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Coaching for Talent Development

Helping People Become More Effective

Coaching can help your people become more effective and productive

© iStockphoto/asiseeit

During the recent economic downturn, many managers have been under pressure to achieve more, but with fewer resources. And many will continue to pursue this goal, even when their industries or organizations start to grow again.

So how can you make this happen?

One way is by helping your people to be more effective and productive in their existing roles, and at the same time empowering them to take on new challenges and responsibilities. And coaching is an excellent tool for achieving this, alongside other elements of a comprehensive talent management   strategy.

In particular, coaching can help you:

• Reveal people's capacity to develop new skills, and take on increased responsibility.
• Develop their existing skills and talent through supported experimentation – when you encourage people to try new ways to do essential tasks and processes.
• Identify where unhelpful attitudes are preventing them from succeeding in their roles, so that you can help them deal with this.
• Develop your people, by helping them solve problems that are blocking their progress.
• Improve operational efficiency by identifying fundamental problems with business processes.
• Highlight succession planning   issues, and provide people with a more realistic understanding of their career expectations.

The guidelines below can help you direct your coaching-focused conversations for best results.

Managing a Coaching Conversation

The GROW model   is a valuable framework for managing a coaching conversation. Follow these four steps to adapt GROW specifically for talent development.

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