P-O-P

Just last week I was invited to speak to 60 business members at Business Club event in Glasgow on how to get the best out of your people. The club were going to have a talk on redundancies and how to legally get it right, however the directors of the club thought that this would set the wrong tone for the night as people are now getting fed up of doom and gloom talk, the current climate and want to be inspired and get the best out of their people. This for me is a key sign that we are moving into a new age. People now don’t want to be square pegs in round holes, people want to be fulfilled and live a life full of joy at work and in leisure and quite rightly so, to achieve this training and coaching is key here

Ten years ago, most companies engaged a coach to help fix toxic behaviour at the top. Today, most coaching is about developing the capabilities of high-potential performers and improving the organisational performance. It’s interesting the take on the training and development in the workplace as ten years ago it would probably have been the first budget to be cut and what I have noticed is that the smart companies who are doing very well in the current climate are the companies have been investing heavily in people development, business strategy and sales coaching. Interestingly enough the clients who have to cut back are the blue chip clients where as the SMEs who are focused on aggressive growth are full steam ahead and are fighting to keep every penny of the people development, training and coaching budget. The public sector are also having budgets cut with even higher standards of service provided to their customers.

Still organisations are now requiring a broader range of skills and a higher level of skills. The key skills that employers class as very important include interpersonal (79%) and communication skills (68%). However, 66% of organisations feel that new employees currently lack both communication/ interpersonal skills and management/leadership skills. Yet, these are also the same skills that organisations feel will be required

High performance coaches help leaders now more than ever as in a recent survey only 15 percent of leaders show consistent ability to be innovative and to steer organisational change, while 55 percent of leaders are linked to below-average business functioning

According to the Center for Creative Leadership – situational leadership coaching can be a much better approach as training alone increased productivity by 22.4%. But, when followed up with coaching, the figure soared to 88% according to Public Personnel Management Magazine (Winter, 1997)

The focus used to be on a training biased approach however in today’s climate the most successful companies are very wise to the undisputed benefits of having an external coaching resource who with external eyes and not caught up in internal gossip or politics can turn around situations and performance very quickly keeping companies on track to achieve targets set. MetrixGlobal.net - according to Dr. Merrill Anderson there was a minimum $61,000 sales improvement in 6 months after coaching at Nortel