Coaching Skills Training for Managers and Professionals
Coaching Skills for Leaders
Effective Leadership
Cultivate leadership skills to inspire, motivate, and achieve goals through understanding and support.
Team Growth
Create a positive environment for team empowerment and productivity through supportive coaching.
Master Skills
Refine communication and emotional intelligence for real-world challenges, ensuring lasting professional growth.Refine your communication skills by learning to harness your emotional intelligence with one of the UK's most acclaimed management training courses.
Why Choose This Training?
More Than Just A Course Of Lectures
What gets in the way of developing and holding on to new communication skills are old habits of thinking and speaking. Even if the advice is very good the reason why it rarely sticks are the mental habits people inevitably revert to, especially under pressure.
Unlearning those old habits and internalising a more effective and lasting approach to communication needs more than a short course of lectures on how to do it.
What Makes This Training Stand Out?
What makes this training stand out is the exceptional support through one-to-one coaching sessions and continuous feedback. Changing behaviour is not an easy task as old habits are hard to break.
With a 40-year track record we can help you cultivate practical skills, and build your confidence to so you can successfully navigate real-world challenges, ensuring lasting behavioural improvements.
Testimonials
Join thousands of participants getting results
"What I love about this course is that I didn't just learn about the topic, this course is about ME. I'm confident I can reliably use my new skills, even when under pressure".
"A lesson for life! The power of effective communication is incredible when one masters the skills "listening with empathy" and "speaking assertively"
Clients We Have Worked With
Well-known companies who have used this course again and again, over many years
Course Summary
Training Objectives
This course is designed to help you develop your coaching skills and become an effective team manager and leader. The course covers topics such as communication, developing relationships, managing change, and creating a coaching environment. You'll develop your skills at tuning in on the other person's wave-length and getting them to tune in on yours. You'll learn how to listen with empathy and how to get them to listen to you by being assertive.
Develop Your Emotional Intelligence
You will learn a set of powerful emotional intelligence communication techniques so that you can manage difficult conversations, handle challenging situations, build relationships and set firm boundaries.
Transferable Skills
The goal of this training is to equip you with the tools they need to build strong, lasting relationships in your professional life, although because these skills are so transferable many clients report vast improvements in their personal relationships as well.
Develop Skills
This is a skills development rather than just a theoretical programme, so the emphasis throughout will be on you taking turn after turn, practising your skills, while receiving feedback and coaching about your effect on others.
Repeated Practice and Feedback
In your coaching sessions you will be helped to practise dealing with the kinds of situation you find challenging, again and again, until you are confident you can do it successfully.
Video Analysis
We'll combine practical, hands-on experience with video replay and analysis and discussion of the principles involved to help you gain both skills and understanding. Special attention is paid to your individual training needs, so you can practise your skills in real-life situations that you have to handle at work.
Sustained Change
That's why as well as your place in a small group, this training includes a generous amount of private and confidential one-to-one coaching sessions online, spread over several months, ensuring an exceptional level of support. This will ensure the changes you make are sustained over a longer period of time and any obstacles are overcome. Choose between online training available worldwide, or in-person face-to-face courses in the UK.
Course Dates and Price
For a list of upcoming course dates (for online coaching and face-to-face training), the locations of the next 3-day public courses in the UK and pricing Click here.
Free Initial Session
This initial coaching session serves as an introduction to the "Skills with People" course, allowing you to understand the course's relevance and effectiveness for your specific needs before committing to it.
Why Is This Coaching Skills Training So Effective?
For more than 40 years this management coaching and mentoring training course has proven to be one of the most highly acclaimed. Over the years we've had thousands of managers and professionals through our hands. Many have said it's one of the best coaching training courses they ever attended.
Coaching skills are is important for any manager and team leader. Developing effective coaching skills helps promote personal development, improving performance, and achieving extraordinary results within an organisation. This page illustrates how the benefits of this coaching skills training, essential skills taught for successful coaching, and why this is a good choice if you want to develop your coaching skills.
