A New Program Develops Coach-Like Leaders

A New Program Develops Coach-Like Leaders
Who Achieve Higher Employee Retention Levels, Better Customer Service and Enhanced Productivity

SAN DIEGO, April 1, 2002 -- Coaching.com—the world’s front-runner in organizational coaching—has announced a new “Coaching Essentials for Leaders” program targeted specifically toward leaders and supervisors who seek to increase their effectiveness and influence positive results within their organizations.

“Think about great managers or great leaders with whom you’ve worked and what it was it about them that made them so effective,” says Madeleine Homan, Coaching.com’s co-founder and Chief Coaching Officer. “The most powerful managers and leaders have the qualities of a great coach. However, these qualities aren’t necessarily natural abilities—most of these folks have been trained to manage in that style.”

“Leaders who utilize coaching skills have more effective teams, higher morale, and better bottom-line results than those who don’t,” says Linda Miller who co-authored the Coaching Essentials program with Homan. “These leaders have high levels of key employee retention, better customer service in their organizations, and higher productivity,” she says. “People remember them … and their impact.”

“Coaching Essentials for Leaders does not attempt to make leaders into coaches. Rather, leaders are encouraged to examine their current attitudes, behaviors and leadership styles while learning coaching skills that make them more effective managers,” says Homan. She has been a prominent figure in business coaching since 1989 and holds a Master Certified Coach credential from the International Coach Federation—an honor held by fewer than 300 individuals.

Homan co-founded Coaching.com with Scott Blanchard, the son of Ken Blanchard who is widely known as the author of The One Minute Manager� and 15 other best-selling books on human development. According to Blanchard, Coaching.com and The Ken Blanchard Companies have extensively studied what makes an individual a great leader.
“Effective leaders understand that the key to driving business results is developing and empowering their people to achieve the strategic objectives of the organization,” he says. “Coach-like leaders are simply more proficient in inciting their people to stretch and meet their targets.”

Coaching Essentials for Leaders was created for senior-level and emerging managers and others with supervisory responsibilities. It was designed to help them learn and apply coaching skills, increase their ability to integrate coaching into their current leadership style, and help foster more of a coaching culture in their organizations. "This is accomplished through the development and practical application of core coaching skills and behaviors. Through personalized, one-on-one follow-up coaching sessions, leaders are encouraged to apply, evaluate and discuss the effectiveness of their new behaviors,” says Homan.

The program includes two distinct segments: an eight-hour training component to learn and practice the skills, and three to five individual coaching sessions to maximize learning and ensure the application and sustainability of coaching skills. "The delivery format for the program was designed to help busy leaders stay where they are most needed—in the middle of the workplace,” says Miller who joined Coaching.com in 2000 as Vice President of Coaching Services. “Coaching Essentials for Leaders is offered primarily via teleconference. The recommended format for long-term content retention is eight weeks of classes that feature one-hour of coursework per week, and fieldwork in between classes.”

Miller—another Master-Certified Coach who has focused on coaching within the corporate arena since 1995—says that each participant receives individual coaching sessions with one of Coaching.com’s professional, certified coaches. All individual coaching sessions are approximately one hour in length and are delivered via telephone.

Both Homan and Miller have extensive experience designing and delivering coaching programs as well as coaching leaders in organizations such as Picture Tel, Forrester Research, Boston Consulting Group, Duke Energy, Deloitte and Touche, Delta Faucet, and The Boeing Company.

By combining a team of seasoned, highly-credentialed coaches with a proprietary Web-based platform, Coaching.com has extended the benefits of coaching beyond the executive boardroom—providing scalable, fully-integrated services that are flexible and cost-effective enough to reach individuals at all levels of an organization

Additional information about Coaching Essentials is available at 1-800-993-1600, or at www.coaching.com and at www.kenblanchard.com.