutes the coach challenges the client to identify what the desired outcome is for this meeting (this coaching session). For example it may be to discuss options, gain clarity and choose an option take action.

Reality – current situation

As you describe the current situation it helps to rise your awareness.

Options and Obstacles

I will ask you to explore your options and discuss any obstacles.

What will you do? What is the way forward? Wrap up

Here I’m asking you to commit to the next actions you will take to progress yourself towards your coaching goals.

Finally I’ll as you to email me, a summary of this session, what next actions you are committing to and feedback on the session.

The GROW Model

I was trained by Coaching Focus and here is a video of Trayton describing the To-Grow model which may be used to structure the coaching conversation.

BETTER GOALS

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How are your goals serving you? Whether I’m helping coaching clients refine goals for a coaching programme or talking over a direct report’s objectives with them, I’m considering how well each goal serves them. The following might be helpful to consider when defining your goals.

Start With Your Vision

In Arnold Schwarzenegger’s book Be Useful, Seven Tools For Life, he talks about the importance of having a crystal clear vision. I’ve not met anyone who has this but to set any goal, we do need some sort of a vision of where we want to head.

Long Term Plan

To quote leadership expert, John C Maxwell, “Without a plan you are growing nowhere”. John is keen on everyone having a five year personal growth plan. If that is too long for you then start with a two year plan. Remember that planning is valuable in terms getting clear on potential next steps over the years ahead. As always, remember to review and adjust the plan such that it moves you in the direction you want to head.

Goal/Activity Alignment

We want our goals to move us towards our vision. We want our activities to move us towards our goals. Great Britain’s 2000 gold medal winning men’s 8 rowing team kept asking the question “Will it make the boat go faster” as they considered which changes to make.

Execution Tactics

What systems need to be in place for you to progress. For some of us, forming a habit of working on goals, at a regular day and time is helpful.

Time Check

How are you going to make time to achieve this goal? What else will you have to stop doing to make the required time available?

Milestones To Achieve

Using the concepts from OKRs – Objectives and Key Results, there will be specific (Milestones) Key Results on the path towards your objectives. We want to identify these and then consider the required steps that will move us towards each Key Result.

Goal Review Date

When setting longer term goals, it is useful to put a date in the calendar to review and reflect upon the goal. You will want to check with yourself whether this goal still serves you. As circumstances change or new opportunities arise, there may be other goals that better serve you. There is value in finishing what you start but if you have decided to change direction then you need to ask yourself if your existing goals still serve you (still move you in the direction you want to head). Alternatively, you might like to set four dates spread across the year when you review all goals. And don’t forget the Sunk Cost Fallacy – even if something is not working for us, if we have invested much time (or money) we don’t like to give up.

Deciding What To Do

If you are stuck regarding what to do to progress then you might like to consider including some of the common actions that many people take: reading books; taking courses; mentors – learning from others who have relevant expertise.

How Many Goals?

Focus is really important to making progress. Hence, I prefer working towards one major professional goal at a time. You might choose two but the key point is that the more things you are working towards at any time, the less time (and focus) you have for each. I have found with coaching clients, they may do well with seven or even ten goals but each of these are in alignment and moving them towards their overall objective.

Prioritise

Whether we are considering you immediate next actions or goals for the years ahead, I urge you to order them in terms of priority. The purpose of this is to create clarity about what is most important for you to achieve.

Stretch Goals

Norman Vincent Peale and many other motivational speakers have said “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars”. The argument is that big, potentially unrealistic goals are more exciting and motivational. Are there unrealistic goals that you will likely fail to achieve? Might working towards one still move you in the direction you want to head?

Success Measures

For each goal, you will want to decide how to measure progress and that includes defining what goal completion looks like. You might like to consider setting three levels for a goal: bronze – goal achieved ; silver – goal achieved plus something further ; gold – goal achieved and significantly beyond.

Public or Private Goals

Within a coaching programme, goals shared with any stakeholders are public. Those only shared with the coach are private. Outside of the coaching agreement, you may decide that you are happy to share some goals with everyone but not others. In terms of goal achievement, you will want to consider whether sharing your goal will be helpful in terms of motivation and accountability.

