Coaching Objectives, Exercises, and Outcomes

The following represents a sampling of coaching topics available, including sample objectives, exercises and outcomes.

Assessing and Managing Performance

Objectives:

• Understanding your personal management style and how this impacts the performance of others.
• Learn the 3 Key Responsibilities of employees.
• Systematic examination of how you presently assess and manage for high performance.
• Individual, team, and large group performance interventions.
• Identification of alternative performance management systems/processes, actions for implementation, and evaluating outcomes.
• Working with specific performance challenges such as the new employee, star employees, or difficult employees.

Sample Exercises:

• Tools to assess your personal approach to managing and leading others.
• Diagnostic tools and strategies.
• Critical thinking and action planning.

Expected Outcome:

• Greater awareness of what factors that influence individual, group, or organizational performance.
• Identify practical options to enhance existing performance.
• Increased repertoire of actions, tools, and strategies to enhance personal or employee performance.
• Holding employees responsible for their performance and behavior.

Career Planning and Advancement

Objectives:

• Assess your unique talent profile and how you can use it for greater satisfaction and reward.
• Identify and communicate your aspirations, value proposition and achievements.
• Attract new opportunities for growth.
• Reinvigorate, reinvent or rejuvenate how you view your career.
• Clarify and plan career progression.
• Individual and organizational succession planning

Exercises:

• Determine what is important to you in your career: skills, values, interests, work environment.
• Communication strategies: Resume, applications, interviews.
• Build skills in influencing, self-promotion and marketing, networking and communication.

Expected Outcome:

• Make immediate improvements that will result in you feeling more confident about where your career is heading, what you want to accomplish and how you’re managing your career.
• Develop a longer-term action plan for career development.
• Build your career network.

Communication

Objectives:

• Understand the relationship between effective communication and career success.
• Key to good communication is good listening.
• Identify communication issues: Public speaking, inter-gender communication, inter-employee communication or supervisor to employee communication.

Exercises:

• Personal assessment of current communication skills and identifying target areas for improvement.
• Develop a plan of action, including reading materials, role play and/or identifying specific incidents and evaluating how a situation can be handled more effectively.

Outcome:

• Identify personality styles to help adapt to other people and their preferred communication style.
• Improved oral communication skills.
• Discern when to communicate in person, via telephone, email or formal letter.
• Tools and skill building, so the recipient may become an effective communicator, regardless of the occasion or situation.

Conflict Management

Objectives:

• When to resolve conflicts, hold the conflict, and stimulate conflict.
• Identify conflict stages and phases, and actions to take to help make conflict more functional.
• Explore using conflict as a way to trigger critical thinking, creativity, and innovation.
• Identify strategies for identifying conflict roots, so you manage beyond the symptoms.
• “Managing up” and “managing down” to resolve or reduce conflicts that restrict performance.

Sample Exercises:

• Identify types and sources of conflict.
• Use personal “critical incidents” to explore conflict resolution and stimulation.
• Action planning and outcome assessment.

Expected Outcome:

• Increased understanding of the critical role of conflict within organizations and workgroups, including why conflict is a necessary part of group dynamics and organizational well-being.
• Increased confidence in dealing with conflict.
• Ability to avoid and prevent conflict when it is not necessary.

Employee Development

Objectives:

• Assess options for career development/progression within your role, profession, industry and organization and take action on choices that benefit you and the organization.
• Learn the Three Key responsibilities of an Employee, and how to meet those responsibilities.

Exercises:

• Use the Competency Profile, job description or outcome measures of the organization to identify areas for growth and challenge.
• Network with key people to position yourself for enhanced opportunities.
• Plot a career path for increased challenge, satisfaction and contribution.

Expected Outcome:

• Gain the perspective of ownership and control in your career and develop plans and strategies to seek opportunities for enrichment, growth, challenge and higher performance.

Leadership Development

Objectives:

• Assess your current career status, leadership style and the results you are getting.
• Learn the responsibilities of a leader.
• Gain a thorough understanding of the 3 key areas of successful leadership.
• Receive individual hands-on leadership coaching.
• Personality style assessment and how to interact effectively with different personality styles.

