Professional coaching: a tool for performance development

Professional coaching is constantly accelerating. From more than 50,000 professional coaches around the world in 2016, the profession now has more than 71,000. Businesses, but also more and more individuals, have been able to verify the positive impact of such support on performance: 96% of people who have received coaching say they want to repeat the experience. Whether it is individual, collective, face-to-face or remote coaching, it is always a privileged moment to reflect on your posture, be challenged on your strategic vision or even make progress through simulation. Whether you are a Talent Development Manager, manager, manager or interested in a career as a professional coach, this file will allow you to understand professional coaching in its entirety

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Professional coaching: definition and historical reminders

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A definition of professional coaching

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Professional coaching is a A tool for taking perspective and professional development. One privileged space, alone or in a team, for take stock of its performance levers and make progress.

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The history of professional coaching

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In its broadest sense, coaching is an activity aimed at coaching (sports coaching), accompanying, supporting and instructing a person or a group of people in order to achieve one or more objectives (s). In the case of professional coaching, the objective to be achieved is... professional. Today, when we talk about coach or coaching, the collective unconscious associates this term with sport. However, it was in the University of Oxford that the term coach appeared in 1830 to describe the tutor who accompanies his student until his exam. The use of the term in sports did not appear until after 1850. In the second half of the 20th century, with the development of human sciences, psychology and management sciences, professional coaching appeared. It was during the 1980s that the practice developed within companies. to make Talents work on the postures and skills necessary for individual and collective performance. Since the 90s, the development of this practice has accelerated by addressing increasingly specific problems and offering ever more varied methods.

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Professional coaching in companies: a growing business all over the world

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Did you know that, according to the National Coaching Center (CNDC), 30 to 40% of corporate training budgets are allocated to professional coaching ? More visibility on this practice and a return on investment that has clearly been demonstrated over the past several years are all factors that encourage companies to invest more and more in this type of support. Another indicator of the evolution of coaching is the number of active professional coaches. As indicated above, this number is constantly increasing. Over the last 4 years, the number of professional coaches in the world grew by almost 35%.The regions of the world where the acceleration is strongest are:

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• Latin America/Caribbean with +174% of coaches vs 2015
• Eastern Europe with + 40% of coaches

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It is also interesting to note that the number of managers/managers who use certain coaching techniques on a daily basis in their interactions Has increased him closely by 50%. This shows a real spread of coaching within companies that goes beyond the only people supported.

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What is a professional coach?

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Professional coach: a regulated profession

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First of all, it is important to remember that the growing popularity of this activity makes it essential to regulate it. Indeed, it is not uncommon to see people present themselves as a professional coach. without having the training, experience, or posture required. Organizations such as the International Coaching Federation or the EMCC guarantee the serious training, experience and regular supervision of its members.

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The role of the professional coach

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In the context of individual coaching or group coaching, the role of the coach remains the same. Namely, Encourage the coachee (s) to explore new approaches to achieve one or more professional goals. To do this, depending on the situation and the problem of the person being accompanied, the coach may adopt a Posture of Sparring Partner, embody a Benevolent listening Or even be more Challenging to get the coachee out of his comfort zone.

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The criteria that define a professional coach

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At Talentis, we believe that there is 4 main criteria which make it possible to say whether it is possible to trust a professional coach:

• What is his experience as a manager or director in a company? Before becoming a coach and supporting talents within sometimes complex organizations, you must be able to have experienced their challenges and problems. This is the reason why a minimum of 10 to 15 years of experience as a manager or manager in a company is desired.
• Is his experience as a professional coach sufficient? Does he have a sufficient number of hours of support under his belt? To find your way around, an organization like the International Coaching Federation (ICF) uses ACC, PCC and MCC certifications. These 3 levels indicate the number of hours of training and practice validated by a professional coach.
• Is it supervised regularly? As is the case in psychoanalysis, for example, a professional coach is regularly monitored by another supervising professional. This work allows him to rechallenge his practice, share lived situations and constantly progress in his coaching position.
• Is he trained in complementary theoretical fields? The only training required to become a professional coach does not necessarily guarantee that you are dealing with an excellent coach. What makes the difference is the ability of the latter to train in ancillary practices such as: Transactional Analysis, Gestalt, Mindfulness, Lumina Spark test debriefing...

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Read our full article: “How to choose a professional coach? ”

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Professional coaching vs training: what are the differences?

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Professional coaching is not training. A trainer will present predefined methods and exercises beforehand to work on specific skills during the training. This is of course very useful in many situations. On the other hand training does not necessarily allow postures and skills to be anchored in the long term worked during the sessions, unlike professional coaching. The coach's job is to get the coachee to come up with his own solutions. Through reformulation, exchange, and positive confrontation, the coach allows the person being accompanied to reflect on their posture and challenges in order to achieve their goals. By this way of proceeding, the coachee will be able to cultivate learning over time in order to increase your level of performance over the long term.

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The expected benefits of professional coaching

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Professional coaching is a breathing space for:

• Get to know your operating methods better and what they involve concerning one's relationship with oneself, one's environment and one's collaborators/peers.
• Define professional goals precisely as well as the action plan needed to achieve them.
• Take advantage of a moment to yourself to Take a break and take a step back on a daily basis made up of emergencies, sometimes stress.
• Discover that we can go further than we could imagine thanks to working with a coach who, through his experience, encourages in particular to leave his comfort zone and to explore options that are often not considered beforehand.

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Professional coaching themes

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There are hundreds of reasons to call on a professional coach. For the sake of brevity and clarity, here is a selection of some themes that are often addressed in coaching :

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Develop your leadership

How to embody the role of inspiring leader capable of engaging teams in a vision? How to inspire employees in search of meaning and engage them even more?...

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Succeed in taking up a job

How to identify the strategic challenges of your new function and prioritize the tasks on which you are expected? How do you quickly make your new team grow in power?

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Succeed in a female career

How to do “self-marketing” to be more visible within your organization? How to decode unconscious biases and sexist stereotypes in order to respond effectively to them if necessary and overcome them?

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Building your professional project

How to map your skills, talents, motivations and assets? How to work on the postures to adopt that could be useful in your future functions?

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Managing stress and energy

How to diagnose your stress levers in order to deactivate them at the right time? How can you better organize your time and priorities on a daily basis to achieve your goals with serenity?

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Optimizing the functioning of a team

How to promote trust and communication within a collective? How do you help each member of the team to express their maximum potential? Professional coaching has a variety of methods to meet a wide variety of objectives. We hope that this dossier has allowed you to understand the challenges even more. If you want to talk to our consultants on a particular subject related to coaching, we invite you to fill out our contact form.

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Read our full article: “6 situations where professional coaching is useful”