Goal Types

You might select a Performance Goal and then create some associated (aligned) Learning and Development Goals.

Your Best Goal

Imagine you have the perfect professional growth plan, developed by a team of experts, mentors, coaches, and learning and development professionals. This includes the exact path for you with each objective, goal, and milestone (key result). However good it is, if you can’t (or chose not to) sick to it, if you are not willing to take the required actions, then this perfect plan might prove useless. The truth is, your best goal (and professional development plan) is the one you will do, that includes the actions you are actually going to undertake. Hence, don’t chose any goal unless you are willing to take the required actions. In short, your best goal is the one you will do.

DESIRE GOOD FRUIT?

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I recall many year’s ago there was a television advertisement for orange juice, named “The Man from Del Monte”. An expert comes and inspects the fruit to ensure it is high quality and of course he approves.

Lyssa Adkins, in her book “Coaching Agile Teams” uses a tree to represent a high-performing agile team. The fruits are the attributes of the team, the roots and leaves get input (water, nutrients and light) that is needed to produce good fruit.

I’ve used this concept to raise awareness within a team regarding the following two questions:

1. What are the key attributes and skills required to be a high performing team within our organisation and then specifically within the teams within software development?
2. What inputs are needed to produce these attributes and skills?

Initially we discussed high-performance football (soccer) teams and players. Then we split into breakouts rooms (of threes) to discuss with regards to our organisation and team. Upon returning together we prioritised the list of skills and attributes. The team as a whole and as individuals reflected upon these, with consideration of how we might continue to improve.

Photo by Laura Rincu00f3n on Pexels.com

Continuous Professional Development

I’ve been considering my ongoing development and also that of my coaching clients. This includes asking the questions…

• How best to evaluate professional development actions?
• What have I observed about the most successful coaching (and mentoring) programmes I have provided?

Evaluating Professional Development Actions

Lets consider a possible action – undergoing training towards a qualification. For example, Certified Scrum Master (Scrum Alliance).

Upon completion of the training, one option for evaluation is to use the Kirpatrick Model Evaluation. This consists of four levels, as following:

Level 1: Reactions to the training course

Answer the questions:

• Were the sessions worth your time?
• What were the biggest strengths and weaknesses of the training?
• Did you think that it was successful?

Level 2: Learning from the training course

Answer the question: What new knowledge, skill, attitude, confidence, or understandings, did you acquire as a result of the training?

Level 3: Behaviour changes as a result of the training

Answer the question: Considering the learning (from level 2). How are you executing it (putting it to use)?

Level 4: Results/Business-impact measures (e.g. productivity, quality, costs, time, client satisfaction, job satisfaction).

Answer the question: What desired outcomes were achieved (for you as an individual and for the business)?

The Best Coaching and Mentoring Results

To share my background, I have coached since 2016 and am aiming for the ILM 5 Coaching & Mentoring qualification during the summer of 2023. I’ve observed the benefits received by my clients but also that they don’t all equally benefit.

Goals are the key differentiator. My most successful clients have clearly defined goals and they are highly motivated to achieve them. That includes turning up to each coaching session prepared with a topic to discuss; committing to next actions and actually taking the next actions prior to our next session. These clients take ownership of finding answers and of their professional development.

Future goals, that the client has for their next focus helps maintain momentum. These don’t have to be fully defined but there should be a clear big picture of the goal. As an example consider someone working towards a fitness goal – completing a 10km obstacle course race. As they focus on this goal and training towards it they realise the results of becoming fitter. After the race, if they choose to relax, without a next focus, they might well start noticing they are becoming less fit. Overtime their fitness level might continue to deteriorate. However, if whilst working towards this goal, they know their next goal is a half marathon, upon goal completion they immediately have a new focus that will continue to improve their fitness. Whilst working towards the obstacle course race, they don’t need to have finalised any details about the half marathon, they just need to know that is the next thing.