How Coaching enables L&D and improves workplace performance

• 4 min read

In his book The Manager as coach and mentor, Eric Parsloe succinctly explains what coaching is, and why it should be a common practice in the training process.

“Coaching is a process that enables learning and development to occur and thus performance to improve. To be successful a coach requires a knowledge and understanding of process as well as the variety of styles, skills and techniques that are appropriate to the context in which the coaching takes place”.

In a best case scenario, even if a training program has been built by an expert, it will satisfy only general needs. Moreover, people who attend training need to have the right motivation to complete the training program successfully – this is true especially for employees already overloaded with daily tasks.

Coaching: from Sports to Business

Much like athletes in sports, employees should be stimulated by a coach. In the business field, the manager becomes a coach: his job is to help learners learn how to act and behave during specific situations in the workplace.

Only in this way will learners be able to build their own working processes (and also acquire knowledge and competencies of course). Basically, this is what Sir John Whitmore says in his book Coaching for Performance. A former racing driver, he’s the pioneer of Business Coaching.

Even if the coaching process belongs to the field of sports, it has naturally become a part of business. Perhaps because standard training techniques are no longer enough to develop skills and improve personal performance.

In his book, Whitmore quotes his mentor Tim Gallwey:Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximize their own performance. It’s helping them to learn rather than teaching them”.

Coaching in the Military field

Well before becoming the norm in business, ‘coaching’ was always fundamental in the military. Army doctrine in the Field Manual 6-22 defines coaching as “the guidance of another’s person’s development in new or existing skills during the practice of those skills”.

This definition tells us something more: the coach is someone who has technical competencies. He will drive someone to acquire the same competences by working on possible situations.

Unlock learner potential

In the business coaching process, the key is the manager: s/he has to let the learners be, rather than impose his or her individual way of facing situations. S/he has to think about people in terms of their potential, not their performance. In other words, the manager has to be confident about the learners.

In education it has been demonstrated that when the teacher trusts his/her students, this influences their performance. In business this is true as well.

A manager will give co-workers tasks s/he believes they will complete successfully. But by acting this way, this person will get stuck in working at the same level. In order to help co-workers move forward, the manager should be helping them to achieve goals. And this is supposed to be done not by imposing his/her own methods, but instead by stimulating co-workers to create their own way to perform.

The result is a more confident and reliable co-worker with improved skills.

When should we use coaching?

We clarified what coaching is, but when should we integrate coaching with traditional training?

It could be useful for managing problem solving, relationship issues, task performance, team working, staff development, assessment, and team building. It’s useful for motivating staff and facilitating the delegating process.

Even if a lot of books and essays have been written about this topic, Whitmore warns us that:

“Coaching is not merely a technique to be wheeled out and rigidly applied in certain circumstances. It is a way of managing, a way of treating people, a way of thinking, a way of being”.

A smart tool to coach

Companies should adopt best practices to integrate standard training programs – deployed both in elearning and classroom mode – with coaching, in order to have skilled and confident employees who are able to both follow procedures and also build their own.

That’s why Docebo has created the Coaching feature for the Docebo learning management system – it’s designed for companies that need to create coaching sessions associated with elearning courses.

Coaches can arrange one to one sessions to assist single learners, but they can also be involved in group meetings and drive learners to compare their experiences in peer to peer sessions.

This is a big step forward: by combining elearning technology with coaching, the coach becomes a virtual coach – becoming more present, effective and useful than ever.

With Docebo’s Coaching feature, companies are able to have a smart and simple tool to bring coaching inside elearning, and make their already running distance learning programs even more effective with an invaluable live-support added value.

The Coaching feature will be available in a few days, if you’d like to test it out, sign up for a free 14-day trial!