Coaching for growth
Featured in the First-time Leadership training manual
By Clare Llewellyn West
Category: Leadership
Credit price: 3 download credits (Single user)
Coaching is an essential leadership tool, allowing leaders to build the competence and effectiveness of their team. Participants are encouraged to help team members to develop these skills in a structured way.
You start the activity by asking the group to think about an example of coaching that most will have encountered – the driving instructor – and identify the necessary elements of effective coaching. You go on to describe the basic principles of coaching. The participants then develop a plan for coaching one of their own team members in a specific task. Finally, you analyse the exercise together to see how a coaching session works.
Who is it for: This training activity is intended for use by trainers to give participants a clear introduction to the principles and process of coaching, and an opportunity to plan out a coaching session with one of their own team members.
| Resource Type: | Activity |
| Min Group Size: | 4 |
| Max Group Size: | 20 |
| Typical Duration: | 01:20:00 |
| No of Pages: | 20 |
Resources: View standard resources for Fenman training activities
Purpose: This training activity concentrates on developing an understanding of the coaching process, and providing a planning structure to allow participants to approach coaching in a systematic way. Clearly, the best place to apply these is the workplace, where participants will certainly have areas of expertise which they need to pass on to others within their teams. The training activity itself is structured as a coaching session. The medium is the message. To become effective coaches participants will need to understand and practise the principles of feedback which are outlined in ‘The gentle art of feedback’. If you wish to provide skills development for coaching within the programme then use those activities which have a strong element of feedback, for example, ‘What does a leader do?’, ‘What kind of leader can you be?’, ‘Communicating the essentials’ and ‘Leading the team’. If you are working with a group over a long-term programme, then you could set aside a short time during two or three future sessions to discuss progress. Let them discuss the progress of the coaching session they have planned in pairs and then spend 5–10 minutes as a group looking at any issues which may have arisen. Coaching is an essential for effective delegation and so this activity links well with ‘Learning to let go’.
Download the training activity, Coaching for growth as featured in the Fenman training manual; First-time Leadership