COACHING – Executives, Managers, Supervisors, Team Leaders, Project Managers in organizations are all very well prepared professionals, and sometimes, something doesn’t click. This is where a coach comes in. A coach will not solve your problems. Instead, a coach will accompany you to find solutions towards your desired outcomes and objectives. A coaching conversation is a powerful tool that can help you define your targets, make the best decisions, choose the better option and find resources to achieve what you want.
One on one coaching sessions can occur at your location, a neutral location or can easily be a phone conversation. For team coaching, where the challenge is often finding a common denominator, increase team chemistry and solve unspoken conflicts we recommend always a neutral location, outside of the operational location.
A coach is a professional centered on people and collective system measurable performance development. Coaching is not to be confused with other close professions such as consulting, training, therapy, and other help relationships. Not to be confused with professions focused on comfort or health recovery either. Coaching originates from the world of sports where extreme competition creates demanding athletes who ask themselves how to develop their own means and internal resources to radically increase their own performance. Coaching approaches are today developed to achieve breakthrough results in all personal and professional arenas of life. If the art of coaching consists in facilitating a client’s performance development (without getting in the way of the ball or bat), it is different from a trainer approach, more focused on the acquisition and practice of new efficient content and methodologies.
SOLUTIONS AHEAD uses the SOLUTION FOCUSED approach for coaching leaders, executives, managers, supervisors and professionals from all levels of organizational systems. The Solution Focused approach was developed in America in the 1980s by Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg. After spending many years studying problem behavior and trying to change it they switched to studying ‘solution behavior’ and how to promote it.
Two simple ideas lie at the bottom of solution focus:
Nobody is perfect and this applies to our problems as well as everything else. If no-one can ‘do’ their problem perfectly there must always be times when they don’t do them so well. These times de Shazer and Berg called exceptions. Whatever the person is doing differently at these ‘exceptional’ times will be the basis of a potential solution. Part of the solution focused practitioner’s task is therefore to discover whatever a person is already doing which might contribute to the resolution of the problem with which they have come.
The second simple idea is that knowing where you want to get to makes the getting there much more likely. One of the common consequences of a serious problem is that it clouds our view of the future. We know that we don’t want the problem but we have lost sight of what it is we do want. Solution focused practitioners ask questions about what life might be like if the problem was solved. As the answers to these questions gradually unfold both practitioner and client begin to get a picture of where they should be heading. The clearer this becomes the greater the possibility of it beginning to happen.
We use a series of tools that help facilitate solution focused conversations: scaling models, appreciative inquiry, positive gossip, objective clarification, resource analysis, powerful questions, systemic constellations, small steps commitments. These tools used in the right context can accelerate the progress of the client’s journey towards reaching their objectives in their professional environment.
As a service, coaching is applicable to one on one conversations with leaders and supervisors, as well as for teams in a workshop environment with defined goal that the group needs to reach. Research shows solutions focused conversations to be effective in 65-83% of cases in an average of 4-5 individual coaching sessions.
If we have raised your interest contact us and book your free trial coaching session.