Bringing coaching directly into the workplace

The workplace has changed dramatically in the past two years and people are having to adapt to new ways of working. This has led to challenges that people are struggling to adjust to. Managers may be leading teams of individuals who are working remotely for at least part of the time and this can lead to challenges around trust, motivation and inclusion.

Workplace Coaching provides one-to-one access to a Coach in the office and supports staff with their immediate pressures, concerns and challenges. Coaching is carried out in-house and takes into account the culture and the needs of the organisation.

It involves the coach being booked in to an office in your organisation on a regular day each month, with appointments made available for staff. Individuals can book in advance to meet with the coach or may be able to drop in if there is space available on the day. They may choose to have just one session, or book a series of consultations over subsequent months, as required. These appointments afford staff members access to someone from outside the organisation, for impartial support and advice, and to help them improve their performance, confidence and job satisfaction.

Coaching appointments are usually 50 minutes long and up to seven meetings may be held in one day (with a ten minute gap between each).

Coaching is proven to help reduce overwhelm and improve morale and motivation. Common issues or worrying trends may be flagged to management, whilst maintaining confidentiality of staff members. The additional benefit of having the Coach in-situ in the workplace makes the environment a more attractive place to be and encourages people to want to come back into the workplace.

Workplace Coaching Clinics are available to be run on site in your organisation once a month.

Online Coaching Clinics

Run in a similar way to the Workplace Coaching Clinics outlined above, Online Clinics are the virtual equivalent, with the one-to-one meetings being held online, either on Microsoft Teams or on Zoom, according to the organisation’s preference. Useful for organisations where staff are mainly or completely working remotely.

Again, the coach would be engaged to run a Clinic on a regular day each month and members of staff can pre-book themselves into a 50 minute coaching session.

To book, or for more information, please contact:
Janet Baker
Tel: 07944225290
Email: janet@inspiretrainingmidlands.co.uk

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

I have to confess, I’m not a great sports fan. I did however get caught up in the Euro 2020 excitement, and felt incredibly proud of the England team, even discussing it with friends! When I said I couldn’t believe I was actually talking about football, one replied “You are discussing football like a management consultant!”, as I was praising Gareth Southgate’s leadership skills.

It really struck me how good a manager he was and how other leaders could learn from him.  Here are five ways in which I think he shines;  skills which any manager can use:

1. Communication:

Southgate communicates openly and respectfully with everyone. On first becoming Manager, he spoke to each member of staff to find out what they needed to do their best in their job. He encourages players to speak to him about anything; building rapport, trust and respect. He makes decisions and informs all involved about his thinking, so there’s no doubt. Involved in decision-making, they feel valued, respected and listened to. “If he has ever got a thought, he always speaks to players about their opinion and what they think of it,” said Declan Rice. When players aren’t played, they know why. When they are taken off, they know why, and respect his decisions.

2. Hiring well:

He has a strong support team, good at their jobs, who fit well together; so important when recruiting. It’s easy to teach skills but harder to change personality/attitude. Hiring the right fit, then trusting them to do the job to the best of their ability is key.

3. Keeping calm:

Known for being calm, he’s created an environment which encourages players to be calmer, feel comfortable expressing themselves, and far more positive in their whole approach. Encouraged to socialise/connect with each other away from games, the bond is stronger between players.

4. Humility:

Arrogance gets leaders nowhere. Southgate shows humility; encouraging openness, trust, recognition, admitting when he’s wrong, learning from mistakes, encouraging others to shine. He’s brave and bold, standing by controversial decisions in staff and player selections, and in matches. “He knows his strengths and recognises the area he can improve on and also tries to find people who work around him to try and fill those slots” Steve Holland, England coach.

5. Kindness and empathy

Irrespective of his career’s heady heights, he’s kind and humble. From writing personal messages to every staff member after the 2018 World Cup, to comforting and reassuring players who haven’t performed to plan. Having been there himself, he can relate to the pain. “That’s based on his style of support, of empathy, of kindness and understanding. He’s highly competitive and can be quite ruthless, but that doesn’t stop you being decent at the same time; he’s giving a modern lesson in decency at the moment.” Sports Psychologist Michael Caulfield.

Football aside, there’s a lot regular managers can learn from Southgate’s management style. These are just a few areas, have a think about whether you have any others to add.

Trust your team

Without trust, the team cannot function, fear increases, motivation decreases and the environment becomes toxic. To build trust, you need to talk to your team about it. Find out what their fears are (which may even be you!) and assure them you will make steps to address them. They may even be too fearful to tell you but you may still pick this up somehow, so it will need addressing. If they won’t talk to you or colleagues, think about bringing in an external coach to work through their thoughts with them.

