Coaching’s Impact on Training
How many times have you left a training program excited to implement newfound skills and ideas, only to get caught up in old habits and fast paced office life, leaving your inspiration to apply those new skills back at the classroom table? We know that training provides a safe space to share an experience of gaining knowledge and skills with others. The networking and knowledge sharing that occurs during training can be invaluable, and yet we know that it can be difficult to translate what you learned in training to your job environment. That’s where professional coaching can serve as a value added experience, locking in learning and helping create a personalized plan for mindfully and intentionally implementing the knowledge and skills from group training.
Like an athletic or dance coach that helps you make adjustments in order to start faster or stick a landing, a professional coach helps you tweak behaviors or beliefs in your professional life so that you increase your competence, capacity, and effectiveness. Often when we bring home new knowledge or skills from training, we try to place them on top of behaviors or processes that are already in place, often unsuccessfully, rather than truly integrating them into our way of being.
A coach can help you take what you learned in class and make it personally applicable—what does this new information mean in the context of your professional environment for you? What makes sense for you to implement or not? How can you blend these new skills with what is already working? Coaches reflect back to us what they witness in our habits of thought and of behavior. What about our perspective or daily habits makes it easy or difficult to implement new skills or insight? If we say yes to applying classroom training on the job, what does that mean we have to say no to? And if we don’t bother applying it, what is at risk?
Research indicates that coaching does lead to increases in both personal and organizational effectiveness. Coaching has been linked to better leader performance, higher levels of productivity and employee morale, and better customer service. When combined with the training needed for leaders and managers to develop certain foundational levels of knowledge and skills, coaching provides the important extra element of focused, personalized learning and growth to help leaders develop lifelong habits and to practice behaviors that maximize their potential and have a positive impact on the organization’s bottom line.
