Your career probably has more influence on your wealth than anything else in your life. However, a career is more than money, it also affects your health and your happiness. Those who proactively manage their careers are more likely to secede, especially in these highly competitive times. Working to increase your marketability and secure your income now will mean much greater choice and flexibility
Executive and Career coaching will provide you with practical skills and advice, tools and support to develop your career, wether you want to move up, across or discover a completely new field altogether.
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A career coach is a professional that will help you:
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Using established tools and techniques a career coach will support you to create opportunities and making your next successful career transition
Who do we work with?
We work with clients for a wide range of backgrounds and industries to take control of their careers and make informed choice about the direction in which they want to move.
Often they want to
- Move quickly into a new organisation
- Develop their career within an existing organisation
- Address current workplace challenges
- Proactively reduce risk by improving performance
- Returning to work after a career break
How do we work?
We work one-to-one with our clients wither face to face or on the phone, which ever is most convenient for you.
Using a variety of tools including established psychometric instruments as well as exercise proven to help people make the effective transition we will support you to make the career move that want.
At every stage, you are in control and your coach will support you to realise your career capital and develop a satisfying and successful transition.
Move quickly into a new organisation
Whether your wanting to stay in your current profession or move into a new area, the good news is that now, more than ever, people are reinventing themselves and their careers, achieving success and career satisfaction in other fields. This is an important decision and needs careful planning.
We work with many clients who know that they want to do something different - but are unsure what! Working with a Career coach you will:
- Assess your "career capital" and potential
- Clarify and focus your priorities
- Review your career options and generate ideas
- Reality check to ensure plans are robust
- Make an informed decision
- Devise a practical action plan to achieve the transition into your new role/or self-employment
Develop your career within an existing organisation
Develop the skills to proactively manage your profile and develop your success through working with others. Managing people well is not only crucial to business success it is probably the key to your own career success, whether you’re managing people directly or influencing through a matrix organisation. Don’t ask those you work with to check their brains in at the door! A great manager gathers a team of the best people, a great manager will develop a team of “Thinking performers”, bringing out their natural ingenuity in a way that makes your workplace creative, vibrant and productive. A great manager knows that a successful team means a successful career.
Sadly this is not the case in many organisations and the true potential of team members can remain untapped for years. Management appointments are often made without training or mentoring made on the basis of subject expertise or length of service. The all-important skill of being good at managing and inspiring people gets overlooked!
The effects of poor people management are widespread and damaging, compromising profitability, growth and long term sustainability. The issue of poor management skill can results in:
- Morale issues amongst staff who don't feel valued or listened to. This saps their motivation, loyalty and commitment
- Poor creativity and problem solving as the flow of ideas and communication is suppressed
- High recruitment and training costs caused by high turnover
- Inability to tap into the underlying skill and ingenuity of potentially great people on your payroll
- Customer complaints and loss of sales arising from poor service
- Micro-managing to the point of undermining the self-confidence of the team members
The good news is that such situations can be turned around in a relatively short time frame through a series of one-to-one coaching sessions. Through increasing self-awareness and awareness of the affects of their behaviour, we enable the manager take ownership of the issue and map out a route to success, helping your managers to:
- Increase self awareness so they understand the root cause of the issue(s) and change their behaviours
- Take responsibility to work out a solution in their own preferred way
- Carry out action steps between sessions in order to 'try out' new behaviours
- Become motivated to value their team and improve communication
- Improve 'emotional intelligence' so they can control their emotions better and read the emotions of others
Become a great manager and build your career. Great managers are great leaders; they bring out the best in their people in a way that makes the workplace vibrant and productive.
Address current workplace challenges
Ignoring conflict is like shutting the door to a room that’s on fire. The fire will spread and eventually consume the entire building.
Whilst unfettered and open discussion of tasks and processes can be a sign of a high performing team, conflict based on personal factors can destroy an organisation. Be it overt 'open warfare' or discreetly sniper fire. Conflict can happen at any level in an organisation and typically includes personality clashes, bullying, political manoeuvring, differing communication styles, frustrated ambition or low ability to cope with high level of change.
