But what I have not come across in the written literature, is anything that examines the practical details of what a coach actually does during a coaching session.
And by that I mean, what is going on inside the coach’s head?
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But what I have not come across in the written literature, is anything that examines the practical details of what a coach actually does during a coaching session.
And by that I mean, what is going on inside the coach’s head?
I cannot remember a time when asking questions was not at the heart of my work. Whether as a trainee, as an investigator, as a team leader or as a manager.
This article builds on the ideas I examined in my ’Coaching as a manager’ where I concluded that a manager could not truly be a coach to someone they manage, regardless of the fact that they can use coaching techniques to help them. Let’s look wider than the manager/coach relationship and examine the organisational situation they work in.
Can a manager ever be a coach to someone they manage? This question is the subject of chapter 18 in ‘The Complete Handbook of Coaching’. And it is something I have been thinking about for a while now. Managers are encouraged to adopt a ‘coaching style’ and Civil Service Learning offer a programme of self-study with videos, reading material and a three-hour face-to-face workshop to do just that.
I’ve always believed that somewhere in a person’s experience there is something that they can use to look at a current problem and use their experience to solve that problem. And my experience shows me that, very often, that person has forgotten or discounted their experience and have built up the issue they face into a problem in their mind.
When people are thinking about being mentored or coached, they are really nervous about what could happen if they and their mentor or coach don’t get on. This, I think, is entirely natural.
I’d like to describe what coaching and mentoring (CAM) are and why I think that they are something that everyone should have access to. My conviction lies in my personal experience of being coached and mentored, and of being a coach and mentor.
I’ve been lucky enough to be invited to a series of training events for registered Civil Service coaches. This event was called ‘The Power of Listening’. It was an informative and practical workshop and it motivated me to summarise what I learned and how it relates to my experience of coaching in this blog.
Service - helping others. There, I’ve said it. After much reflection and rummaging in my memory I’d sum up my approach to coaching with that one word. Jeremy Bentham wrote, “Create all the happiness you are able to create. Remove all the misery you are able to remove.” And coaching is a powerful way of doing that.