Exercises:

• Personal assessment of current understanding of leadership
• Personal introspection of your values
• Develop personal goals, career goals and team goals.
• Identify specific and current issues or areas of concern and work on building action plans to improve, correct or resolve the issues.

Outcome:

• An understanding of the responsibilities of a leader.
• Provide tools and insight to leadership qualities so you may become an effective leader.
• Ability to assess a situation and develop plans of action that include the entire team or department.

Life Skills and Work/Life Balance

Objectives:

• Why work/life balance is a critical component of organizational wellness.
• Going beyond stress management.
• Identifying points of imbalance in your life, and/or helping others identify points of imbalance.
• Explore other life skills to help maintain balance.
• Refilling your tank when it’s running on empty.
• Energize your work/life by taking actions that promote creativity and community, and help manage the intense times.

Sample Exercises:

• Identify level and sources of stress.
• Wheel of Life.
• Managing your intense times.
• Group climate builders.

Expected Outcome:

• Gain deeper understanding of the role of stress in our lives, and the relationship between stress and physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual health.
• Develop increased awareness of how imbalance in one’s life affects morale, satisfaction, and performance.
• Identify strategies for yourself and others to help re-energize and regain balance, or to counter the intense times at work.

Marketing

Objectives:

• Learn the concepts of marketing, including appealing to your customers’ needs.
• Benchmarking and tracking impact of marketing efforts.
• The advantages to using test groups and surveys.

Exercises:

• Identify your target market.
• Develop goals and action steps to implement a marketing plan.

Outcome:

• A workable marketing plan in place with goals, objectives and benchmarks for tracking results.
• A better knowledge and understanding of marketing.

Management Skills and Competencies

Objectives:

• Learn the Three Key responsibilities of a Manager.
• Learn the Three Key responsibilities of an Employee, and how to communicate those responsibilities effectively.
• Gain insight of coaching techniques for more effective management style.
• Personality style assessment and how to interact effectively with different personality styles.
• Receive individual hands-on management coaching.

Exercises:

• Identify current style of management.
• Evaluate current level of effectiveness with informal surveys.
• Identify areas for improvement.

Outcome:

• An understanding of the responsibilities of a manager and an employee.
• Tools to work more effectively with staff and peers.
• Improved department morale.
• Increase in department productivity.

Personal Productivity

Objectives:

• Stretch the boundaries of what you can achieve and who you want to be.
• Identify your greatest talents and how you want to use them in life and work.
• Clear barriers that prevent you from moving forward.

Exercises:

• Assess your strengths, manage time, build your delegation and cooperation skills.
• Setting and achieving goals.
• Include affirmations and positive thinking in your outlook and your attitude.

Expected Outcome:

• Improved awareness, understanding or application of skills and behaviors that will enlarge your viewpoint of your productivity, competence, satisfaction and effectiveness.

Workforce Diversity and Understanding Differences

Objectives:

• See how a lack of diversity limits performance and growth.
• Valuing diversity, in all its forms (racial, ethnic, belief systems, talents, personality, etc), reduces conflict and enhances development, collaboration and performance.
• People learn, change, and perform in different ways.
• Seeing ‘what matters’: helping others value and appreciate their unique differences, to build a greater sense of community and form more cohesive work units.

Sample Exercises:

• Identification of individual differences in your work area and their impact on morale, satisfaction, and performance.
• Values clarification.
• Understand the full range of diversity issues, including - cognitive (differences in how people think, intelligence, etc), affective (differences in feelings/emotions, values, and some beliefs), and conative (differences in the instinctive ways people take action to achieve something,
• Cognitive affective vs. cognitive differences and their impact on the workplace).

Expected Outcome:

• Increase your appreciation and respect for work group diversity.
• Gain new perspectives on differences that often lead to conflict within a team.
• Identify specific strategies to help yourself and others appreciate and value the differences others bring to your work area, and to utilize those differences to promote a positive workplace climate.

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