I have decided to try to terminate personal development talks (PD-talk, Swe. pu-samtal) in favor of coaching. I have tried coaching during a period for a chosen handful and it has turned out successful.

I want to support the employees in their personal development by enabling them to focus on their goals. The idea is to have a coaching session every month where we can talk about their goals and obstacles, to help keeping focus on these issues. This enables us to put up both long term and short term goals and to follow them up on a regular basis.

A PD-talk once or twice a year doesn’t allow us to put up short term goals in a successful way, and putting up long term goals without dividing them up into short term sub-goals looses focus.

For a consultancy business where most of the consultants are located externally at customer sites it is of even more importance to have a close dialogue with their nearest manager.

Yes there could be conflicting situation being a person’s manager at the same time as coaching them, but we have to live with that. The benefits still outweigh the disadvantages. Coaching is essentially about raising self-awareness and taking responsibility.

How do we do this then? My idea is that we kick-start with a coaching education for all managers and then we create a coaching schedule and simply start coaching. After a while we follow up and evaluate eventual needs for more education or perhaps a coach for the coaches.

Two educations that we are evaluating at the moment:
Coach2Coach
Mercuri

Posted by Jens on Tuesday, April 18th, 2006 at 12:14 pm.