Core Competencies for Effective Coaching - Essay Example

Core Competencies for effective coaching Galileo Galilee, the great Physicist and astronomer while adding his perspective about coaching, had said that "Coaching is about improving the individuals capacity to focus, learn, and innovate." "You cannot teach a person anything; you can only help him find it within himself”. So, in this era of competence and knowledge what makes coaching most effective? Does it a factor of skill and qualities of the coach? Is it the client’s commitment to the coaching process and the urge to bring improvement or elaborate change? Or is it level of understanding and relationship between the coach and the client that defines the success of the coaching as a whole? Perhaps it might be the competency especially core competency that helps coach in designing models and techniques that would be instrumental in developing the desired psychological framework for effective and successful coaching. International Coach Federation (ICF) has provided a framework that lists down the standards for effective coaching. This is a list of the Coaching Core Competencies for supporting superior understanding about the sagacity and approaches that need to be applied in todays coaching profession. The core competencies as mentioned above have been grouped into four clusters without adding any weight to groups or the individual competencies. Also, there isn’t any kind of priority attached to the listed competencies but at the same time, they are critical for the development of an effective coaching process. At present, establishing the core competencies has been the course of action of the current generation of coaches. Following the list as provided by ICF, the four main categories are: a. Setting the are foundation b. Co-creating the relationship c. Communicating Effectively d. Facilitating learning and results Setting up the required foundation for superior coaching processes requires simultaneous work in two directions. The first one is to follow necessary ethical guidelines and professional standards. It includes coaching ethics and standards as well as the ability of an individual to apply appropriate coaching standards in all coaching situations. In the beginning, it’s the coach’s own behavior that must be as per established norms of ICF. The coach must be aware of the listed ethical guidelines am should have all necessary details that segregates coaching from other support professions like consulting and psychotherapy. The client’s need must be the top priority and if necessary, should be referred to another support professional. The second direction underscores the need of the coaching agreement. It emphasizes on specific details related to coaching interaction that discusses the guidelines and specific parameters of the relationship between the coach and the client. The parameters include fee structure, schedule, logistics and several other details. The features of the coaching package should be well documented along responsibilities of the coach as well as the client. There must be some sort of semblance between the client’s need and the coaching method adopted. Under the Co-creating the Relationship Category, the ICF provides details that makes establishment of some relationship with the client. It entails the necessity of a trustworthy coach with an ability to explore a safe and supportive environment producing mutual respect and genuine concern over issues that encircle clients welfare and future. The above mentioned clear agreement should be followed promises kept with utmost personal integrity, honesty and sincerity. The client should be respected and its perception and learning style must be appreciated with support. The support should include behaviors and actions involving risk of failure and also explore possible coaching in sensitive and new areas. The relationship need to be spontaneous with coaching presence should be open, flexible and confident. During the process, the style should be flexible, intuitive and open to available set of options. The environment should be light and full of energy. The coaching process should shift between established norms and news possibilities and demonstrate confidence and emotions at the same time. The competency of Communicating Effectively begins with three subcategories of active listening, powerful questioning and direct communication. The coach needs to focus completely on what the client is saying and what has not been mentioned. The client’s desire should come out from the client himself and hence the coach should enable self expression into the client through a conducive environment. The client’s agenda should be the coach’s priority rather than the coach’s agenda for the client. The communication provides a way for to the client to give an ear to client’s concern, goal as well as expectation from the coaching package. The ability of the coach helps him in figuring out client’s values, faith an beliefs and also in distinguishing between the pitch of the speech and body language. Through better listening, the coach can ensure that there is sufficient clarity and understanding of what the client actually desires and what is he or she trying to convey. Proper summarization, paraphrasing and reiteration of the client’s message yields improved result in short span of time. Its this listening and quality replies with explanations that encourages the client to reinforce its feelings and improvise its perception. The ideas and suggestion integrates and the long descriptive details can be broken into single line statements with more essence of client’s need and expectations from its coach. The communication between the client and the coach gets new height with powerful