The Importance of Coaching Skills Training
Coaching skills training is necessary for managers and team leaders who want to enhance your ability to support, develop, and guide your team members towards achieving their personal and professional goals. This coaching skills training program will equip you with the knowledge, tools, and techniques to foster a coaching culture that encourages continuous learning and development. This training enables you to become more self-aware, improve your listening skills, and better understand the needs of your team, so you can improve their performance.
This training will be able to provide you many benefits for both you and your team. We'll help drive your personal as well as the organisation's success.
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Skill Area |
Benefits of this course |
|
Communication Skills |
- Improved active listening - Better understanding of team members' needs. - Positive and constructive feedback |
|
Leadership Skills |
- Enhanced ability to inspire and motivate - Creating a positive work environment - Effective delegation |
|
Employee Engagement |
- Improved skills and job satisfaction for team members - Increased productivity - Reduced turnover |
|
Conflict Management |
- Increased confidence in handling difficult conversations - Effective conflict resolution - Improved team dynamics |
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Self-awareness & Emotional Intelligence |
- Stronger relationships with team members - Greater overall effectiveness as a manager |
Essential Coaching Skills
To be an effective coach, on this course you will develop the following essential coaching skills:
- Emotional Intelligence: Understanding and managing emotions in oneself and others, fostering self-awareness and empathy.
- Active Listening: Paying full attention to the speaker, selecting back, and summarising what has been said to ensure understanding.
- Empathy: Being able to put oneself in another person's shoes and understand their feelings and perspectives.
- Effective Questioning: Asking open-ended and probing questions to encourage self-reflection and deeper understanding.
- Constructive Feedback: Providing honest and actionable feedback in a supportive and positive manner.
- Goal Setting: Helping team members set specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) goals.
- Building Rapport: Establishing a strong connection and trust with team members, creating a safe environment for open communication.
Emotional Intelligence
Emotional intelligence is the ability to recognise, understand, and manage one's emotions and the emotions of others. It includes self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. A coach with high emotional intelligence can better understand other people's feelings, motivations, and challenges, allowing them to provide more tailored support and guidance. On this course you'll learn how to tune in on the other person's wavelength more effectively so they feel more understood.
Active Listening
Active listening is a crucial skill that involves fully focusing on the speaker, understanding their message, and responding thoughtfully. It requires a coach to give their complete attention, avoid interrupting, and to reflect back, to clarify the speaker's thoughts. Active listening builds trust and rapport, ensuring the person you are coaching feels heard and understood.
Empathy
Empathy is the ability to genuinely understand and share the feelings of another person. A coach with strong empathy skills can connect with the other person on a deeper level, enabling them to provide more effective support and guidance. Empathy helps coaches to create a safe and non-judgmental environment others can openly discuss their thoughts, concerns, insecurities and aspirations.
Effective Questioning
Asking the right questions is an important skill that helps you explore other people's thoughts, beliefs, and goals. Effective questioning techniques include open-ended questions, which encourage others to think critically and offer more comprehensive answers, and powerful questions, which challenge others to examine their assumptions and perspectives. This skill enables coaches to facilitate self-reflection and personal growth in their team memeber.
Constructive Feedback
Providing constructive feedback is an essential skill that helps coaches guide your people towards improvement and development. It involves offering honest, specific, and actionable feedback while maintaining a supportive and positive tone. If you can focus on the effect their behaviour and or actions are having on you, and include plenty of praise as well as criticism the feedback is balanced and objective. On this training course you'll become an expert in how to deliver feedback. You'll learn how to be kind to the person, and tough on the issue when you need to.
Goal Setting
Goal setting is a critical component of successful coaching, as it provides a clear direction for development. Coaches can offer guidance in setting SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) goals, ensuring they are realistic, relevant, and motivating. This process involves breaking down larger objectives into smaller, manageable steps and creating an action plan to achieve them.
