Expert’s ideas

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"Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams, who looks inside, awakens."

 Carl Jung

If you are interested in personal development, why not consider executive coaching? There is no better way to embark on an inward exploration.

We are moving from the age of entitlement to the age of personal responsibility. Personal Leadership will be a critical success factor in the 'knowledge economy'. We all posess an innate immunity to change and coaching is recognised as the key enabler to change and personal development.

Coaching in a business setting is a dynamic process that provides support, structure, focus and motivation to assist people in clarifying and achieving their personal and business goals. Coaching empowers people to think and act creatively, resourcefully and purposefully, to overcome habitual limitations and to fulfil their potential.

Coaching is an exceptionally effective tool for management development because:

• It operates at many levels simultaneously – resolving the inevitable tensions between personal task, team and corporate objectives.
• It operates in the now, addressing real issues and current concerns.
• It is always action orientated, delivering outcomes which reinforce learning, leading to long term behavioural change.
• It improves performance by utilising and developing personal strengths and responsibility, leading to greater job satisfaction.
• It unleashes the untapped creative potential within the workforce, and develops the learning capacity of managers and teams, promoting a learning culture within the organisation.

What the academics say:

“Coaching has become the Zen for executives” – Manfred F. R. Kets de Vries (Professor of Leadership Development at INSEAD in France and Singapore)

According to de Vries, coaching has become a major activity in the field of leadership. He states that nowadays every self-respecting executive demands a coach. For de Vries the biggest reason for this coaching-trend is the pace of change in our present-day global world and the pressures on executives to transform their way of thinking to accommodate present-day realities whilst at the same time achieving stellar bottom-line results. Another aspect described by him is that the emphasis on managing interpersonal relationships has grown as organisational leaders have come to realise that talent and human capital are what differentiates mediocre form high-performing organisations. It is not surprising, that INSEAD puts high importance on coaching within their educational activities. Their diploma programme “consulting and coaching for change” goes to the heart of human relations, drawing on insights from a broad range of disciplines ranging from psychoanalytic psychology to cognitive theory. These are then integrated into a clinical approach and applied to management theory.

Other top business schools worldwide have also embedded coaching as an integral part in their curriculums in various ways. At Harvard Business School, for example a personal coach is assigned to work with each participant through certain modules. Through a combination of team-based action learning sessions and one-to-one coaching meetings, participants will gain greater insight into their personal leadership style and approach.

Cambridge Judge Business School sees the most challenging issue for executives in the understanding how individuals and groups behave in organisations, and why they perform the way they do. Their programme “organisational behaviour” gives deep insights into this aspect.

Cranfield School of Management focuses on personal and professional development; building confidence, emotional intelligence, decision making and team working. They claim that over 97% of their full-time MBS students are in their chosen employment three month after completing the programme. Here, their Career Development Service plays a major role as they help students to identify and refine the skills that are needed, growing self awareness, enhancing networking and presentation skills and coaching for mock interviews and psychometric tests.