questioning from the coach side. This questioning ability first quantifies the benefit to this new found relationship and then maximizes its impact. The ICF through its guidelines has clearly stated that the questions mirrors various aspect of active listening and hence better understanding of what is client’s perspective. The questions are supposed to discover hidden aspects that provides energized insight and commitment to customer’s perception ability. The questions might be the very first step towards learning process and creation of new possibilities. The questions are meant for better listening with open essence but at the same time it should not make way for any justification and backward movement. The final part of the communication is that of smooth and direct communication. This form of communication is for effective coaching using a language of persuasion that in the end suffices the purpose of positive impact on the client. Articulate feedback must the part of this communication while reframing the client’s understanding of the scenario or cases with another perspective about something certain and uncertain. This direct communication makes the coaching objectives and its agenda clear and the language of communication underscores the required respect that is being expected by the client form its coach. In the end, with this communication, a verbal picture with full illustration becomes reality. The ICF in its fourth and final core competency talks about facilitating learning and results through awareness, designed action with planning and goal setting and managing progress and accountability. ICF states that the coach should have the ability to integrate and evaluate all sources of information and interpreting the same so that the client should become more aware of the coaching process and hence could achieve the desired set of results. Its the own assessment of client that matters rather than what has been described by the client. The more the client is informed and aware, the better understanding and clarity over results can be achieved. The awareness factor could stretch its impact over the client’s ability to identify various ways of perceiving itself and the surrounding environment. This could be of great help to the client in padding up the disparities between thoughts over improved interpretation of its feelings and action. The client’s ability now gets strengthened and he/she becomes more confident towards its own action, emotion and commitment to achieve what is supposed to be important. The viewpoints gets shifted towards new possibilities. The client is now better equipped to figure out different factors that impacts his/her personality and behavior. This can be stretched to grouping of those facts and figures as per possible presence of interrelation and the lack of it. The client can now handle issues over its significance or triviality and also over situational or recurring. The learning through facts and figures makes the coaching model more predictive and hence the coach can design future course of action for learning and coaching. The client and the coach can now form a single team that catches opportunities of learning from the outcome. This outcome could be the result of anything that happens in work or life situations or simulations. The predictive nature of the process now makes the agreed-upon coaching results more achievable. Brainstorming session could assist in enabling the client to delve deep into the learning process and demonstration of the obtained result. The client can now systematically explore alternative ideas, steps and solutions while concerning more on results and opportunities to achieve the same. Self discovery through active thinking and experimentation comes into picture while discussing the results and outcomes of previous steps. The objective is to have a scenario of “Do It Now’ with ultimate aim being the client’s goals without any adherence to change or modify the same. The pace of learning now becomes comfortable and also enjoying. Planning and goal setting gets prominence through introspection of previous results and the coach’s plan is now more effective. It consolidates results as information and delves into the previous planning and its correlation with agreed-upon goals. The planning process can now be given a fresh impetus that should concern more on major areas and immediate requirements of complete learning and development of the client. Post result analysis, managing the progress and its accountability comes into picture. The coach must identify the important issues and maintain its attention so that the client could take responsible action. The progress management tools demonstrates the commitment level of both client and the coach towards achieving both primary and ultimate objective. It helps in clearing out what has been the strength and weakness of the client in the previous session. It also reads into the fine lines that can tell what and how a particular thing should have been done and what we have learned in the previous session. The progress management makes way for effective preparation and organization of next phases of coaching. The client’s progress can now be tracked and hence one can figure that what has been finished and what is left in the whole package. The client’s confidence level gets a boost with self-discipline and makes him accountable for every action, step and success. The personality and behavior as whole gets improved with the introduction of disciplined action and associated feedback. In the end, it’s the client who is most benefitted and is now laced with the strength of better decision-making, priority development and addressing the key ingredients of learning and experience gained. Read More