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The Helicopter View – A Developmental Coaching Approach

News views and events from Leadenhall

The Helicopter View – A Developmental Coaching Approach

by Chris Woodman

 

Nancy Kline talked about Time to Think.  In the modern, fast moving, information overloaded environment, it can be very difficult to find time to step back, take a breath and think about where you have been, where you are now and, importantly, where you are going next.  We are calling it the helicopter view.

Over ten years ago, long before we had heard of Covid, we developed a coaching service called the Leadership Development Review with one of our most valued clients.  Around a hundred or so leaders undertook the review, and the feedback and results were incredibly strong.

The principles and the concepts behind the process were very simple.   Take a leader and ask them to complete a personality profile (Hogan), undertake the company’s 360 tool and work with a coach to really understand the feedback and the developmental implications and consider what might be helpful going forward.  The coaches and the leaders really dug deep in the coaching sessions.  The leader would then share what they had learned from the process (insights, observations and learnings) with their manager and then present the proposed development plan and then jointly agree the proposed actions and next steps.  The development was owned by the leader and supported by the company.

In the pre-Covid world, all this work was undertaken in person, involved multiple meetings, and took several months.  It was highly valued, relatively expensive and therefore reserved for senior executives.

Fast forward to 2024, and we decided to revisit and redevelop this approach using our platform Coaching on Demand, to enable more people to step back, take that helicopter view of where they have been, where they are now and where they might need to go next.  Our goal is to make the process affordable, simple and effective.

A short introduction to Coaching on Demand.  We developed this coaching platform in 2019 and it was launched commercially in April 2020.  It will be five years old later this year – it is a well-tested, easy to use platform.  We have been enhancing it’s capability over the years and it has three valuable additional functions – manager guidance, a 360 tool called Insights and a link to order an Everything DiSC personality profile.

This has enabled us to democratise (but not commoditise) our original development review process which is no longer confined to leaders but any employee that wishes to step back and review their progress and invest time in building a development plan.  It consists of the following:

  • Three one-hour coaching sessions with an experienced Leadenhall coach
  • 360 degree feedback via tool on Coaching on Demand (feedback explored in the coaching sessions)
  • A personality profile, Everything DiSC, results of which are explored in the coaching
  • Optional manager guidance
  • Completion of a simple Development Plan for review with manager.

If this approach to development coaching is of interest to you, please drop us a line at enquiries@leadenhallconsulting.com

 

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