Personal and Executive Coaching

Who can benefit from having a coach?
Individuals who want to grow or improve their life or career skills, solve specific non-clinical problems, achieve a very specific set of goals and realize their full potential. Coaching is NOT therapy.

Individual coaching serves to align individual performance with team and organizational objectives by:

• Maximizing and leveraging strengths
• Increasing and enhancing communication between managers, direct reports, and teams
• Helping individuals take ownership and responsibility for their behaviors and actions
• Encouraging individuals to stretch beyond their assumed constraints

Coaching can be used as a long term process or a short term intervention.

The primary benefits of coaching are improved individual performance, bottom line results including profit, client service and competitiveness, development of people for the next level, confidence raising, self empowerment, goal achievement, relationship improvements, and retention. (Ann Ronan, Ph.D)

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Many approaches to change are problem-focused in that we attempt to move forward by exploring the problem. We try to understand what the problem is, what has caused it, and what we need to do to get rid of it. This works well in many situations, particularly those involving machines and other man-made articles. For example, we may notice that our car seems rather sluggish which prompts us to inspect the wheels. We discover that one of the tires is flat and so we replace it. Problem solved! But when we are working with people, diagnosing the problem often gives us little indication of the solution and indeed may even make the situation worse! Fortunately there is another way. We can focus on solutions instead. This solution-focused approach involves:

• Finding out what works and doing more of it.
• Stopping doing what doesn’t work and doing something else.

It doesn't mean that we refuse to discuss the problem but it does mean that we use any problem discussion to discover what the you want to do, to learn about your commitment and passion, and to unearth evidence of skills and resources you are already using.

OSKAR is a framework for solution focused coaching:

1. OUTCOME:

What is the objective of this coaching?
What do you want to achieve today?

2. SCALING:

On a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 representing the worst it has ever been and 10 the preferred future, where would you put the situation today?
You are at “n” now; what did you do to get this far?
How would you know you had got to “n” +1?

3. KNOW-HOW & RESOURCES:

What helps you perform at “n” on the scale, rather than 0?
When does the outcome already happen for you - even a little bit?
What did you did to make that happen? How did you do that?

4. AFFIRM AND ACTION:

What's already going well?
What is the next small step?
You are at n now, what would it take to get you to n+1?

5. REVIEW: What's better?

What did you do that made the change happen?
What effects have the changes had?
What do you think will change next?

Excerpted from The Solutions Focus: Making Coaching and Change SIMPLE or at www.thesolutionsfocus.com