What is coaching in development?

Coaching is a form of development in which someone helps the student achieve a specific objective by providing training and guidance. Just like in sports, the workplace also needs coaches to be successful. Coaching is a unique individual relationship designed to help people overcome challenges, develop their potential and maximize success. Coaching may be appropriate for promising or established employees who have lost motivation, need help to improve their time management or communication skills, or struggle with interpersonal relationships at work.

Your in-house coaches, whether professional coaches or leaders with a training mandate, are committed to both employee development and organizational objectives. Back in the world of business coaching, Bill Gates once commented in a TED talk that: “Everyone needs a coach. In a scenario where the coach is being trained, the skills listed above are exactly the same essential skills that the experienced coach will use to train the novice. Development coaching is based on the framework that first aims to understand the “what”, the “why” and the “how” of the individual before starting the coaching process.

A great coach will have an arsenal of essential skills that they can incorporate into every training relationship. Developmental change is a process that can take years to achieve, and a development coach will try to communicate to the person the skills and knowledge that will help them to develop on their own, keeping the property where it belongs, with the person receiving the training. Development coaches should pay attention to these characteristics when starting the training process. They can see how the coach uses them first-hand and get a set of tools to implement in their own training.

COVID-19 has been a great example of a significant change that coaches must adapt to in order to apply the relevant skills within the training relationship. Development coaching uses a framework of techniques whose main objective is to understand the WHAT, WHY and HOW of a person before continuing with development coaching. Gates has often talked about how he has used coaches in the past and that a coach is not just for the executive sphere, but for all levels of staff in a company.