Snapshots of business coaching successes
The brief case studies below offer a glimpse at how coaching has been of benefit to a variety of organisations and individuals
Case study 1 - achieving behavioural change
Case study 2 - leading a team
Case study 3 - strategic planning
Case study 4 - overcoming difficult situations
Case study 5 - professional career development
Case study 6 - competency-based development
Case study 1 - achieving behavioural change
During his annual performance appraisal, Michael agreed with Gordon, the director to whom he reported, that he felt he was stagnating in his job. A statistician with an international reputation in his field, Michael was ambitious and industrious. For a variety of reasons, he had developed a style of behaviour at work which easily gave the impression of being a detached judge. Impartial as befits a statistician in an international pharmaceutical company but lacking the warmth and attention to people that his role as team leader required. Enabled to view the quality of his relationships with an empathetic but confronting counsellor, Michael faced up to how much was lacking in many of them. He soon experimented with simple forms of behaviour that conveyed a new element of inclusiveness and openness: leaving the door of his office open frequently, wearing less austere clothing. Senior managers unaware that he had consulted about his behaviour were soon heard to comment on the contrast in it. Some of his colleagues, at departmental head level, asked for similar professional support and likewise took significant initiatives.
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Case study 2 - leading a team
Elaine was appointed as development director to settle recurrent failings in delivery of a flagship project of a medical electronics company with ambitious plans for export development. What was perceived as a downside of the energy and drive she brought arose from the unsettling impact on the finance director and on some engineering leaders reporting to her. Seeing themselves as 'consistent' and regarded her as bullying, they generally tended to muster little support for her efforts to raise the level of performance of the business. Frustrated with their apparent 'resistance', she acted in ways that reinforced the negative cycle. Through psychometric profiling and performance coaching, we enabled her to see herself and others in a new light. Once she appreciated how many of those she respected acted simply on the basis of temperaments different from her own, she gradually worked out a variety of ways of influencing them. Relieved from feeling pressurised and labelled by her, they in turn dovetailed their priorities along the lines she wanted.
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Case study 3 - strategic planning
Directors of the U.K. commercial division of an international electronics company found that the timescale for structural change available to them was being quickly whittled away by a mix of commercial pressures in the business environment and political forces at head office in Europe. I coached the lead director about the board strategy for communicating with staff and trades unions, with a view to safeguarding the quality of relationships with customers.
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Case study 4 - overcoming difficult situations
Tom worked as a senior executive with a leader in business-to-business publishing. On his return from an international meeting, the plane in which he was a passenger was involved in a mid-air collision. Tom was not physically injured but suffered severe stress after identifying the corpses of his dead colleagues. In a company in which management-staff relations were strained on account of redundancies arising from investment in new technology, the emotional implications of how Tom was treated had significant implications. We enabled him to settle into a new role with dignity and to gradually regain his earlier vigour.
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Case study 5 - professional career development
Mary, 30, a solicitor, approached us for help at a time when the poise of her career was off balance. While reasonably experienced, she felt that she was stagnating. Our conversations started about implicit messages she conveyed through her self-presentation in conversation. Feedback from a questionnaire about her personality type, the Myers Briggs Type Indicator, prompted her to radically update many beliefs she held about herself. In ways and to a degree she had never anticipated, she soon began to notice that she was presenting herself with much more conviction and ease in court. To her surprise and relief, her anxieties about her professional fitness fairly soon began to relax, as she saw herself in a new light. As our paths parted, she wrote a "self-characterisation", a story about herself at work some years ahead, writing in the third person, as if by a friend who knew her very well. This portrait projected her as a successful specialist in the area of practice in which she was extending her experience. Within a year, she got in touch to tell me that she had been promoted and that communicating in court remained a source of accomplishment for her.
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Case study 6 - competency-based development
Increasing investment in information and communications technology, and a changing global marketplace, obliged marketing and sales staff of the U.K. division of a multinational electronics distribution company to review core competencies needed for greater commercial success: a stronger emphasis on relationship and quality management, influencing and negotiation competencies over technical and design skills. Less immediately evident was the need for the company's accountants to change their focus from analytical competencies to competencies of a consulting kind, in which they stimulated and supported managers to look at financial data in a more rounded way. Our use of repertory grid and critical incident techniques facilitated the shift in self-awareness and communication skills.
Kieran Duignan
Since 1982, Kieran has worked independently and in association with other consultancies (large, medium, small and micro) and as a contributor to postgraduate university courses in counselling, ergonomics and occupational psychology.
Counselling evolved along with consulting assignments and my work gradually assumed its present focal points: learning and career management, leadership, teammanship, new ways of working and quality business relationships.
In the ergonomic facet of my practice, I consult about technophobia, tangled human relationships and sources of stress and risk associated with problems of useability of I.T. systems and other artefacts at work.
Kieran can be contacted via kieran@enablingspace.co.uk or on 020 8654 0808. Find out more about Kieran's work in our Referral Services section by using the Name Search in the business or personal coach databases
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