By using an independent coach/facilitator who quickly established trust with your employees, it is possible to create a 'safe space' for each party to air their grievances. Ultimately the coach will be looking to achieve an outcome that represents a win-win scenario for each person. Where the issue is related to personality or communication differences, it can be helpful to use a Jungian Profiling system such as Myers Briggs Type Instrument (MBTI) or Jung Type Indicator (JTI) to highlight the underlying differences in personality. The coach will establish 'ground rules' at the start of each session to ensure that the discussions are as productive as possible.
It may be that an individual has a history of conflict with more than one colleague. This may be raised at an employee review or in a 360° Feedback report. One of our coaches would then work with the individual to get to the bottom of the problem. By working through the issue, we can help the employee to:
- Increase self awareness so they understand their impact on others
- Understand the underlying reasons why they have a tendency to be involved in conflict
- Learn new behaviours or strategies to cope better with colleagues
- Develop better listening and communication skills
- Understand the differences in personality types
- Overcome limiting beliefs that may contributing to the problem e.g. "Everyone's out to get me"
Improving performance
Are you a rising star with a taste for success and want even more of it? Or, are there performance issues with some of your key personnel?
Careers rarely follow a steady upward trajectory of success and plateaus are common. Consistently high performance is hard to achieve and throughout life all of us can be affect by a number of issues including:
- Lack of direction or motivation
- Fear of failure or fear of rejection
- Poor time management and organisation skills
- Under developed people management skills
- Individualistic behaviour
- Personal issues
- Stress
Executive Coaching is an independent honest and straight forward drive success forward and solve many issues where performance is not as high as it should be, whether a long term issue of a temporary hic-cough. With successful careers in the private and public sector in their own right, our coaches all have first hand experience of the challenges and issues that people face on a daily basis. It is their experience plus the ability to catalyse lasting change in people that enables us to help you achieve the difference in performance you may need. We can help to:
- Improve self awareness about the issues that are affecting performance
- Close the gap between what is wanted and current behaviour
- Remove limiting beliefs or fears that are deeply engrained
- Develop career management techniques
- Implement an action plan in order to achieve agreed goals
- Increase motivation, sense of purpose and fulfilment
- Reduce stress
- Improve inner confidence and the ability to communicate effectively with others
Returning to work after a career break
Returning to work after a career break, sabbatical, maternity or long term sick leave can be a happy, exciting experience or a time of stress and worry. The culture of work is very different from long term leave whether it is a career break, sabbatical, maternity or long term sick. It takes time to readjust and get back into the swing of things. Often a period away from work is an opportunity to develop new skills and experience new and sometimes challenging situations. This experience can fundamentally alter the way a person sees the world, including their core values and motivations. Returning to work after a period away can be a mix of emotions. It can be characterised by:
- Culture shock
- Lack of direction or motivation
- Low confidence and fear of failure
- Poor time management and organisation skills
- Worries about Personal issues eg health, finance, balancing work and family
- Stress
There can be advantages for companies who welcome back and retain those employees who have taken a period of time out of their careers for whatever reason. They may be rewarded by new skills learnt whilst away from work, greater productivity, better staff morale and loyalty.
Coaching can help realise these benefits and minimise the pitfalls. Our coaches are well experienced in developing a smooth reintegration into the work place following a period of leave having work with rehabilitation following a period of long term sick, those returning from career break as well as return to work following maternity leave. Through a series of one-to-one coaching sessions over a relatively short period of time, we can help your returning employees to:
- Understand how their break away from the work place has change their values and motivation
- Remove any limiting beliefs or fears that are deeply engrained
- Develop a re-induction program and career management techniques
- Increase motivation, sense of purpose and fulfilment
- Reduce stress
- Improve inner confidence and the ability to communicate effectively with others
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