Realising your Potential – coached development programmes

Despite the effects of the recession and shrinking L&D budgets, we still need to invest in our staff. We wish to ensure continued high performance, ensure retention of valued staff and demonstrate the company’s commitment to them. We need to find highly effective, high quality development which is sensitively priced.

Realising your Potential (RYP) is a coached development programme for managers and executive staff designed to enable strong performance by:

• Identifying areas of strength and ensuring that these are suitably harnessed and directed to deliver high performance

• Identifying areas of weakness and development need, ensuring that these are improved and do not present obstacles to high performance

In addition to clear performance improvement, this programme’s benefits include:

• A completely tailored approach designed to meet the specific development needs and goals of each participant

• The alignment of each participant’s business/performance goals with their personal career aspirations, ensuring a powerful and highly motivating programme of activity

• Educating participants to self-coach and manage their professional development in the long term

• Ensuring accountability and ownership for personal and professional development

What we do

- Assessment of perceived performance and behaviour using 360° feedback using your existing data or provided by us

- Assessment of competency strength and weakness areas using a leading leadership and management assessment tool, ASSESS.

- Coached one-to-one sessions:

o Discuss performance goals and career aspirations
o Give assessment feedback
o Identify/clarify areas of development and enhancement, based upon assessment data, required to achieve performance and career goals
o Define a specific action plan with which to achieve the development goals and enhancements identified above.
o Ensure each participant is suitably committed, focused and ready to implement and review their ongoing programme.

RYP can be delivered on a ‘one-off’ basis for a single participant or for teams or other groups. RYP with teams can be extended to incorporate other team tools and activities, as required. It is valuable in harnessing the strengths of the team to support individual development, as well as encouraging individual participants to support overall team development.

Delivery methods

This programme has been designed to provide highly cost effective development accessible to all budgets, and may be accessed in two ways:

Standard RYP involves online completion of the assessment tools, and three face-to-face coaching sessions.

Virtual RYP involves three telephone or web-based coaching sessions in addition to the online completion of assessment tools.

RYP is not for everyone – to see if it would work for you or your staff contact us for further details:

E: ryp@managingchange.org.uk
T: 01954 718037
W: www.managingchange.org.uk

Executive Coaching – Assessing for Real Benefit

Roy Hodgson’s recent sacking as manager of Liverpool football club has been widely reported. In a radio bulletin earlier this week the correspondent talked about the initial improvements in the club’s fortunes following Hodgson’s hire which was quickly (after one month) followed by disappointing results. That got me thinking about how this relates to coaching for executive performance.

We have known for some time that any intervention, or change, to a situation involving people, will lead to an initial boost in performance. This is known as the Hawthorne effect and has been very widely studied in the 90 years since it was first described. I wonder whether this is what Liverpool FC have experienced: in July 2010 when Hodgson joined Liverpool, he made a series of changes with new signings and so on. They won all of their initial games. From August onwards however, their fortunes were very different, and for fans, very disappointing, culminating in his recent sacking.

I am interested in how this applies to coaching interventions and believe it may have important implications concerning the point at which benefit is assessed. If Liverpool FC’s owners measured Hodgson’s performance after the first few matches they might have congratulated themselves on his selection and considered that the money had been well invested. Assessing the same performance six months on however, they clearly came to a different conclusion and sacked him. Many football pundits now argue that this ‘yo-yoing’ between rapid hiring and firing is a problem as it doesn’t give managers enough time to establish performance. They might well be right; in either case determining the optimal time factor would appear to be critical. This is often further obscured by pundits and experts determining that something went wrong sometime during tenure since the start was so positive. This is problematic since it means that solutions may be aimed at the wrong part of the sequence.

How does this relate to those buying professional coaching services? Potentially it means that any benign intervention will lead to an initial improvement in performance. It won’t be enduring or particularly in-line with the coaching objectives defined at the outset, but it might make people feel good, require less skilled coaching practitioners and perhaps even be cheaper in the short term. That’s not meant to be tongue-in-cheek either – arguably there is benefit in this. However most professional coaches and most buying organisations are looking for lasting and profound performance improvement: to achieve real personal growth and change that does not slide back to an earlier state when the intervention has ended.

As a coach I am focused on how to deliver enduring benefit through coaching and ensure value for my clients. Typically, assessment of coaching assignments takes place at a relatively early stage of the process (immediately on completion of the programme) when very often Hawthorne-type effects are still operating. [Using Hawthorne-type effects to support progress within coaching assignments is of course beneficial and can help to embed changes to behaviour]. This of course is problematic for coaches too because it means it is very difficult to assess the effectiveness of work and apply enhancements to the right area.

One solution to this is to extend the assessment period to a point in time after the Hawthorne effect is likely to endure. At managingchange we typically hold 3 reviews of each coaching programme:

1. A mid-point review, roughly halfway through a defined number of sessions. This is designed to informally assess progress against objectives and ensures that all parties (coachee, sponsor and coach) can assess whether progress is on track and correct things if they are not. Interestingly (but not surprisingly!) because coach, coachee and sponsor know that this will happen that focus tends to mean that programmes are rarely off track.

2. A formal meeting to review the outcomes and progress against the initially defined business objectives is held on completion of the programme.

3. In addition we then review this progress at a later date – usually anywhere from 3 to 12 months after the assignment has ended, according to the situation and context.

In our use of this extended assessment to date, our anecdotal feedback is that the benefits derived from coaching are more assured and consolidated. This approach helps to ensure that enhanced performance has been achieved and is enduring, thus producing business benefit and realised value.

Sarah works with companies to help their people achieve their performance, development and career goals. If you or your organisation would like to know more, get in touch to see how we can help T: 01954 718037 or 07711 503382

E: sarah.jaggers@managingchange.org.uk
W: www.managingchange.org.uk

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