Jan­ice Lear­mond Criqui

Is your com­pa­ny look­ing to add life-coach­ing skills to your man­agers' skill set? If so, this ar­ti­cle is for you.Back­ground: I was asked by a fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tion to meet with HR staff to dis­cuss coach­ing for their man­agers. In the meet­ing the key spokesman in­di­cat­ed that they would like to pro­vide train­ing to their man­agers to be coach­es so that they can coach their ju­nior staff. The ques­tion was asked whether I would be able to pro­vide such train­ing.I in­di­cat­ed that I, per­son­al­ly, would not do this train­ing as I be­lieve that life coach­ing is a young pro­fes­sion and any­one as­pir­ing to be a life coach should do their train­ing with an ac­cred­it­ed coach train­ing school, where­by they would be able to do the ad­di­tion­al cours­es that would give them their (Cer­ti­fied Pro­fes­sion­al Coach) cre­den­tials.

It is like do­ing an as­so­ciate de­gree and then be­ing able to have the nec­es­sary cred­its to go on and ac­com­plish the full de­gree.I ex­plained that there is a pro­gramme that of­fers coach skills, which is a col­lec­tion of the core skills that man­agers will need to hit the ground run­ning, as a coach.Al­though many of these skills can be used in many oth­er con­texts (teach­ing, man­ag­ing, par­ent­ing etc), in this course, man­agers will learn how to specif­i­cal­ly ap­ply them to a coach­ing set­ting. The skills taught, will give man­agers the con­fi­dence to coach any­one, any­where, any­time.

On­line course

The course is an on­line course so that man­agers can sit at their com­put­ers ei­ther at the of­fice or at home and at­tend class. This will al­le­vi­ate the need to have man­agers away from their desks for long pe­ri­ods and they will be able to pur­sue the ex­tra cours­es on their own and at their ex­pense.My phi­los­o­phy is that, if a com­pa­ny is go­ing to in­vest thou­sands of dol­lars on man­agers, to pro­vide a coach­ing skill-set pro­gramme for them to be­come life coach­es, then they need to re­search the op­tions and en­sure that mon­ey is spent once.

This in­vest­ment in the man­agers will en­cour­age them to pur­sue the ad­di­tion­al cours­es, once they recog­nise that life coach­ing is their pas­sion and the com­pa­ny will ben­e­fit in the long run.My one last piece of ad­vice to them was to not make the train­ing manda­to­ry for the man­agers. To be a suc­cess­ful coach, a man­ag­er needs to "want" to do the train­ing. Else, the com­pa­ny will be spin­ning top in mud and will not get the ex­pect­ed re­sults af­ter the train­ing is com­plet­ed.Fi­nal­ly, I pro­vid­ed the fi­nan­cial in­sti­tu­tion will the rel­e­vant ma­te­ri­als and con­tacts for them to do their due dili­gence as I was not pre­pared to pro­vide the train­ing at the ex­pense of my rep­u­ta­tion.

TIPS

Man­agers will learn:

�2 how to lis­ten like a coach

�2 how to ask pow­er­ful coach­ing ques­tions

�2 how to set up struc­tures for your clients

�2 how to as­sist your clients to cre­ate a vi­sion or ac­tion plan

�2 the pow­er of ac­knowl­edge­ment

�2 how to keep clients ac­count­able

�2 how to cre­ate trust in a coach­ing con­text

Com­pa­nies who would like to find out more about the coach skills pro­gramme for their man­agers can con­tact me:E-mail: jan­ice@coach­ing4ide­al­life.org; Mail your let­ters:PO Box 5145, St James.