We have long known as a society that top-level coaching can have significant impacts on individual and team performance. We need look no further than elite athletics and championship teams, whether in the amateur or professional ranks. The right coaching matters. As does targeted competency development – a forward is not expected to work on their weaknesses at the goalie position.
Many organizations have also come to the same conclusion regarding the value of coaching for their employees – to the tune of US$15B invested in coaching/year in the USA alone in 2020.
According to a recent Randstad study, while 50% of companies rely on direct managers to coach their employees, employees report that their #1 reason for not availing of the opportunity is not being comfortable sharing openly with a coach or mentor who works where they do.
The potential benefits to corporations of hiring external coaches for their employees can include improved employee performance and productivity, improved leadership skills, increased employee retention and engagement, better communication, and collaboration within and across teams, as well as more innovation and creativity, both individually and collectively. Some even cite improvements in organizational culture. These are tangible changes that can affect your organization’s top and bottom lines.
It’s no wonder, as Randstad’s study confirmed, nearly everyone sees coaching as valuable.
But how can you ensure your employees can find the type of coaching best for them individually, as well as ensuring they can maximize their contributions to your organization’s growth, innovation, and strategy? Should that coaching focus on helping them identify and overcome their weaknesses? What if it were also about identifying and capitalizing on their strengths? What if it could help you identify and overcome your organizations strategic vulnerabilities?
When your employees sign up to The Hive to find a coach and complete a profile, our proprietary matching algorithm will identify coaches who might be a good fit for each employee based on their individual profiles. No other platform offers that.
At The Hive we go a step further in ensuring your employees get the coaching that helps them, and your organization, to realize their potential. In partnership with Human-Insight, our Strategic Diversity Analytics and Individual Competencies Profile Reports and team debriefs helps organizations to:
- Identify the right people for the right roles and teams to maximize their contributions to organizational growth, innovation, and strategy
- Identify and overcome strategic vulnerabilities
- Ensure you hire the right people
- Successfully navigate change at scale
- Create sustainable long-term value for your organization
Strategic Diversity Analytics
Strategic Diversity Analytics, powered by our strategic partnership with Human-Insight, provides valuable insights at two levels:
- Individual Strategic Contribution Assessments (ISCAs): provides key insights for individual leadership development (self-image and 360 assessments). Each person would do a self-assessment and ask five of their colleagues to provide feedback. Both the Self-Assessment and feedback assessments use the same instrument
- Strategic Diversity Analytics (SDA) Workshops: offers deeper understanding of the dynamics of working together in teams and within an organization. The self-assessments of the cohort participants are plotted in the same cube as part of a guided workshop attended by all members of the cohort.
An ISCA is required for each member of a cohort of 5 to 8 people. SDA Workshops are attended by all members of a cohort. There is one main SDA workshop per cohort with shorter individual sessions.
Individual Strategic Contribution Assessments (ISCAs)
Our ability to maximize our contributions requires we be in the right role for our strengths. We can help your employees identify theirs through our Individual Strategic Contribution Assessment (ISCA). An ISCA assesses people on three dimensions:
- Attachment: are we more relationship-oriented or content-oriented?
- Exploration: are we more exploratory or control and optimizing focused?
- Managing Complexity: are we more of a specialist or more big-picture/generalist?
The ISCA report is accompanied by a Competencies Profile Report; there are thirty-eight different competencies that apply in every workplace. How exactly these competencies manifest will be different for each of us. This report provides insights into how they manifest for an individual profile.
Together they provide insight into our natural preferences for contributing to an organizations growth, innovation, and strategy.
Strategic Diversity Analytics (SDA) Workshops
A strategic Diversity Workshop is designed to help each team understand it’s current strategic makeup to identify its strategic strengths and strategic vulnerabilities in the context of your organization’s growth, innovation, and strategic needs. The team will gain insights on how they can optimize their capacity to successfully design products, services, and programs that will meet the needs of your customers. They will also learn more about their capacity to deliver those products, services, and programs on time and with attention to quality and efficiency. Last, the team will gain an understanding of their agility to manage disruption and uncertainty, along with their strategic vulnerabilities.
Strategic Diversity Analytics help teams perform better by providing insights into:
- Individual natural preference in contributing to performance
- The dynamics between different team members
- Team characteristics based on individual contributions and dynamics.
- Connecting team characteristics and the strategic objectives of the team.
Knowing their strategic vulnerabilities will enable them to identify what may be needed from other areas of the organization or the need to conduct strategic hires and/or contract temporary consulting services.
Targeted Coaching and Competency Development
Coaching and competency development have become major foci of investments over the past couple of decades as more organizations have come to understand the costs and risks associated with losing talented people to the competition. We’ll also talk more about this in our upcoming series on #HowWeWork.
The results of the ISCAs and SDA Workshops provide the context for best determining which type of coaching and competencies can contribute specifically to your current and near-future needs.
ISCAs provide employees with the insights they need to make informed decisions on where they can best contribute to organizational growth, innovation, and strategy. The accompanying competency profiles, when combined with organizational context, inform decisions to build personal and professional development learning pathways.
Along with each ISCA and Competency Profile reports, we provide a My Competencies Profile Workbook to help employees identify their current competencies and make plans for the ones they want to further enhance or start developing to maximize their contributions to your organization’s growth, innovation, and strategy. This will enable them to make better choices for targeted investments in their coaching and competency development.
The SDA workshops provide additional context to ISCAs, as they enables teams, and team-of-teams within organizations to coordinate and plan investments in coaching and competency that are strategically driven.
Getting Started
To get started on maximizing the potential of your people and your organization, contact Jason Beres to get your team onto The Hive, and Larry Cooper to learn more about Strategic Diversity Analytics.
About The Hive Professional Network
At The Hive, we are committed to providing people and organizations with the insights, coaching, and mentoring they need to become who they are meant to be so they can realize their true potential in work and in life. To do this we are building an ecosystem for coaches and those seeking coaches to find their perfect match through our proprietary matching algorithm, unique platform, and strategic partnerships.
Find your Hive
Are you a Coach? Join The Hive and get set to take your coaching business to a whole new level in 2023 and beyond.
Are you looking for a Coach? Join The Hive to find a Coach to help you reach personal and professional objectives.
Author
Larry Cooper is the Chief Strategy Officer and A/CTO at The Hive Professional Network.
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