Bringing Out the Best in Your Organisation’s Top Assets by Developing People Ltd

Any organisation that wishes to be successful must master the art of nurturing their talent – the people who will make a long term difference to the organisation’s performance.

Talented people are likely to have a low boredom threshold, and therefore need constant variety and challenge. To keep up momentum, development programmes need to be highly impactful, spread over a limited time span (eg 9 – 12 months), and balance learning modules with challenging assignments and projects. Support also needs to be provided in terms of executive coaching or mentoring to give appropriate guidance and support. This can help talent explore their own understanding of themselves and the wider aspects of their role, such as leading in a responsible way.

Whatever talent nurturing method you choose, it is also important to measure its effectiveness. Dave Marchant at Developing People suggests that organisations use several criteria:

• The successful application of knowledge and skills on the job
• The impact of the employee’s performance
• Acceleration of the organisation’s “talent pipeline”

“In this way, your organisation can be sure that it is nurturing the right talent in the right way”, suggests Marchant, who has helped organisations such as IBM to make the most of their talent.

Do you have to like the person coaching you for it to be effective?

This would be nice to achieve but is not essential with every coaching relationship and it is unrealistic to expect this in every case. What is essential is a respect for each other and for what you can bring to the executive coaching relationship. What is key is respect for your skills as a coach and for your communication ability. You need to help the coachee to think differently and to look at things with fresh eyes and to provide a new perspective and to be a catalyst for them to ACT on this new thinking.

You may not actually greatly like or warm to the person that you are coaching, nor they you. We are all different individuals and there is ample scope for us to recognise the different perspectives, ideas and beliefs that other people possess. Where this can become difficult is in the area of values, behaviours, management styles and standards. I would find it hard to coach or be coached by a person who lacks fundamental integrity, who was rude to or dismissive of me or his/her people or who wanted to manipulate them or me to do something negative or illegal or completely against their will. If their style is completely autocratic and controlling and if they could not see the possibility of leading and managing in a more positive, democratic way then I would not be able to build and sustain the required rapport and positive relationship with them that I need to establish for me to be an effective support to the people that I coach. I

nterestingly enough, if I look back on the hundreds of people that I have coached over the past 15 years I realise that there have been very few coaching assignments where I have not felt that I could establish the necessary relationship and rapport with my coachee. I suspect that this is largely because the pre-coaching engagement routine that we go through with new people would discourage those with inappropriate values, styles and expectations and that both they and I self-select out of a coaching relationship with someone that we cannot identify with.