Coaching in Organisations

Empowering Students through Coaching The end of the Spring term at our school is marked clearly by one notorious event. Staff and students gather at a theatre in Prague and take their seats with high anticipation, for neither the audience nor the performers themselves can be certain of what is about to occur. The Cultural Olympiad is a smorgasbord of drama, music, art, film, comedy and dance in which the four houses of Ignis, Aqua, Terra and Ventus compete with passion and pride. As a Head of House, I watch each year with amazement at what the students can achieve ...

Making a difference to individuals, teams, and the whole organisation! One of the areas that coaching has seen enormous growth and implementation is in organisations. The benefit that individuals have seen from coaching has been extended to team coaching for amplified reach. Moreover, the fastest growing modality of coaching in recent years has been the use of good coaching skills by managers and leaders, thereby expanding the ripple of coaching even further. Finally, more and more organisations are now seeking to develop a coaching culture. This is not only nurtured by the use of good coaching conversations and skills, but ...

The International Coaching Federation’s (ICF) vision is that coaching is an integral part of a thriving society and every ICF Member represents the highest quality of professional coaching. Given the global experiences of recent months, we could easily be forgiven for thinking that society is, in most cases, certainly not thriving. However, regardless of the many challenges people, organisations and communities have been facing, coaching as a profession is steadily growing. In fact, it is growing significantly, and it is quite possible that the presence of such challenges has enabled coaching to truly come into its own. I am reminded ...

Before the pandemic, coaching was being very effectively and increasingly used as a powerful strategic resource for leaders and their development. Furthermore, a growing number of organisations started to explore how coaching skills and principles could be used to leverage a positive impact beyond individual leaders. Team Coaching is widely utilised to develop teams and a “coaching approach” is now being cited as an important ingredient to inform leadership and organisational culture. Given the immense challenges faced by organisations and their leaders in pandemic and post-pandemic operation, coaching, as a discipline and a way of leading and communicating, is really ...

I am noticing a shift in the work being brought by my coaching clients recently. For over a year now, leaders have been focussing on how to navigate and effectively lead their teams or their organisations through the pandemic, whilst also facing many associated challenges such as virtual working, strained finances, and significantly increased stress as a result of the high levels of uncertainty, complexity and change. However, I now see a shift toward the question of post-pandemic leadership… "How will we return to work?," "How will we re-engage?," and more importantly, "How will we recover and get our organisation ...

This week is International Coaching Week (ICW) and all over the world there are literally hundreds of events focussed on coaching. Some of them are professional development opportunities for professional coaches and managers and leaders using coaching skills; some are live demonstrations of coaching and others are presentations on the many beneficial aspects of coaching including its role as a strategic resource for organisations. The profession of coaching is growing and evolving rapidly and has now become part of the daily lexicon of organisational and leadership conversation and strategy. The coaching bus gets bigger and better and it’s picking up ...

The Agile Centre is a leading provider of Agile consultancy, assessments, training and business services and I recently had the great pleasure to speak at one of their regular Meetups to talk about Coaching Leaders through Uncertainty. You can watch the full webinar here:  Here is an overview of the presentation: The Growth of Coaching In 2020, the International Coaching Federation (ICF) published its fourth major research project on the size and scope of the coaching profession. The 2020 ICF Global Coaching Study represents the largest study of its kind with 22, 457 responses from 161 ...

Drawing upon coaching psychology to help leaders navigate the “new normal” This article draws upon the book, Becoming a Coach, authored by Tracy Sinclair and Jonathan Passmore and seeks to highlight the benefits and application of a particular coach approach and how it can be applied to leadership. Integrating coach approaches to leadership can be very valuable, especially when it comes to more successfully navigating times of challenge and leading into new environments and circumstances. Here we will explore the humanistic approach, its implications for relationships, and how we can bring this alive in leadership through the Time to Think ...

Day after day, I see a plethora of articles, blogs and podcasts sharing ideas and suggestions for how to navigate the pandemic and its multiple consequences. In fact, I have also offered a few of my own. However, the question I am sitting with is: how could we possibly know what to do? We have never in living memory experienced anything of the scale, magnitude and impact of this pandemic. So how could we simply know? In the absence of knowing, what do we do? In my ongoing quest to answer my own question, I have found myself exploring and ...