Today’s and tomorrow’s key core competence is not core technical competence but rather core cultural competence that encourages employees in organizations to be flexible, encourages them to want to change, encourages them to want to learn and encourages them to want to adapt to the needs of internal/external customers.
To achieve this, an essential resource in business today is not capital, but knowledge. We all know the familiar nostrums – empowerment, networking and lifetime learning while many organisations still recruit first class people only to constrain them with a highly authoritarian structure. This won’t work in future.
Organizations must unleash the potential of employees. One of the ways is to unleash this potential is through effective coaching and mentoring. Leaders and managers must become connoisseurs of developing talent. No manager can do everything alone. It’s the people they choose that ultimately create long-term success and coaching is a means to ensure organisational survival.

The Goal of Coaching
The objective of coaching is to help individuals to improve their leadership or management competencies and capabilities. This enhances their ability to produce better business results, better leadership and better team collaboration.

The 1:1 Coaching Process
We begin each coaching assignment by meeting with the coachee’s manager and/or HR to get alignment on objectives. We then meet with the coachee to learn what they want from the process.

Often using 360° interviews of business partners, peers and direct reports we then outline a plan to address areas for development. For the next five-six months or so, your coach meets with you every other week. The best coaching work gets done face-to-face, but we do supplement in-person meetings with phone or Skype conversations, as required.

Each coaching assignment concludes with a second interview of those in the original 360° interview. This is to assess progress in meeting development plan goals. Throughout the assignment, we provide progress feedback regularly to the coachee, their manager and HR if this has been agreed.

High Potential Coaching – Facilitated Peer Advisory Boards
In addition to direct, 1:1 coaching, we facilitate and coach high-potential peer groups in a format resembling an internal advisory board. Peer advisory board members meet on a regular basis to focus on live business issues and develop internal collaboration and negotiation skills. We reinforce and supplement group sessions with one-on-one member coaching. Peer benefits include:

• Increased political savvy
• Improved collaboration
• Increased ability to ask the right questions and develop potential solutions
• Better situational reads, more flexibility in finding solutions
• Increased ability to read complex organisational situations and overcome obstacles
• Increased leadership capability with direct reports, peers and senior managers
• Strategy creation and implementation
• Mutual gain outcomes
• Increased level of consultative/executive presence
• New business development
• Better capability and control of other business situations