Building Rapport
Establishing rapport is essential for creating a trusting and supportive coaching relationship. You need to be able to demonstrate genuine interest, respect, and empathy to ensure they feel valued and understood. Techniques for building rapport include using open body language matching and mirroring, tone and pace, and showing appreciation for their thoughts and opinions. The most powerful tool for creating rapport is empathy. On this course you'll not only learn about it in theory, you'll practice it over and over until you're really good at it.
Might This Coaching Skills Training Meet Your Need?
Yes, if the following rings a bell ...
- You struggle with effectively communicating with your team members, which can lead to misunderstandings, conflict, and decreased productivity.
- You may struggle with leading their team effectively, and may not have the skills needed to inspire and motivate their team members.
- Your team sometimes struggles to be engaged or motivated, they may not perform to their full potential, leading to decreased productivity and higher turnover rates.
- Conflicts in at work can be damaging to team dynamics and morale, and can be difficult to resolve without effective conflict management skills.
- When team members don't work well together, productivity and job satisfaction can suffer.
- Feedback is a crucial component of coaching and developing team members, and without effective feedback skills, it can be difficult for individuals to help their team members improve.
- Your normal approach is to tell them what works for you - give them advice, or you show them how to do it by saying watch me and doing it yourself, but that doesn't always work. Sometimes these approaches are helpful, but often they're not. When they fail it's because there's an obstacle in the way, a difficulty the person you are trying to help is experiencing, and your advice is unlikely to be helpful if you haven't found out precisely what their difficulty is. But either from habit, or as a result of time pressure, or because you assume you already know it, you tend to give advice before you fully understand their difficulty.
- Perhaps your effectiveness as a coach could be dramatically increased if you stopped making assumptions and did more listening before giving advice.
The Benefits Of This Coaching Skills Training For Managers
Might your need for better coaching skills be met by this London UK based management training course called Skills with People?
Coaching skills training offers numerous benefits for managers, including:
Improved Performance Management
By learning coaching techniques and developing a coaching style, you can better assess and address performance issues within your teams. This approach enables you to provide constructive feedback, create actionable development plans, and support your team members in achieving their goals.
Higher Employee Engagement
Employees who receive regular coaching and mentoring are more likely to feel valued, engaged, and committed to their organisation. This increased engagement leads to higher job satisfaction, improved morale, and better overall performance, and reduced staff turnover.
Enhanced Communication Skills
This coaching skills training can help you develop active listening, empathy, and assertive questioning techniques. These essential skills enable managers to better understand your team members' needs, build trust, and facilitate open and honest communication.
Increased Productivity
By supporting personal development and fostering a learning culture, this coaching skills training can help you improve your team's productivity. Managers can identify areas for improvement, set goals, and provide ongoing support, enabling employees to reach their full potential.
A More Effective Leadership Style
Developing coaching skills allows managers to adopt a more collaborative and supportive leadership approach. This style of leadership empowers team members, encourages responsibility, and fosters a positive working environment.
Why Choosing This Coaching Skills Training Program?
When selecting a coaching skills training program, consider the following factors:
Practical Application of Skills
Opting for this coaching skills training program is a smart choice because of the practical applications, allowing you to practice coaching techniques and receive feedback from experienced trainers and other participants.
Flexibility in Course Delivery
This program has flexible course delivery options, including online or in-person workshops, to accommodate varying schedules, learning preferences, budgets, and ability to travel.
Experienced Trainer
This program is led by an experienced trainers with a proven track record in coaching and professional development for whom this course has become their life's work.
Positive Feedback from Previous Participants
The testimonials and reviews from previous participants show how effective and what good value this training program provides.
