The Role of a Coach in the Corporate World

Jenni Lim, HR Head Asia at SEMPERIT

People are naturally creative, resourceful, and whole. They are generally capable of finding answers, taking action, recovering when things do not go as planned and capable of learning. As a coach, we will need to be open to possibilities, discover with the coachee and not dictating. When focusing on the whole person, we need to listen on many levels, tuned in to the influences that arepresent in each of these different dimensions.

Providing feedback is one of the coach’s most important skills. It includes highlighting the impact of what the coachee did and what he or she might do (even) better next time. We should focus on skills, not person, when providing feedback, paint specific picture of the desired skills and acknowledge coachee’s feeling. It is important for us to balance the negatives and positives and help the coachee to come up with the constructive actions.

The experience of intuition is sometimes hard to explain which makes it difficult for some people to accept. It is difficult to verify that it’s real as no observable evidence for the conclusion. People normally turn to facts, scientific research model, and method to operate. However, intuition is a powerful asset in coaching. Intuition often shows up in an unexpected way in the coaching conversation. The important thing is to be open to intuition, trusting it, aware of it and completely unattached to the interpretation.

“It requires a collaboration and willingness of the coach and coachee to build on extraordinary trust. As a coach, we should tune with the coachee for the sake of their learning and discovery.”

It requires a collaboration and willingness of the coach and coachee to build on extraordinary trust. As a coach, we should tune with the coachee for the sake of their learning and discovery.  We play a key role by holding a vision of what is possible and through their commitment to transformative experience, however the coachee still choose the topic, the action and the results they want. We should use balance coaching, which will help coachees on the flow; way to balance priorities, expectations, and perspectives on the issues they bring to their coaching sessions. There is a natural tendency for a coach to hold back, analyze, check, and see if it is right or if this is the right time to say something. We need to be willing to use the intuition to be able to have a breakthrough into the conversation that he/she may not be able to fully articulate or logically diagram in the moment.

The coach should also challenge the coachee to pursue his or her fulfillment. We need to be encouraging, pointing the way a life fully lived, a life that is valued and without regret. The moving forward to an envisioned future is the focus of the process coaching.We need to be aware of the flow which involves sensing the turbulence under the surface and names it, explores, experience, a shift happens, energy opens up, the coachee has access to new resource, and movement happens.

Finally, it is important to continuously motivate the coachee. The golden rules of motivation are to know where they are, work on their confidence, work on praise, identify their needs for support, and know what motivates them the most.