International Coaching Week 2023: Exploring your potential for corporate & career growth through coaching

Jeremiah Fennell, the ten-year-old American football sensational journalist, had a passion for playing American football but as life will have it, he had a condition that made playing impossible. So, he converted the same passion, zest and quest into sports journalism, especially the NFL, which has shot him into the limelight. Likewise, Ghana’s tech guru and software engineer Farida Nana Efua Bedwei, diagnosed with cerebral palsy, did not allow her differently ableness to truncate her potential to excel in technology.

One of Asia’s most successful executive coaches, Philippe Grall demonstrates that everyone is a diamond in the rough that requires mining, washing, polishing, cutting, etc., to add value and show the world that they are in service and impact on the world.

Coaches embody awareness, possibility and curiosity to support clients in exploring their potential to live their life to the fullest in satisfaction and fulfilment.

Coaches walk side-by-side with clients, focusing on the contents emerging from everyone rather than on the container. This is why the theme of this year’s International Coaching Week by the International Coaching Federation is ‘Explore your Potential’ from the 8^th to the 14^th of May.

In today’s world, coaching has become an essential part of effective business leadership for results. Therefore, management and people in leadership roles must be assessed and connected to executive coaching. The reason is that business leadership coaching assists business leaders in enhancing their leadership skills, such as improved communication skills, understanding the power of delegation and how it is done, and becoming highly motivated.

Through coaching, leaders get the opportunity to learn, adapt and apply their leadership skills and style to different situations, thus, becoming more effective in leading their teams.

Business and leadership coaching has helped business leaders build stronger employee relationships, increasing employee engagement and commitment. In addition, coaching can assist leaders in better understanding their employees’ strengths, motivations and challenges, and providing them with the support they require to succeed.

Executive business or leadership coaches have the skill and training to encourage business leaders to think outside the box by helping them expand their minds, explore new ideas and become action-oriented. When exposed to coaching, business leaders can quickly recognise and challenge their biases and assumptions to foster innovation and creativity.

Retaining top talents in our present VUCA world is challenging. Still, executive coaching can help business leaders retain top talent by providing the support and development opportunities they require to grow and thrive. In addition, leaders are guided on how they can help identify their employees’ career goals and aspirations and develop plans to assist them in achieving those goals.

Trends in human capital, especially with the aftershocks of COVID-19 in every sector and every country, indicate that many institutions are increasingly becoming more concerned about their capacity to deliver. This capacity rests largely in attracting and retaining excellent individuals who are motivated, focused and driven by good managerial support and opportunities to grow their skills and knowledge and advance in their chosen career paths by progressing within the organisation and industry. However, it is becoming more evident that the people-focused programmes – such as investment in upskilling through training, staff engagement initiatives, strengthening performance management, policies that focus on work-life balance, well-being, change management, diversity and inclusion, occupational health and safety, etc., – do not seem to be fully producing the productivity shifts anticipated.

What more could be done to ensure that employees engage in capacity-building initiatives to safeguard institutional delivery and experience personal and professional growth and development that positively impacts their lives? This is where solution-focused coaching contributes directly to personal growth as it speaks to personal and professional goals and the benefits of achieving peak performance.

Individuals are as unique as fingerprints. Through coaching, each can tap into his/her unique values, which are the motivations for actions and feelings that connect to their identities, all of which energise their vision. Once one’s vision is invigorated, one becomes motivated to seek solutions to any desired goals within an envisioned period.

Coaching is a triggering tool to break the underlying limiting beliefs of clients to aid them in navigating and defining solutions and strategies to catalyse growth through powerful questioning. A metaphor of the coaching relationship may be likened to midwifery, with the coach’s role being to encourage, facilitate and ease the ‘birthing’ process. The coaching modality assumes and recognises that the client holds the solutions facilitated through presence, trust, emotional intelligence and psychological safety for transformation to occur to promote growth and development.

Coaching has been well-validated as a modality which – whether used as an intervention, strategy or process – demonstrates 200 percent plus ROI (Return on Investment).

Coaching is not limited to the context of those who have already begun their professional lives; it is a game-changer within academia, the pre-professional period. Prominent educational institutions – like Harvard University, Johns Hopkins University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology – provide coaching for their students, supporting them throughout their academic journeys.

To differentiate it from academic advising – which focuses on study-specific activities, think of academic coaching as the ‘everything in-between’. Coaches generally focus on a holistic client experience, which is no different in academia. Both secondary and post-secondary students live with the stress of fulfilling educational requirements, navigating extra-curricular activities, and discovering barriers and challenges they haven’t previously encountered. Having an academic coach through such experiences supports students in developing confidence, resilience and motivation as well as identifying and prioritising goals to achieve the life they want during and after their educational experience.

Coaching encapsulates all fibre of human life and discipline, which sports feature significantly from the ancient Olympic Games to the Roman gladiators, and even the much-awaited All Africa Games to be held in Accra, Ghana in March 2024. Nelson Mandela said: “Sport has the power to change the world. It has the power to unite people in a way that little else does. It speaks to youths in a language they understand”.

Sports always have a way of bringing joy and entertainment and heartbreak to millions of people worldwide. Athletes are integral and play a pivotal role in creating these mixed emotions. This creates pressure for young athletes to excel on the field. Their status oscillates between being a hero one weekend to being a pariah to the very fans who sang their praises. Most top athletes have life coaches on their management teams for emotional well-being, psychological safety, performance, etc.

Life coaching is a powerful tool that helps athletes and teams achieve their full potential on and off the field. The role of a life coach is to help athletes identify their strengths and weaknesses and develop strategies to improve their performance. In addition, life coaching offers athletes a 360-degree world view of their lives to stimulate life purpose toward fulfilment and satisfaction.

Furthermore, life coaches work with athletes to set clear and achievable goals, develop mental toughness, and overcome mental barriers that may hold them back. Tony Robbins has served many athletes through life coaching, and their results have been phenomenal; on his list are Pat Riley, Andre Agassi, Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, Chuck Liddell, Tom Brady, and now Golden State Warriors owner Peter Guber, coach Steve Kerr, and star forward Draymond Green.

To sum up, coaching is an integrative intervention that can cut deep into the mind, body and soul. It creates shifts, supports emerging awareness, facilitates possibilities, and awakens opportunities to aid clients in living their purposes to the fullest. Furthermore, through coaching, corporate institutions can be enculturated with systems and policies that give employees the safe space to live their purpose through a career path as a higher calling in service to humanity. Exploring one’s potential through coaching offers more significant returns on empathy, performance, team bonding, creativity, diversity, transformational leadership, personal and professional growth, with a sense of fulfilled progressive life.

Co-authored: ICF Ghana Coaches