Add Coaching to Training + Consulting Mix
By Robyn Logan
Coaching is such an ingrained, integrated part of my life that I can’t imagine a time before I ever spoke the words “I am a coach”. I was thinking this week about how it was that I came to coaching. In a way, it was a sort of “coming out”. Once I did say those words, I could look back and see that in fact I had been “coaching” for a long time before ever recognising it for what it was.
Anyway, I digress. For me, like most other coaches I know, it was a memorable event. I was sitting in an airplane reading an in-flight magazine. There was an article on business coaching and I thought to myself, “Yes, that’s exactly what I need, so that I can stop boring my partner every night with stories of client upsets and training dilemmas etc.” It turned out that coaching did the trick where my business and home life was concerned. But it did more than that. Within weeks of experiencing this methodology firsthand I recognised its power and potential. I had been consulting and training in various capacities for years, with excellent results. But through being coached myself I saw that coaching had the potential to create long- lasting, deep, sustainable change, both personally and organizationally.
At the time I was running a corporate training company and I would go into organizations like General Motors and Kodak and deliver training workshops on leadership, management, communication, anything to do with organization or development and performance. I had a team of trainers and consultants working for me and I had a standard evaluation process where I would evaluate the outcomes of the training 3 months down the track. What I found was that the results weren’t as good as I would’ve liked them to be and often, not much had changed. I knew I had good curriculum and I knew I had top-quality trainers. The training was customized and tailored and based on a rigorous training needs analysis process.
So, I got to thinking about the integration of skills and knowledge with practice and the integration of theory and practice, if you like. And I decided to introduce something I called “Implementation” (actually it was coaching.) And I changed my model to what I now see as the “Training + Coaching” model. I would deliver a two-day workshop and then I would attach ten weeks of coaching onto that. So everyone who came to the workshop would have a phone call with a coach, they’d have a phone call for an hour a week, for ten weeks following the training.
The results were extraordinary. I found such a difference in the take-up of skills and knowledge; people were implementing them and change was occurring.
In a way, coaching really is life-long learning. It’s learning on the go, it’s learning on the hop, it’s learning in your everyday life. It’s actually relevant. And I think one of the areas where training often fails is it can lack relevance. The thing about coaching is you learn what you want to learn, when you want to learn it. So coaching really is a form of “just in time” learning. When a client is talking to their coach, it becomes apparent that they need a new skill. They then go and learn that new skill, but because it’s been identified in the process of a coaching relationship it’s actually much more relevant and can cause learning at a much deeper level.
The end of the story is that I am a total convert to coaching as a methodology for deep sustainable learning or far-reaching change. And it all began on a flight from Melbourne to Sydney!