Talent Coaching

As corporate coaches and from an organisational perspective we have to support our clients by identifying the key competencies that define success as individuals progress through the key transition points in their journey from an individual contributor through to enterprise manager. We can powerfully align an individual’s performance rating with a potential rating to identify likely strengths and vulnerabilities in new roles.

Coaching high achievers or talent requires a finely tuned and challenging form of coaching. With talent you are frequently working with individuals who have high belief in their ability to be successful, are demanding, goals driven, totally committed, challenging and rewarding to work with. Coaching can be a key intervention to support their continued success, leadership development and business impact.

Coaching Talent: What Are The Potential Barriers and how to Overcome them?

Receptiveness to Feedback:

It is not unusual for talent and top executives to be sceptical about the need to accept feedback and to change behaviour. This resistance is often driven by their attitudes and belief in their own success and can show up in the following behaviours:

• High commitment yet with a reluctance to change
• Linking past behaviours to future success
• Tendency to over-commit
• Tendency to overrate personal performance

“Receptiveness to feedback” and hence performance and growth, increases when the talented executives get feedback from self-selected stakeholders or raters: people who they trust, respect and see as important to their future progress within the organisation.

As coaches we can  accelerate this process through the use of three key interventions:

• Talent Feedback Report
• Three Way Meetings
• Feedahead

Leadership Limitations:

Nothing is simple in the world of leadership development. Research from the Career Development Programme at Harvard Business School indicated that whilst leaders can be successful for very many different reasons, the ways in which leaders fail are quite limited.

Nine patterns tend to show up in executive coaching:

• Never being good enough
• Seeing the world in black and white
• Doing too much, pushing too hard
• Avoiding conflict at any cost
• Running roughshod over opposition
• Having fear in the drivers seat
• Not connecting emotionally
• Lacking a sense of boundaries
• Climbing the wrong ladder

Any of the Leadership Limitations can result in failure or block progress and advancement for talented executives: Specific programs need to be put in place which include Self Leadersship and Breakthrough, which can fundamentally address these areas. The Hogan Development Survey is designed to identify potential leadership derailers.

Moving Forward

The Coaching for Talent programme has a focus on developing sustainable leadership success and looks beyond competency alone to understand the factors that shape genuine leadership. Ideally take into account the four themes of: Credibility, Character, Career Management and Capability for a positive organisational impact.

Each of these themes plays out differently as the individual progresses. Diagram 1 illustrates some of the challenges that arise as the leader develops:

• Building greater credibility reassures stakeholders, who are typically peers and line management of leadership authority and legitimacy
• Developing character and shifting focus progressively from short term personal interests to longer term organisational stewardship
• Demonstrating increased career management maturity enables the individual to shift their career goals to reflect the new operating demands
• Increasing capability demonstrates the individual’s ability to take on new challenges which emerge as they progress through the organisation.

The Outcomes and Benefits

Supports the leader to discover a more authentic and integrated form of leadership. It addresses the key leadership development themes from a wide base. This coaching approach utilises a proven structure to deliver the identified behavioural changes and challenges the best to get even better.