Handling of mistakes

Assess how you address any mistakes they make. If you blame or embarrass them, they will not admit to any in future and they will not learn from them. You are just going to push them away and lose good employees. Support them if they make a mistake. Look at why it has happened and use it as a learning opportunity. Also, admit when you are wrong or have made a mistake. You will gain far more respect from your team if you do so and it will show a more human side of you.

Celebrate successes

Make them feel proud of their achievements and motivated to continue working well. Make them feel valued as human beings, not just commodities. Praise them, verbally, by email, give them a handwritten note, reward them. However you do it, celebrate them!

MBWA – Management By Walking About

Be seen. Mingle with the members of your team but absolutely not in an overbearing way that makes them feel like you are checking up on them. Make it a sociable, kind and supportive environment for them to work in.

Communicate

TALK with them, ask how they are doing, be interested in their lives, ask what they are thinking, if they have any recommendations about what they would like to see in the workplace, etc. Then LISTEN to them. If action is required and is appropriate, then ACT. If you delegate work to them, explain why the work is important, how it fits into the greater scheme of things and why they are the best person for the job. Keep them informed about the organisation’s plans, priorities, challenges, future opportunities and they will feel more part of the company.

By doing all of these, you should see your team members’ trust increase, their morale improve, as will retention, the general working environment, and productivity.

Inspire Training offers coaching for managers, as well as training in leadership, management and team building.

Its flagship training and coaching programme Confident New Manager Programme, combines training and coaching in a unique and specialised format to help managers gain a grounding in the essential skills needed.

Image by John Hain from Pixabay 

Does being a newly appointed Manager excite but worry you?
Then this Confident New Manager Programme is the key you need to succeed and thrive:

Are you worried about the transition to managing other people?
Do you feel excited, yet terrified in your new role, daunted by tasks and responsibilities you have never had before?
Do you feel out of depth, lacking in confidence, and fear being seen to be a failure in your new role (maybe even suffering from Imposter Syndrome)?
Are you concerned about juggling all your tasks on top of monitoring the work of your team?
Are you worried about not knowing how best to manage the members of your team?
Do you sometimes feel there is no one at work to turn to with your worries?
Would you find it useful to have someone on hand, external to the organisation, to discuss your concerns, issues and ideas?

If you have said yes to any of the above, then here is the programme for you:

This is an instructor-led, online, group training and one-to-one coaching programme, designed specifically to help new managers lead their teams more confidently, effectively and productively. It will give you the support, tools and techniques to help you to feel more confident (and less stressed) about your role; to interact better with your team, peers, and those senior to you; to manage your team more effectively, build trust and get them to work more productively and cohesively to achieve goals.

Instructor Bio:

My name is Janet Baker and, many years ago, I was like you, a newly appointed manager. Having previously been a very successful team leader, I thought the transition would be straightforward. However, reality was very different.

The support I had been promised was not forthcoming, the team was divided, some were resentful. I felt totally out of my depth, suffered from imposter syndrome and longed for my old job. I was so stressed! Over time, I ploughed my way through the problems, gained experience amid much heartache and hard work, and met challenges face on.

Fast forward in time, I have now been a successful Training Consultant and Coach for the last 25 years, putting that knowledge and experience to good use. I have worked with people in management of all levels in a wide variety of organisations, training and coaching them to help them become more effective in their roles.

Don’t struggle through like I did. Let me pass this knowledge and experience on to you to fast track your way to being a more confident manager by giving you the tools and support you need in your new role.

What can this programme do for you and your team?

There are six training modules, plus a series of coaching sessions:

Step 1: Validation

Why you? Understanding your new role as a manager, what is expected of you and when, and feeling more confident about being in that post

Step 2: Organisation

Recruitment of and interviewing staff, ensuring you have the “best fit” personnel in your team

Step 3: Communication:

Dealing with your team in meetings and one-to-one; online and face-to-face. Communicating in an open, friendly, and professional way, to ensure your time and their time is used most effectively, ensuring tasks are completed successfully, questions asked and answered freely and clearly. Also communicating well with other departments, peers, and senior management

Step 4: Tasks and Delegation

Managing your workload and that of your team, to ensure work is completed to standard in a timely manner

Step 5: Motivation

Working with your team to make the best use of their skills, expertise, and knowledge, getting them on board, helping improve collaboration, communication, creativity, productivity and trust and managing their performance

Step 6: Transformation

Taking it forward for the future, growing as an individual and with your team

Step 7: Coaching

Four one-hour, one-to-one coaching sessions, when you will have some private time to focus on your own specific issues

Additionally, you will have email support, to get your questions answered, and a programme Facebook group to connect with like-minded members.

When does it start?

The next programme will run for six concurrent Thursdays, commencing on 30 September 2021 at 09:30hrs (UK BST), each module lasting about two hours. On completion of the training programme, you will then be invited to book four one-hour, one-to-one coaching sessions with me.

