Certificate in Coaching Skills for Managers and Directors

Your learning process begins at registration in our coaching skills training courses. You’ll receive two powerful instruments before the first class and use these to discover your coaching style, abilities and vulnerabilities.

Use this information during your in-class training to address real-time challenges instead of hypothetical case studies.

You’ll learn to leverage your leadership strengths and neutralize your weaknesses to become an outstanding coach and mentor. Determine how to create a working contract with each employee that builds commitment to SMART objectives and drives home the message that what each employee does is meaningful and important. Benefit from discussions on key ethical and organizational issues, and take advantage of the instruments provided to define opportunities for personal and employee development.

Course content

With ongoing changes in the demands and needs of employees, managers require the skills to coach with a focus on both the ongoing roles of staff as well as broader development needs considering the employee’s purpose and career aspirations. Specifically, how to help the employee achieve the career they desire by guiding the employee’s ongoing professional development.

Coaching Your Employees for Higher Performance

Background to Coaching in Business and Public Sector Environments

• The need for learning in organizations
• The place and function of coaching in a learning organization
• Styles of coaching and effectiveness
• The “two-bucket” theory of motivation

Fundamentals of Coaching for Higher Employee Performance

• Characteristics of a great corporate coach
• Three cups of tea: the process that builds trust and relationships
• The impact of your employee’s expectations on performance
• Establishing goals, objectives and standards; the clarity of expectations
• Tracking performance: activity reports
• Using measurement to motivate and hold employees accountable
• Recognition and rewards: dangers and opportunities
• Critical feedback: 10 steps for an effective process

Mentoring High Potentials

Mentoring Direct Reports and Other High Potentials

• Formal and informal mentoring
• Issues around mismatches
• Essentials of successful programs
• Three mentoring strategies: when and how to use each
• Techniques to increase ownership and accountability

The Mentoring Meeting Process: Getting Started on the Right Foot

• Creating a “contract” – confidentiality, boundaries, logistics
• Establishing a trusting and productive relationship
• The four critical meeting phases and what happens in each
• Clarifying your role
• Creating a workable performance plan
• Documenting and evaluation processes
• Techniques of advising: three powerful strategies to build interest, commitment and ownership

Self Evaluation to Establish Your Coaching Style and Preference

• The ‘ideal” coach and mentor
• Identification of personality and leadership gaps
• Planning for improvement: practice of coaching skills in DYADS
• Process evaluation

Assessment Tool:

• Using the Life Styles Inventory to evaluate your coaching style

Creating Personal Development Plans

• Training and development philosophy
• Maximizing training dollars
• Steps to creating a development plan
• Ten alternative opportunities for learning
• Matching learning styles and learning opportunities
• The importance of follow-up

Assessment Tool:

• Designing a development plan from a 360º LSI feedback

Team Learning

• Setting up teams of self-directed learners
• Getting the team to take ownership for learning

Advanced Coaching Techniques

Coaching High Potentials

• Coach and be coached using the GROW tool
• Debrief the coaching situation from both perspectives
• Discuss future usage of this tool back at work on Monday

Advanced Coaching Approaches

• Organizational needs and employee needs
• Using coaching interventions to manage performance and change
• Specific tools and skills for effective coaching
• Further applications for coaching and mentoring
• Coaching challenges

Career Coaching

Career Coaching: Understanding Motivators for Work and Career

• How to examine motivators for career choices
• Understanding how to apply motivators to new career ideas
• Working with others in a career coaching process: internal and external applications and conversations

Guiding Others Through Career Choices

• Developing a Career Vision

Practical Outcomes for Career Coaching

• Specific, low-cost developmental ideas for employees
• Explore coaching scenarios

Team Performance Development – Final Planning for Implementation

Team Performance Coaching

• The importance of measurement; modern vs. traditional systems
• Using a Balanced Scorecard for team and individual performance management
• Transferring ownership for performance to the individual or team
• Goal-setting and benchmarking team KPIs
• Recognizing performance improvement

Review

• Solution focused coaching
• Creating a personal vision
• Using force field analysis to create action plans

Program Wrap-Up

• Applying your learning and coaching methods back at the office