What You'll Take Away From This Coaching Skills Training Course
How the skills you'll practise on this course will make you much more successful at coaching
This coaching and mentoring skills training course will enable you to master the art of listening with empathy. With this key coaching skill you'll delay giving advice until you've got right to the bottom of why they're finding the task difficult. You'll often find that helping them realise what's been holding them back is enough to empower them to complete the task without any advice from you. Your listening has helped them think things out for themselves. You'll discover that as a coach, it's how you listen to people that empowers them even more than the advice you give.
The heart of the matter in coaching
On this coaching and mentoring skills training course you'll learn to focus not on the problem to be solved or the task to be done by the problem owner, but on what's going on in their mind - what they feel, what they think, what assumptions they're making, what they know and don't know. You'll develop your ability to spot what difficulty they're having or obstacle they're encountering - what's preventing them from solving the problem or completing the task themselves.
The main coaching skill you need for this is listening with empathy. Your aim, by helping them identify and remove the obstacle, is to enable them to solve the problem or complete the task themselves. Giving advice can of course be useful, but you'll learn to give it only if all else fails. You'll learn to resist the urge to take the lead by telling them or showing them what to do. They'll get far more out of it if you can help them discover for themselves what's been holding them back.
This kind of coaching is harder than telling people what to do, especially if you're in the habit of giving advice and solving people's problems for them, but it's very rewarding and far more effective. On this coaching skills training course we'll give you plenty of practice and expert coaching to help you break the advice-giving habit.
How do most most managers and professional people respond when someone comes to them with a problem or concern?
They automatically assume the role of problem solver and adviser. Solving problems is one of the skills that got them where they are. They're well practised at it and enjoy it. It's become a habit - probably an unconscious one. But though sometimes it's the best way to coach, mentor and counsel people, it can often be even more helpful to listen with empathy instead. Listening with empathy is one of the two crucial key skills you'll develop on this coaching skills course.
What difference does listening with empathy make to the way you coach?
When you take on the role of problem-solver and adviser your mind is focussed not on the person but on the problem, so the first thing you do is try to understand the problem. Rather like a doctor diagnosing a patient's medical problem you obtain the facts by asking questions. But the effect of your questions is, perhaps unintentionally, to put you in charge. You take the mentally active role, leaving them with the passive role of supplying information on request. They follow your lead, as indicated below:-
Here's an outline of a conversation following YOUR thoughts as you give advice
- Someone brings you his problem.
- You acting as problem-solver and adviser asking for the specific facts so that you can offer advice.
- He gives you the facts you ask for.
- You offer a solution.
- He remains dependent on your advice when he has a problem.
The big difference between this and listening with empathy is the focus of your attention. Listening with empathy focuses not on the problem but on what's going on in the mind of the problem owner. Your objective is now quite different. You're aiming not to solve the problem for him but to help him solve it. And in order to achieve this you use a very different way of listening. Instead of asking for specific facts, you listening with empathy. As a result, instead forcing him to go down your path, you go down his - as shown below:-
Here's an outline of a conversation following the HIS thoughts as you help him think it out for himself
- Problem owner brings you his problem.
- You listen with empathy in order to tune in to HIS thoughts and feelings about the problem.
- You help him think about his own problem with open questions (see "8 very useful open questions", below).
- He explores his own thoughts and feelings with the help of your listening and your questions. In this way he clarifies his own mind about the problem and how to tackle it.
- Your empathy helps him develop his own ability to solve the problem.
- He leaves you empowered and less dependent on your advice when he has a problem.
8 very useful open questions
An open question, unlike a question asking for a specific fact, gives the problem owner freedom to answer without restriction and implies that you're interested in whatever they have to say. Below are 8 open questions you can use when listening to someone with a problem. They help the problem owner explore the problem from a variety of different angles:-
- How do they feel? (Try to name their feeling or feelings).
- Precisely what is the feeling is about? (In other words, what has happened?)
- Why does it matter to them? What is the underlying belief, value or need behind this feeling?
- How they have tried to tackle it or thought of tackling it?
- What specific obstacle has prevented them from resolving it?