Alternatively, a second Programme will be run on Thursdays, commencing on 30 September 2021, at 18:30hrs UK BST (13:30hrs EST).

What is the cost?

The investment in this programme is £597 per person. Only ten people will be accepted onto it, so sign up today to be part of this exciting programme!

Application deadline:

The deadline to sign up is midnight on Monday 27 September 2021.

To Enrol:

Contact me at janet@inspiretrainingmidlands.co.uk, fill in a booking form or phone me on 07944225290 to secure your place on this unique programme.

Drop me an email at janet@inspiretrainingmidlands.co.uk and I will be happy to help.

Click here for the booking form:  New Manager Programme Booking Form

Photo credits:  

Sanu A S from Pixabay

Katy Allison from Pixabay

Angelo Esslinger from Pixabay

Expanding your horizons, even just a little bit at a time, can help to build up your confidence. Try to do something new or different each week, no matter how small, to introduce yourself to new experiences.

Why not try any of these:

• • Shop in a different town
  • Take a different route to work
  • Start a new evening class
  • Change the style or colour of your hair
  • Start up a conversation with someone in the bus or supermarket queue
  • Learn to play a musical instrument
  • Learn to play a new sport
  • Learn some words from another language, especially if you are going to be visiting that country
  • Book a weekend away somewhere you have never visited before

These are only examples but show the types of areas you could consider to increase your confidence. Taking small “risks” will enable you to gradually work towards taking bigger chances in your life.

Go on, shake your dice!  Good luck!

We were one of those families, with our son receiving his A Level results, after much nervous waiting.  Thankfully for him, he gained the grades he needed to do the course he desires at his university of choice.  Big sighs of relief all round!

As he went off out to celebrate with his friends, we contemplated the next hurdle in our lives, our boy leaving home to study and live in another city.

There will certainly be tears, but also great pride and the knowledge that we have prepared him well to be a mature, confident, personable young man, able to stand on his own two feet and cope with his new life (we hope).  We will be just a phone call away and a couple of hours away by car should he need us, so that security is still there for him.  For us, we get to spend more time together, will enjoy weekends away, including ones to a certain university city, and embrace the change as well as we can.

Other students, however, have not enjoyed the same feeling of success as he has.  Having to deal with lower-than-expected grades, rejection from sixth form places, university places, jobs, apprenticeships, they will feel disappointment, hurt, anger, upset, despair and confusion.  Hopefully their families will be sympathetic, calm and supportive, but doubtless there will be some who won’t be able to hide their disappointment and will make their child feel even worse than they already do.

Calls to clearing houses, universities, sixth forms, colleges, training centres, re-evaluation of life goals, assessing new directions will ensue and in the process these young people are learning a massive life lesson – how to deal with disappointment and failure.  How to handle change.

From failure, re-evaluation may bring amazing changes in direction not even considered, and in years to come people often look back on those times as actually being beneficial and life-changing.  We can all look back in life at when things didn’t go to plan yet worked out for the better in the long run.

Forget about the consequences of failure.
Failure is only a temporary change in direction
to set you straight for your next success.
Denis Waitley, Writer, Motivational Speaker

Building Resilience
I thought this subject would be a good theme for a blog, as resilience is a necessary life skill, at work, when studying, at home, in relationships. Learning how to bounce back from tragedy or disaster and move forward positively in life is a great ability to have, and it can be learned and increased with practice.

People who have good resilience are able to cope better with change and recover more quickly from stressful situations than those with lower resilience.

So, how can you build your resilience? Here are five ways which may help you:

1. Ensure you have good friends and family members around you. Real friends whom you see and talk to, not just interact over social media, as people like this will be of immense support to you and help you by offering different points of view and solutions and by being positive about situations;
2. Develop good problem-solving skills These will help you view situations as challenges you can overcome, not as total roadblocks you cannot get round. If this isn’t a strength yet, then talk to someone who is good at working through issues. A friend, colleague, family member, coach. Someone who can be impartial, supportive and help you weigh up the options. I will address some ways to problem solve in a future blog.
3. Make realistic plans and take steps to carry them out. Be prepared to have a Plan B (or even C) in case things don’t happen exactly as you thought they would. However, don’t be afraid to challenge yourself. Pushing yourself a little harder will be more rewarding and enable you to grow as an individual and gain confidence;
4. Manage your feelings in a healthy way. Be conscious of how you are thinking – if you are aware of negative conversations in your head, try to move your thoughts into a more positive direction. Focus on what may go right rather than wrong, on good qualities rather than bad, etc.
5. Have meaning in your life. Find things which bring you pleasure and so encourage positive emotions within you. Be grateful for all the good things around you, seek them out and practice gratitude for them (maybe write a list of three of four things you are grateful for at the start or end of every day), laugh, choose to focus on positive actions and make positive choices to lift your life (choose a comedy film instead of a horror film, for example). If something dreadful is really getting you down, evaluate whether you really need it in your life or consider how you might minimise your contact with it, or build in positive times around it.

