Coaching helps enable people to be their most effective, personally and professionally. Above all, coaching support can help people achieve balance, clarity and effectiveness.
Mind the Gap’s courses on conflict management, leadership and project management often include a coaching element during the course and as part of follow-up. This ensures that insights gained during training can actually be applied in people’s work and personal life.
Our coaching approach is grounded in key values of personal and professional respect, dignity and trust. Whether face-to-face, by telephone or video-link, our coaching draws on models of Life Coaching, Executive Coaching (including career coaching), or Collaborative Coaching.
In Life Coaching, there is normally only one client – the person who is being coached. People may seek coaching to consider, for example, making an important decision in their life or career, issues around health and wellbeing, work or personal issues.
Executive Coaching often involves working with the sponsor’s goals as well as the client’s. This can help to balance individual goals with organisational needs. But it does require clarity about where the client’s and sponsor’s needs coincide and where they differ. We use a professional coaching agreement to make these things explicit and ensure that we all work to the same end. Clarity, openness, confidentiality, commitment and mutual agreement are our top priorities.
In our Collaborative Coaching the client, sponsor and the coach work to create change together in safe, mutually supportive ways. Sometimes other things apart from work-related issues may enter coaching discussions. The meaning of collaboration here is not that there are three people in the room! Private things stay confidential between the client and the coach. It is just that we formally acknowledge through a tailored ‘coaching agreement’ that we are all ‘on the same team,’ trying to work toward goals or changes that everyone agrees on.
