- English
- Bahasa Indonesia
Coaching and coaching skills are being used more and more nowadays. Coaching as a practice and as a profession has taken root in many and various forms and in different environments. As practice and profession, coaching has been developing and growing since about 10 years ago. Today we can find coaches working from home offices, inside the institutions or organizations or corporate cubicles. Some coaches work as employees within organizations. Others combine coaching with consulting work in order to provide ongoing implementation support and follow-up. Many coaches work with private or individual clients. Some coaches specialize in working with teams, people in relationship or organization systems.
Nowadays coaches and clients cover different demographic categories or profiles such as age, income, education, ethnic background, and job position. Many coaches specialize in a select interest or career area and focus on working with CEOs, managers, expatriates, immigrants, artists, musicians, parents and their teenagers, students, and other specified clients or client profiles. The environment within which coaching takes place is equally varied. Many coaches work with clients with regularly scheduled sessions, by telephone or emails, by appointments, and other variations. Some coaches prefer in-person coaching whether at the client’s site, at the coach’s office, or off-site. Coaches may contract with clients for a fixed period of time (e.g., three months or six months or a year). Other coaches establish ongoing or open-ended relationships with clients. Coaching can take place in paneled board rooms, inner-city homes, or mountain retreats.
Within that framework, coaches bring their coaching training and experience and a wide variety of tools and assessment instruments or Coach’s Toolkit (Whitworth et al., 2007). Examples of discovery forms and checklists for use with individual clients: Individual Client Discovery Checklist, Coaching Agreement, Personal Information Fact Sheet, Wheel of Life Exercise, Individual Client Interview, Strategic Planning Checklist, Completion Log, Coaching Preparation Form, Examples of discovery forms and checklists for use with corporate clients: Corporate Client Discovery Checklist, First Meeting Checklist, Corporate Client Profile, Performance Awareness Appraissal, Job Performance Wheel, Management/Leadership Wheel. Many coaches use assessment tools as part of their initial discovery work with clients. In corporate and organizational work, it is virtually standard practice for coaches to use some form of individual assessment.
The permutation of forms and environments continue, inspired by the imagination of coaches and the interest of clients. And no matter what forms of coaching takes, it will be most effective when coach and client create a safe and courageous environment for the work and when both parties consciously design their working alliance.
Coaches typically begin a working relationship with an initial process that is part client orientation and part self-discovery work for clients. This foundation-setting process familiarizes clients with the coaching process, provides an opportunity to design the alliance, and begins the work of clarifying client issues and goals. There is no standardized form. With some coaches, it is a brief interview or a page or two of basic questions, all handled in the initial or discovery session. Other coaches might use several sessions, assessments of various kinds, and interviews with the client’s co-workers, direct reports, or family members. This initial discovery session might be done as visioning work at a retreat center.
In the initial work, clients learn what to expect from coaching. It is also a time for clients to clarify where they are, where they’re headed, the strengths they will use to get there, and the obstacles that often interfere.
The coach typically covers these four areas:
(AvantiFontana™)