With business moving at breakneck speed; frequent job shifts, downsizing, mergers, changes in strategy, consumer needs and employee expectations, training alone has been inadequate to up-skill leaders within organisations to prepare and manage these constant challenges. Organisations are looking internally and externally for people who can guide them through workplace challenges, help improve performance, and lead them through career decisions.
Coaching is becoming central to leadership development to help high potential leaders advance into successor roles; addressing performance issues, and grooming individuals for increased responsibility to achieve business goals.
In recent years, coaching has been recognised as a superb tool for improving performance and managing people more effectively. It differs from training or mentoring in that a trainer or mentor will generally guide and teach someone in a specific task or job. Mentors and trainers draw significantly on their own experience and often have the answers. A coach works with an individual as a detached, independent thinker who holds the firm belief that the Client/Coachee is a capable, resourceful person who needs guidance and support in articulating and achieving their goals.

Every individual, team, organisation, community can benefit from coaching as it supports:
- Discovering a solution to a challenge or problem
- Developing a skill
- Enhancing an element of job performance
- Improving time management/personal organisation
- Planning a career path
- Personal development
- Work-life balance
- Becoming more creative/effective in both personal and business environment
- Developing confidence
- Improving team understanding and performance
- Creating a culture of engagement and high performance
- Becoming an effective leader and manager
Organisations operate in a volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) environment. Coaching supports the management team and individuals to better understand themselves and their environment and take action and shift behaviour to positively impact themselves and those around them.
- Appreciative Enquiry: The basis of appreciative enquiry is the belief that every person and organisation have key strengths, that which brought them to the present point. We identify these strengths and build on them. This principle acknowledges and recognises all that has gone.
- Emotional intelligence: To coach another and to manage relationships effectively requires a level of emotional intelligence. Through coaching we support the individual in developing interpersonal skills, identifying strength and triggers to better manage emotions.
- Positive psychology: The premise of positive psychology is to be more solution focused.
- Neuro Linguistic Programming: As trained NLP practitioners, we bring to the awareness of individuals their patterns of thinking and language often spoken that shape the outcome of their life, work performance and relationships. Neuro Linguistic programming is a powerful tool to help change thinking patterns and neural pathways in creating a more successful and fulfilling life.
The book, ‘An Engaged Workforce: 6 practical steps to creating a coaching culture’, is a practical guide for managers in creating a high performing engaged workforce. Its written as a story, so as to share some of the challenges and experiences faced in business today and more particularly as a manager. At the end of each chapter are best practices and action steps that a manager can take to improve their team performance. Here’s what some of our readers had to say about the book: