During one’s career there is always a starting point before you can progress up the career ladder.

There are not many (if any) people that have made it to where they are now without some guidance sought from those senior to them.

Quite often this guidance has come in the form of coaching, mentoring or counselling.

Coaching is a means of enabling people to achieve their goals for improved performance, growth or career enhancement.

Mentoring describes a relationship between a senior (mentor) and lesser experienced individual (mentee). It involves work face-to-face to foster professional, academic or personal development.

And finally counselling, in terms of business, applies to helping someone reframe problems and learn new strategies to improve circumstances in any area of their life.

Each of these methods has a way of providing success and empowerment for an individual but the key for a leader or manager is to understand when use of each tool would be necessary. One is not better than any other; it is knowing when to use which concept.

Today we’ll discuss the importance of coaching in the workplace.

As described in this very simple video, it requires the leader facilitating the coachee move in the right direction, helping them define their own problems as well as how they can solve them.

This enables the coachee to understand the issue, gain confidence in their own methods and empower themself to accomplish the next task that hinders them.

By facilitating this process and helping the coachee progress, the leader can hold them accountable to their “self defined” solutions. As humans if we understand our own problems and determine how to solve them ourselves we own the solutions. We will be far more likely to follow this path than if we are told what is wrong and have our problems solved for us.

A commonly used process to help a coach facilitate this process is G.R.O.W. – Goal, Reality, Options and Wrap-Up.

Goal, is the end result that the employee should be searching for. To be the most effective it needs to be defined so it is clear and apparent when achieved.
Reality, is how far the employee is away from their goal and the amount of ‘steps’ needed.
Options, these are the ways/strategies to achieve the goals.
Wrap-Up, is about the way forward and the need to be converted into action steps which will take the client to their goal.

Understanding how the G.R.O.W process  can help a manager coach their staff to the right outcomes will ensure they not only own the problem but its solution as well.

In future posts we’ll talk about mentoring and counseling and how they also fit into the managers’ toolkit.

 

Apricot offers executive coaching and mentoring to help leaders reach their full potential. Using a variety of assessments tools help to determine development needs and performance goals Apricot performs, confidential one-on-one coaching with executives, senior and mid-level managers and develop and deliver customised leadership programs.

Apricot staff are accredited in a range of Performance Management tools including: Myers-Briggs Type Indicators (MBTI), Enneagram of Personality and Human Synergistics.

 

stefan.grun@apricotconsulting.us