Experts across various disciplines support an intervention by a COVIDExperts across various disciplines support an intervention by a COVID-19 era corporate group coaching culture to revive peak performance without incurring or gravitating the devastating socio-economic damages of the 2020 pandemic.-19 era corporate group coaching culture to revive peak performance without incurring or gravitating the devastating socio-economic damages of the 2020 pandemic. Some companies did fashion-out supportive and empathetic innovative ways to keep their employees going during the lockdown. Still, the real deal now is how to wake the giant in their employees in the COVID-19 era phase.
This drive has become very imperative after the Global Leadership forecast 2021 by Development Dimensions International on learning modalities revealed that 48% of leaders, especially in corporate spaces, wanted external coaching; 48% developmental assignments; 42% assessment to diagnose leadership strengths; and 39% formal in-person training (and coaching).
Among many more indexes and surveys, these forecasts make it more essential for a group coaching culture integration into the new normal to support most employees in finding themselves and loving their careers.
Group coaching I define as a transformative, effective and powerful coaching form or methodology with a group of people to foster wellbeing, improved leadership performance, self-efficiency, result-oriented group dynamics, etc. I encourage coaches to ensure all the competencies of the international coaching federation and other coaching ethics and professionalism domains are evoked. It is an opportunity to allow clients or participants to differentiate coaching from training, counselling and mentoring, and then team coaching from group coaching.
According to the Globalisation and Health (2020) report, many healthcare workers suffered a series of degrees of burnout, lack of restful sleep, anxiety, stress, fatigue, fear and depression. These resulted from patients they lost, loved ones they lost, infections they suffered, and colleagues they lost. Such experiences were not unique to the sector alone, and they cut across all sectors of the global economy and human development. Although it impacted job losses, most nations recorded high domestic-abuse numbers, especially during the lockdown.
Everyone suffered or experienced an impact(s) in one way or another, which affected careers, family, health, education, government budgets, economic hardship, etc. These are part of many reasons why corporate bodies must, as a need and strategic re-engineering, invest in group coaching for their employees.
Group coaching in this new normal must focus on resilience, personal life-purpose awakening, repositioning, career reviving and repositioning, fellow-feeling support systems, peak performance from the collective drive, and ignite job satisfaction. These are to promote work-life balance and excellent employee and customer experience.
Some benefits of group coaching are:
- Effective leadership and management
- Institutionalisation of a coaching culture
- Empathetic group dynamics
- Support and trust
- A positive effect of social facilitation
- Improved knowledge transfer and sharing
- Increased committed action, responsibility, and accountability
- Stimulate growth mindset for creativity and innovation
- Facilitate resilience and self-leading
- Sense of awareness and appreciation
I propose the following PASCAD core coaching skills to companies to create a coaching culture that suits their corporate modelling in these new normal phases due to the COVID-19 pandemic. PASCAD is admittedly a bespoke model we fashioned out at Zoweh Global Consult to serve our client’s needs and the post-pandemic dispensation we are faced with. Other coaching professionals and experts use what works best for them, considering their core roots of coaching.
PASCAD is rooted in ontology, mindfulness, and ecology practiced within the International Coaching Federation’s (ICF) eight competencies and ethics, and deploying the benefits of mbraining insights and knowledge with effective rapport building using neuro-linguistic programming. PASCAD is a mnemonic of Presence, Active listening, Safety & trust, Curiosity-compassion-commitment-celebration, Accountability & responsibility, and Diversity-equality-inclusion.
Presence: It is the practice of being present in thought, spirit and body during sessions. The client(s) and coach foster congruencies that allow the client to evoke transformation from within. Presence creates trust in the process, coach, and client to bring about a desired outcome and results. “The greatest gift you can give to another is the purity of your attention,” Richard Moss. But this comes by constant practice, mindfulness, discipline and connection.
Active Listening: This follows up to augment presence and bring out the best in clients during sessions. Creativity and innovation occur in languaging, such that what is being said verbally and non-verbally is critical to coaching outcomes. Active and effective listening occurs when the coach’s judgments, assumptions – and frames of viewing the world, are absent to support the client to come forth.
Safety & Trust: Creating an environment that will allow the client to trust and be vulnerable is essential for a successful outcome. It is not just during the session, but even after when the client or (employee) knows every aspect of the session is strictly confidential within coaching ethics. Safety, trust and curiosity are very potent to the growth, development and sustainability of coaching culture in an organisation.
At best, I recommend an external certified coach or an in-house certified resource or coach who has the needed pedigree of trust and safety. When one person feels their safety and trust is compromised, and is not given the needed ramification and recommitment, it can jeopardise an entire powerful intervention of the established coaching culture.
Curiosity, Compassion, Commitment and Celebration: This is the skill of asking questions which allow the client to explore opportunities available on the subject matter, awaken an awareness that is coming forth on what is under discussion and the potential or abilities lying within to drive transformation for growth. It is exercised with compassion to differentiate it from interrogation or media questioning to elicit fact.
Curiosity through compassion stimulates a certain level of commitment in the client toward whatever outcome comes forth to aid sustainability after the session. Finally, there must be acknowledgment and celebration of the continued progress of the client or employee to serve as a way to show the good faith of possibility.
Accountability and Responsibility: Coaching is holding a client accountable and responsible without a sense of guilt and judgment through questioning to trigger shifts which will birth the outcomes desired. The client, committing to their words, evokes the corresponding actions to bring about the evidence of shift and awareness of how, when, why and what is possible for them to achieve or be.
Growth-mindedness and resilience thrive when employees or clients can objectively look at their situations without conscious or unconscious bias or filters of their worldview and make possible choices to achieve their intended results.
Diversity, equality & inclusion: Coaching culture allows employees to embody their uniqueness in abilities and potentials without unproductive comparisons. It also provides leadership to manage the strengths, opportunities, threats and weaknesses of oneself to promote peak performance without compromising efficiency and effectiveness. It also allows management to know the skills, abilities and areas of employees’ interest to invest in continuous professional development.
In modelling a league of extraordinary groups, teams, departments, etc. through coaching, DEI must focus and understand each individual’s SWOT, potentials and abilities to foster awareness that produces effective, excellent results.
The overall benefit of a well-cultivated corporate coaching culture and integration comes in revenue, excellent employee experience, healthy customer experience, and effective management functioning. In addition, resilience, job satisfaction and team-spirit sustainability during this phase of the global pandemic are too critical for any business to compromise. Therefore, plugging corporate coaching culture into an already existing company culture is imperative in this new normal era.
Scofray Nana Yaw Yeboah
Transformational Coach | Certified Corporate Trainer | Lead Facilitator for Zoweh Global Consult
Contact: (+233) 243 085932 Email: [email protected]
