A Coaching Model Created by Thomas Varghese
(Executive Coach, INDIA)
Background
A Business leader with 38 years of overall experience and more than 25 years in leadership roles.
Core Strength Lie in
- Business Transformations.
- Leading ongoing business
- Turnaround of struggling businesses.
- Leadership development of teams.
- Been involved in numerous Mergers and Acquisition, creation of JV and disinvestments.
- Significant International exposure in running companies in South East Asia, North America and Europe.
Current Profile
Managing the Textile Business of Aditya Birla Group a large conglomerate of 45B$ in the league of Fortune 500 with presence in 42 countries and 120,000 employees.
Core Strength
Leadership coaching development in corporate of Senior Leader, a niche area of expertise could be in the context of:
- Transitional leadership
- Realization of the full potential of leaders.
- Turnaround skills.
- Leadership transition in acquired companies.
Client to address
The clients would comprise of
- Leadership CEO
- Business Leaders.
- Senior leaders of Aditya Birla Group for meeting internal coaching requirement of Large Conglomerate group.
- Leaders from different walks of life who may require coaching support for enhancing performance and realizing full potential.
The Coaching Model
Coaching model designed primarily is in line with ICF seven steps coaching process namely,
- Establish the Coaching Agreement.
- Set the Goals and Outcome of the Sessions.
- Clarify the Current Situation.
- Clarify the Gap.
- Identify and Commit to Action.
- New Learning.
As my target audience will mainly be leadership clients, As a coach will primarily focus on guiding/helping the leaders in exploiting their full potential in both work and their personal life’s, creating awareness, new insights which will help them realize their full potential.
Thereby unleashing their full talent. Similar to how an Eagle reinvents itself and soars to great heights.
This Coaching Model is named as “SOAR LIKE AN EAGLE”’
Pre-work
Coaching is a journey that a coach would partner with the client to provide fulfilling outcomes for the client. As a coach, one would listen, observe and customize the approach to the client needs. Thereby enhancing the skills, resources and creativity the client already has. This journey has to be enjoyed by the coach and also the client.
As a coach, one would keep the mind, free from assumptions, preconceived notions, own beliefs and would try to confirm ones understanding about the client.
As a coach, one would understand the client before one begins the coaching sessions.
In prework, one would concentrate on
- Is he the right coach for the client?
- Is the client ready to work with the coach?
- What coach can learn from the client?
- How will this coaching benefit the coach?
- What is unique about the client that has been said about him by his friends, associates, superiors and peers?
- What are the clients coaching needs?
- Does the coach possess all relevant information for effective coaching?
- A brief on the skill sets the client possesses.
- Duration and time frame that will be needed for accomplishing the task.
Coaching Agreement
It is crucial that for the coaching to achieve its results, that client understands the following
- Role of Coach and Role of the client.
- What is coaching and what it is not?
- Ethics and confidentiality.
- Clients requirement from coaching and his commitment
At the beginning of each session, the coach and the client would focus on
- What to focus and achieve in a session.
- How the client measures success for a session/ feedbacks?
- Based on the discussions, the list of further reading material etc. for the client.
Co-Creating the Relationship
People are unique and every person has something different in them. It is important that as a coach one is aware of uniqueness in my client or help the client to identify something unique about himself.
It is therefore important that the client opens up to the coach, has agreed to maintain confidentiality and follow a high standard of ethics, the appropriate moment has come to identify uniqueness in the client.
As a coach, one would use the set of the following powerful questions in these sessions to get to understand the client better.
- How do you want to be remembered?
- What would you do if you had unlimited resources?
- What story is holding you back?
- What will you do first?
- How much energy are you willing to put into that?
- How would your ideal self-create a solution?
- What are you trying to prove to yourself?
- If I was in your shoes and asked for advice, what would be the first thing you’d tell me?
- What would you try now if you knew you could not fail?
- Just because that happened in the past, why must it happen again?
- Is what you are doing helping you follow your joy?
- If your money could talk, what would it say to you?
- What is the experience you are looking to create?
- How does this decision match up with who you know you are?
- When will you start?
- What small steps can you take to get you closer to your vision?
- What are you waiting for?
- What are the positive outcomes of this negative situation?
- What story do you most often hear yourself telling?
- What am I not asking you that you really want me to ask?
As a coach one would be in a position to understand my client better based on his answers, I will try to figure out if there is something unique that the client did not figure out by himself? And this will be played back to him. Coaching sessions will then be planned and will be unique to each and every client.
Here as a coach, one would also identify whether any changes have to be made to the coaching agreement and make appropriate changes for the same.
