We live in a time where the corporate world is endlessly evolving. New jobs and industries emerge with astonishing regularity. For most professionals, however, their formal education is expected to have prepared them for the rest of their careers.
In reality, if we want to keep up, we need to be agile and adaptable. We need to embrace lifelong learning, upskilling, and development. So, in a world, where change is the only constant, who helps us adapt, navigate and reskill for the modern work life?
Professional business coaches empower leaders and employees by helping them play to their strengths, sharpen their skills, and learn new ways of doing things. Professional coaching creates a ripple effect of positive impact on leadership, performance, well-being whilst also achieving organizational goals.
Unfortunately, though, coaching is often limited to c-suite teams and high-paid executives. With 87% of millennials prioritizing professional development, it’s time to deconstruct the barriers and make coaching available to everyone.
Let us take a look at why coaching is crucial and why we believe everyone deserves a great coach.
Modern Work Life Necessitates Evolving Employees
VUCA is an acronym developed by the US Army War College. It describes the volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity of our modern world, and very precisely describes the working conditions most businesses and employees of today find themselves in.
Much of today’s work has moved online and remote work is here to stay - which is an undeniable factor in how our work-life has encountered disruptive change. Even before Covid-19, our professional lives were undergoing tremendous modifications demanding new ways of leading and working. Change has merely been accelerated by Covid-19, advancing technologies and the influence of new generations' ways of doing things.
You could argue that change has always been the norm. That the world continuously changes and that we, human beings, have evolved proactively and reactively in line. So, is the change experienced today and the impact felt on our work lives really that different from 100 years ago?
Without a doubt, yes. We have speeded things up – and combined with technological advances, we now face a brand-new world where the way we work will remain in perpetual flux.
In modern organizations, people continuously need to be ready to work in new ways, with new mindsets and even be prepared to be totally reskilled. Leaders, employees, and organizations alike need to be adept with change.
While it can be fun, change is challenging. It requires diligent guidance to help employees realize their potential for themselves and the organizations they are part of.
How Can We Enable Professional Development In Line With Change?
Due to the rate, volatility, and ambiguity of change faced on a daily basis in modern organizations, it is crucial to have a place where employees can regather themselves. A place to step back, reflect, connect to their strengths, and be inspired to stand up for themselves, their team, and their organization.
Resilience, emotional intelligence, drive, engagement, imagination, strategic thinking, and not least learning agility – the meta-skill to navigate change and learn new skills – are characteristics demanded of our leaders and employees of today and tomorrow.
How can these characteristics and skills be honed and trained whilst simultaneously remaining fully attentive in a full-time role? This is no easy endeavor, yet there is hope!
Professional business coaches provide ongoing external counsel that ensures leaders and employees stay ahead of their industry. They can offer clear-headed guidance in digestible relevant formats and help leaders and employees navigate through turbulent times at the same time as they develop themselves, implement new tools and methodologies and ways of thinking. They help connect the dots between theoretical or intellectual frameworks and daily issues, problems and dilemmas. And they help leaders and employees dare try out “new ways” and methods.
Managers are Unrealistically Expected to Wear All Hats
A common understanding of management and leadership is that managers and leaders need to:
- Inspire with a compelling vision
- Define strategy
- Set targets and milestones
- Perform their own roles
- Develop their teams
- Manage performance and help employees develop
- Solve conflicts
- Drive change
- … and much more
In short, they are expected to bring out the best in themselves, in all of us - and wear all hats. Some managers thrive in this responsibility while others may fall short. One thing that’s for sure, though, is that the responsibility of securing employee learning and development often is the last thing to be considered, when everyday busyness hits the manager. And even when managers successfully do manage to also coach and guide the employee in his or her development, there might still be areas where the employee would be better served by also having access to a great coach. The power imbalance between the managers and employees can make it difficult to establish a fully open, truthful, and equal conversation, paramount for the employee to really learn and grow.
A professional coach provides a safe space where employees can be honest about shortcomings. The coach can leverage that honesty to carefully and thoughtfully challenge employees to work on weaknesses and amplify strengths.
