Coaching for High Performance: How to develop exceptional results through coaching

FOREWORD

IT is often seen as a ‘hard-skill’ profession where there is no place for soft skills. Yet the importance of soft skills for the IT professional should not be underrated; they underlie all behaviours and interactions. Both IT and non-IT professionals need to work together and learn from each other for effective business performance. All professionals, be they in IT or elsewhere, need to understand how their actions and reactions impact on their behaviour and working relationships.

This series of books aims to provide practical guidance on a range of soft-skills areas for those in IT and also for others, including those who deal with IT professionals, in order to facilitate more effective and co-operative working practices.

Each book is written by an experienced consultant and trainer. Their approach throughout is essentially practical and direct, offering a wealth of tried and tested professional guidance. Each chapter contains focused questions to help the coach plan and steer their course. The language used is jargon-free, and a bibliography and a helpful glossary of terms are included at the end of the book.

Angela Wilde, January 2009

PREFACE

This book is intended to provide IT managers with practical advice and tips on how to create a coaching environment in their department.

Coaching is a powerful tool to create high performance in all IT teams. Fortune magazine found that, asked for a conservative estimate of the monetary payoff from coaching, managers who had been coached described an average return of more than $100,000, or about six times what the coaching cost them in time, money and effort.

Coaching is a forward-focused activity. It helps people improve their performance and enhance the quality of their work. Plus, it is a skill that is readily usable by all. It is a set of behaviours that you can adopt during a five-minute chat with a colleague, in a direct report, during a one-to-one meeting or a performance review, or as part of an IT project meeting.

In reading this book, I hope that you will be inspired to apply the coaching skills to your IT workplace to help you create an environment of high performance.

Sarah Cook

The Stairway Consultancy Ltd

www.thestairway.co.uk

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sarah Cook is the Managing Director of the Stairway Consultancy Ltd. She has 15 years’ consulting experience specialising in executive coaching, leadership and change. Prior to this, Sarah worked for Unilever and as Head of Customer Care for a retail marketing consultancy.

As well as having practical experience of coaching individuals in public- and private-sector organisations to enhance their personal effectiveness and optimise their performance, Sarah is a business author and has written widely on the topic of leadership, management development, coaching and team-building. She also speaks regularly at conferences and seminars on these topics.

Sarah is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and a Chartered Marketeer. She has an MA from Cambridge University and an MBA. Sarah is an accredited user of a wide range of psychometric and personal diagnostic tools. She may be contacted via [email protected].

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to acknowledge:

Sir John Whitmore, whose GROW model of coaching is widely accepted as best practice. See Coaching For Performance: Growing People, Performance and Purpose (3rd revised edition, Nicholas Brealey Publishing Ltd, 2002)

Laura Whitworth, Henry Kimsey-House, Karen Kimsey-House and Phil Sandahl for their 3 Levels of Listening model. See Co-active Coaching: New Skills for Coaching People Toward Success in Work and Life (Davies Black, 2007)

Peter Hawkins of the Bath Consulting Group, whose CLEAR is a model for coaching (www.bathconsultancygroup.com)

Tim Gallwey, the founder of coaching as we know it today. See The Inner Game of Tennis (Pan, 1975).

CONTENTS

CHAPTER 1:

WHAT IS COACHING?

In this chapter I provide you with:

• A definition of coaching and how this is different to training, counselling and mentoring.

• An overview of the benefits of coaching.

• An illustration of where coaching may be useful for you.

• An overview of how coaching is linked to performance management.

Too much to do, too little time

Marvin was struggling. Although an experienced IT manager, he was new to the organisation. He had inherited a department consisting of a mixture of ‘old hands’ as well as several graduates and project managers who, like himself, were new to the organisation. The business had an aggressive agenda for change encompassing several major IT projects. The trouble was, although everyone had the best of intentions, no one on Marvin’s team seemed to be pulling their weight. Deadlines were being missed, tempers were becoming frayed and Marvin seemed to end up doing more and more of the work himself in order to keep things afloat.

Marvin realised that something had to change if his department was going to achieve the Key Performance Indicators it had been set. In desperation, Marvin called one of his former colleagues who was now heading a successful IT team in another firm. How, he wanted to know, had his ex-colleague been so successful in creating a high-performance team?

And this is how Marvin discovered the benefits of coaching. This book shares Marvin’s journey of discovery; it outlines what coaching is, the benefits of coaching, the process and skills of coaching and how it can be used successfully in an IT environment to bring about sustained levels of high performance, personal achievement and growth.

My hope is that in reading this book you will benefit from the power of coaching.

What is coaching?

There are various definitions of coaching:

• ‘An ongoing professional relationship that helps people achieve extraordinary results’

• ‘Helping people to unlock their potential’

• ‘The process of accelerating an individual’s progress to achieving personal and organisational goals’

• ‘The partnership between a manager and an individual, whereby the manager helps the individual to learn’.

In essence, coaching is forward-looking and goal-oriented. The purpose of coaching is to help individuals define desired outcomes for themselves, to create awareness of the options open to them in achieving their desired outcomes and to help them take responsibility for developing appropriate strategies and actions to achieve them.

Coaching versus other disciplines

Coaching is different to training as the latter involves teaching something, usually a skill. The coaching process assumes that the coachee has the ability to find the resources they need to achieve their goal. Coaching is about helping people to