Building resilience is like getting fit by working out at the gym. It takes work and practice.

It is all about choice at the end of the day. You can choose to let something drag you down and affect your life, and perhaps the lives of others, or you can choose to take positive action or have a positive state of mind about it and deal with it so that it becomes less of a burden. You will feel better and your life will take a turn for the better!

So what three positive things have happened to you today?

Link to

• Assertiveness

More often than not, people want to make changes in their lives but, for one reason or another, the prospect of it can scare them or make them procrastinate. As a coach or trainer, my role is to help them embrace the benefits of changing and help them take manageable steps towards making that change.

Letting yourself down
As I always tell my clients, the easiest person in the world to let down is yourself. You may leave tasks until another day, may say you will learn that new skill another time, you will start the diet/fitness regime “tomorrow”, or contact that new prospect by the end of the week. Then days, weeks, months, or even years go by and you are still not achieving what you had set out to do, letting yourself down in the process.

Sometimes, the delay may even have impact on other people, such as team members, your family, your friends, and sometimes on your health, wealth and happiness.

So, how can we get past this issue of procrastination? Of putting off what we would like to achieve?

Being accountable
One of the best ways to achieve progress or success is to be accountable to someone for the goal you set to learn, change or achieve something.

When you are accountable to someone else for your actions, you are far more likely to be motivated to achieve them. People are far less likely to let someone else down than they would do themselves.

Being accountable means stating your goal and understanding that you are responsible for taking actions and being answerable for them but, the main benefit is that you are going to report back to someone else. This gives you control over the process but there is both a sense of independence (you carry out your role as agreed) and of support (from whomever you are reporting back to).

Who to tell?
Think about it. Away from work, you might have a personal trainer for your fitness regime, go to a slimming club to keep a check on your weight, see a nutritionist about your diet, go to a music teacher to progress with learning an instrument, have a life coach to help you move from where you are now to where you would like to be in your life, etc. So, at home, you may speak with a friend, your partner, a parent.

All you need is someone to discuss your goals and aims, someone to talk through steps to take, possible issues, timescales, etc. Someone you report back to about your progress and someone who helps you along the way, listens to you, advises, encourages, motivates you and celebrates with you when you achieve your goal.

At work, it may be that you are set goals by your line manager, you may have accountabilities in your annual performance review, you may have tasks set by fellow team members or directors, you may have a coach or mentor to help you work on a plan and achieve your goals. In meetings, minutes should show actions, together with dates by when they need to be carried out, so you are accountable to fellow meeting attendees for completing them.

Using social media is another way to make yourself accountable. Think about it, if you declare something on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, your friends/followers will hold you to task over it and you are more likely to succeed, so as not to lose face or let them down. Just be careful what medium you decide to use, make sure it will be a supportive, encouraging environment, not one where the trolls can bring you down out of spite, just for the fun of it.

Benefits of being accountable

• Firstly, you feel responsible for completing the task you are assigned. It is incumbent on you to carry out whatever you have undertaken to complete and, if you are reporting back to someone else, you will be more motivated to complete it.  We do not generally like to let people down and also lose face by having to admit we haven’t completed something which was in our power to do.
• Secondly, by having someone to report back to, or a deadline to complete it by, you will be less easily distracted and more focused in your progress. If you start by knowing what you want to achieve, what success will be like for you, and set achievable milestones (especially for bigger tasks) you have a way to measure your progress. How do you eat an elephant?  In bite-sized pieces!  Not that I advocate eating elephants, just imagine a life-sized chocolate elephant for this purpose if that is easier for you!
• If you are working with someone else, such as a trainer, coach, mentor, colleague or line manager, you may work out a plan or strategy to follow, so you can track your progress throughout and make any adjustments en route should they be needed.
• If you fall down in your progress, that other person should be able to motivate you not to give up, perhaps work with you to identify any issues, overcome any obstacles, be there to support you.
• You will have confidence that you are making progress by sharing steps you are making, gaining recognition for your advances and, ultimately, sharing your success.

Greater confidence
By taking responsibility to carry out actions, and then completing them to achieve specific goals, this can lead to greater personal confidence, to more positive relations at work/home (according to those affected), increased competency and productivity, improved time management and increased trust with other people, when they know they can rely upon you.

As a coach and a trainer, I see people really grow in their lives when they have set themselves targets, either in a training environment, in their workplace or at home, and have subsequently gone out and achieved them. They report back with great delight about their success and are usually eager to get started on something new.

Although their goals are mutually discussed, challenges are given and doubts discussed, the actions taken are in their own control. They make the choices and the decisions, so ultimately they realise they are able to achieve what they set out to do. The reward is success and the increased confidence to try something else!

So, what would you like to achieve today and with whom will you share it?