Goals and Measurement
At the outset of any coaching conversations, it makes sense to establish with the client what the client wants to achieve. This gives sense and purposes for meaningful discussions.
As a coach, one would emphasize the role that a coach plays and how sessions with the client will be conducted and the work environment. As part of the coaching agreement, this will be documented so as to ensure clarity on roles and deliverables, here an opportunity will be given to the client to add his own notes/paragraph which will ensure his commitment.
The end deliverable of the coaching assignment will be measured by way of feedback after each session.
Reality Checking
Once the goals are set, exploration of the facts and feelings around the coaching theme is crucial. In this crucial phase it is important to create awareness(perceiving things as they really are)self-awareness (recognizing those internal factors that distort one’s own perception of reality.
Reality checking involves tapping into the emotions of the client.
- How did the client feel about
- What is the predominant feeling when?
- What client thinks they are afraid of?
- Can the client give a rating on a scale of 1-10 for your level of confidence in your ability to do?
Reality question that nearly always contributes value is
- What are the actions clients have taken on this so far? Followed by what were the effects of the action or if the answer is nothing, what are the factors that prevented the client from taking the action?
Options
Once the client is made aware of the reality around the situation, the next stage of the coaching model is about helping the client explore about what actions, solutions and ideas that will help resolve or move the situation forward. The alternatives and having options is important as choice enable us to feel in control and empowered.
Here the Coaches role is to bring in certain dimensions that the client should focus on. As a coach, one would guide the client to think out of the box, be creative and explore extensively until we both are satisfied that there has been no stone left unturned. The coach serves as a support, creates a bond and works with the client to create insights:
- What options has the client come with?
- What is the set of drivers which will need resources?
- How could the situation change /improve?
- What has been tried so far?
- what is the downside of the options explored
- Knowing the current reality what are the new experiments that the client is ready to explore?
Reframing Perspective
Reframing is an essential part of the coaching process as it helps others to see things differently and, as a result, come to different, more empowering conclusions or feelings about the event or experience.
The coaches ability to reframe a situation for the client can provide a new perspective and, with it, new possibilities. Things that seem impossible now seems possible.
Reframing isn’t about pretending that everything is great for the client. Rather, it offers and invites more and varied ways for clients to consider the problems they are facing and to find new ways to meet the challenges.
Here are some powerful questions to help client discern and reframe their perspective.
- What is the most enjoyable aspect of this?
- If you are feeling resourceful and generous, what might be different about the situation?
- What’s missing here, that if included, will make this situation flow?
- What do you think is the other person’s perspective?
- What can you learn from this?
- In what way is the current situation absolutely perfect?
- What in this situation can you find to be grateful for?
- What are you doing well? What can you do better?
- What is the value of your current attitude?
Handling Negativity
When faced with negativity, as a coach one would understand that it comes from clients own belief. A coach should be able to see beyond these beliefs. Certain common negative responses and how one would unlock it.
Once the Limiting belief is identified, the solutions and choices are much easier to find. A significant investment of time has to be made in the explore options phase so that nothing gets missed out in this stage.
Imagination
The next crucial phase is to move into an imagination frame wherein as a coach one would encourage the client to imagine that if all the obstacles are removed, what client will end up with. This phase focuses on the end result (Beginning with an End in mind).
So having got the end in mind and clarity of the objectives, how can the obstacles get removed is the next step. One would help the client to identify the obstacles that are client own belief based on own assumptions of a problem or a concern.
This filter will give us the real set of obstacles that need to get acted upon and in exploring the options, we would have covered the options that are available for the client. This activity gears up for the next phase of the coaching model.
Action Plan Owned by the Client
The culmination of the above stages should lead to the client stating the action plans against the Goals. Coach engagement with the client is to assist/help in the following:
- Define an action plan/s based on the options exercised.
- Help the client articulate an action plan with measurable results.
- The action plans should be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time Bound).
New Learnings
Client summary of actions, commitments and perspective shift is crucial at this stage and as a coach would be in a position to ask the client:
- Has the client learnt anything new?
- Have things become clearer?
- Key takeaways from the session
- New Awareness / New learnings if any.
Self-Realization / Accountability
Coach partners with the client to hold their promises to themselves. It is important for the client to realize that he has to be true and fair to himself and not to anyone else. Here coach interventions to the client would be:
- How will the client be accountable for one’s own actions set to achieve the Goals?
- What interventions will be needed to enhance accountability?
- Any other support?
Results
It is important as a coach to acknowledge progress and share it with the client. Support the client to be more confident and energize for better results. The transformation process will be followed until such time the client feels confident and is able to succeed.