The Benefit of Professional Business Coaching
While employees face increasingly rapid and volatile change, leaders and employees desperately need space to see the bigger picture. Great coaching journeys and sessions create that space by allowing leaders and employees to step back, reflect, regather and connect to their strengths.
The external guidance brings light to new perspectives, skills, and behaviors and stimulates problem-solving to achieve goals. It keeps the employees intellectually fit by provoking deeper thought on the directions and needs of the organization. This headspace imbue the confidence to make tough choices and navigate the ambiguity of modern work life.
Through coaching, leaders and employees are also afforded opportunities to widen their skill sets to deliver higher quality projects and engage, motivate and inspire themselves and those around them. Furthermore, coaches teach employees to think for themselves, be proactive, self engaged, and critically evaluate whether they are taking the right approach or direction in their day-to-day work. And - self-engaged employees thinking for themselves and empowered to make their own decisions are worth their weight in gold!
However, this level of deeply professional coaching is unfortunately rarely seen. In fact, the only other place where we find coaching offered to “the many” is in sports.
What Sports Coaching Does Better than Business Management
Everyone is familiar with the role of the sports coach. From the sidelines, they guide their athletes to excel in unison. No team or athlete would ever have won a championship without the right coach to steer them in the right direction. They are responsible for bringing theories to life and from practice into a habit. Results are achieved through recurrent rehearsal and practice. While a single fiery speech might set the adrenalin running, it is repeated actions that persevere.
In the sports world, coaching is available to almost everyone but for some reason, despite the innumerable examples of success, this approach never made it to the world of business. In business, it is traditionally only a select few who get access to a great coach.
We have all the evidence we need to prove the case, but the disconnect still persists.
Coaching Should Be For Everyone
The majority of organizations collectively fail to invest strategically in professional development for employees despite knowing that the boots on the ground are their most valuable asset.
Some companies now offer employees access to a variety of courses in for instance project management and remote work. To a larger and larger extent, these courses are offered online. Internal learning platforms are becoming more and more popular, offering employees access to e-learning courses and training. This is great (at least better than nothing). The issue with courses is the lack of continued learning, feedback, and follow-up. The harsh truth is that without feedback, self-reflection, development, and further training and application of new behavior - in real-life situations - even the most inspiring courses are rarely particularly impactful.
Conversely, the value of having regularly scheduled sessions with a coach is profound. It takes practice and hard work to improve working habits and leadership skills. To truly attain excellence and shine at the next level, we need to challenge ourselves, be challenged, supported, moved, and helped – in the right way.
Coaches are trained to help employees develop and excel – at just the right pace. Professional business coaching happens at the workplace, ensuring that learnings, reflections, and training meet the needs of the individual while also being tailored to empower the leader and employee to meet company goals.
Just as with sports, it takes continuous guidance and practice to improve.
The Solution? Online Business Coaching - Tailored to Your Needs
At Session, we believe that coaching should be available to everyone with the appetite to learn and the aspiration to develop their career prospects in service of an organizations purpose and business aims. It should not be exclusive to high-end budgets and it shouldn’t be limited by local proximity. Online coaching makes it possible to offer professional business coaching to more people, at a lower cost from anywhere.
Investing in one's team is more than individual development, it fosters a culture of growth and learning that permeates the very fabric of the organization. If each employee is continuously developing, engagement skyrockets allowing the company to be more and more productive. It is understandable that time consuming development programs taking the employees away from day to day activities costing many production hours might not be realistic for already busy teams. The investment in coaching, though, is doable. One hour every two weeks or maybe even once a month can be planned and accommodated for. And the payback in terms of employee engagement, happiness and growth speaks for itself.
We hope you agree, and we hope you are ready. Reach out to learn more about our tailored global online business coaching solutions and strengths-based leadership development programs.
Our vision is a world with great leadership and sustainable organizations.
The mission is to democratize the access to high-quality business education and remove financial and location-based barriers to professional development.
Let's get started.