- What would they ideally like? What do they really want?
- What will be the consequence if they do nothing about it?
- Now having thought more about it what further help do they need from you if any?
Question 8 gives you an opportunity to give advice if needed. Having listened so attentively you're now in a better position to give advice if you have any, and the problem owner is more likely both to be receptive and to find your advice relevant and useful.
Practical tips on using open questions
- Instead of asking the questions, try answering them and reflecting back the answers, e.g., “What you seem to be saying is …”. This is harder work but more helpful because by holding up a mirror to the problem owner it helps him be more aware of and think again about what is going on in his own mind.
- A good listener makes as much use as he can of the information he has already received before asking for more.
- Never give advice before exploring at least some of these open questions.
The urge to rush in and give advice is a common obstacle to effective coaching. By making the effort to listen with empathy you can learn much more about the problem, and then, if advice is needed, it will be more relevant and helpful. On this coaching skills training course you'll get lots of practice at handling people in this way.
Example Of Coaching
First without, and then without the key skill of empathy
Example of coaching, first without, and then without the key skill of empathy
Imagine that Viv, a member of your staff, is in difficulties. Her problem is that she takes on too much work. She's losing the confidence of the people who use her services because she's often very late in completing their work. This is what she says to you:-
- VIV: Everyone says their work is urgent and that I'm the only one who can do it. It's impossible. I just can't cope.
How would you try to help her?
Here are three possible ways:-
First way - Give quick advice
- YOU: Never accept work unless you know you have time to complete it. Just tell them when you're too busy. Okay?
- VIV: Okay.
But the problem continues and she leaves the job. Your advice was probably correct. It is what you would do in Viv's position. But the trouble is - there's an obstacle in the way. So although it may be good advice, it's useless to her.
Second way - Come to the rescue
- YOU: Oh dear. We can't have this. I'll tell you what we'll do. Jean can act as your gatekeeper. People who need your services will have to approach her first to ask if you can do it.
- VIV: Okay.
But she soon feels humiliated and quits.
Third way - Coach with empathy
- YOU: You sound very worried.
- VIV (lets off steam): I am! It's keeping me awake at night.
- YOU: I get the impression you're worried about letting people down.
- VIV: They might think I'm not up to the job.
- YOU: You think they'll assume you're not up to the job if you say 'no'.
- VIV: Yes.
- YOU (pointing out a flaw in her story) But by saying 'yes' when you're too busy to do the work aren't you making inevitable the very thing you're afraid of?
- VIV: Well, yes, I suppose I am. But what should I say when I'm too busy?
- YOU: What stops you telling the truth?
- VIV: I hate saying 'no'. People will think I'm just making an excuse.
- YOU: Are you just making an excuse?
- VIV: Of course not.
- YOU: I believe you, but you seem to think others won't - and I get the impression that's what stops you saying it.
- VIV: Mmm. I was always taught to get on with things and not make excuses.
- YOU: You're now wondering if that was such a good lesson.
- VIV: It's being dishonest, and I don't like that.
- YOU: You'd prefer to be honest, if only people would believe you.
- VIV: Yes, I would.
- YOU: Suppose I bring you work and you're too busy to do it. And imagine I'll believe whatever you tell me. What would you say?
- VIV: I'd say, please don't think I'm unwilling or incapable of doing your work. It's just that I'm too busy right now because I'm in the middle of a job for someone else. I want to do it, but it'll have to wait till later.
- YOU: That sounds perfectly okay to me. Are you comfortable saying it?
- VIV: Yes, but didn't it sound like an excuse?
- YOU: What do you think?
- VIV: No, I don't think it did.
- YOU: I agree. If you need a bit more practice to develop your confidence why not video yourself saying in on your smart-phone. Then you can see it and practice as often as you like.
This way of coaching isn't easy if you're in the habit of giving advice. But on this coaching skills training course you'll have plenty of practice with expert coaching to help you break the advice-giving habit.