Why your organisation needs coaching skills right now

The pandemic has taken its toll on everyone; forcing unwanted change, exposing vulnerabilities and demanding high levels of flexibility and agility, resilience and resourcefulness that can be hard to maintain. The past months have been an extraordinary test of mettle, particularly for corporate and other organisational leaders and managers. It’s not easy to elicit peak performance from stressed people and to the hold space for your entire team during a globally anxious time. Supervisors, managers and leaders with well-developed coaching skills are better equipped to weather these unprecedented pressures and guide their teams more successfully through the ongoing crisis.

Nicky Wilson-Harris, coach supervisor educator at Sacap

“What people don’t often realise about coach education is that you don’t just learn how to help others do their best; you are personally transformed by the skills you learn,” says Nicky Wilson-Harris, a master practitioner in leadership development and a coach supervisor educator at Sacap (the South African College of Applied Psychology). “Learning how to coach others and practising coaching in your workplace results in significant personal growth and leadership development. This is a challenging and complex time to be a manager or team leader, and you need higher levels of skills if you are going to be able to provoke performance, unlock potential and sustain engagement. Right now, many are flagging as the pandemic drags on, and we’re in need of an invigorating shift that brings new energy and purpose into our daily work.”

This was the experience of a team of 20 leaders from the University of the Western Cape (UWC) who pivoted to online learning and recently completed Sacap’s internationally-accredited short course, Coaching in the Workplace. Sacap, a long-standing specialist in coach education, has a robust online education platform with cutting-edge edtech tools and a highly trained faculty at its online campus. The 12-week course consisting of interactive webinars, breakaway sessions and individual mentored coaching meetings was a rich learning journey into personal mastery for the participants.

Wilson-Harris says: “The course creates the space for teams to explore new ways of being and to build relationships, which are the most important things we can do this year. In the process of adapting to a new reality, there’s the opportunity to consider proven capacity; identify the strengths we have and the new ways of being that will support our ability to craft a unique response. Alongside developing essential capabilities such as active listening, participants learn how to shift attention to the quality of relationship and adjust the tone and frequency of conversation. This has an immediate effect on person-to-person engagement during a time when our orientation is social distancing. Working in this way, managers and leaders can activate performance at a time when teams and individuals feel isolated and vulnerable.”

You can join Nicky Wilson-Harris for Sacap’s upcoming webinar Unlocking potential. Provoking performance in the workplace where she will be discussing the impact of coaching in the workplace with a panel of coaching alumni. Find out how coaching helps managers navigate disruption, complexity and ever-changing workplace dynamics.

Date: 27 August 2020
Time: 12pm–1pm
Registration is free at https://zoom.us/webinar/register/5715960487279/WN_aIRfgFw9TT6z2_uPrhXlzg

Managers and leaders with three or more years of work experience can apply to join Sacap’s next online Coaching in the Workplace course, which runs from 14 September to 4 December 2020. Registration closes on 4 September 2020.

Coaching in the Workplace courses are also available to corporate, NGO and institutional teams with a minimum of 15 members.

International accreditation - Participants completing Sacap’s short online Coaching in the Workplace gain 30 hours of International Coaching Federation (ICF) Accredited Coach Specific Training (ACSTH) hours that can count towards the minimum number of coach training hours needed to become accredited by the ICF as an associate certified coach.