It's never too late to learn coaching skills

It will soon be a year since I retired from my old law firm. You will recall that I had spent my entire career there, so I will not deceive you by pretending that the move to consulting with my sole colleague, Jacques Rouselle (my dog), has been without personal difficulty along the way. After a lifetime in one business, there have been some big changes on a number of levels.

However, I have now got to a point where I am enjoying a sense of stability. I’m generating enough work to feel financially secure, which is allowing me to actually enjoy the days when I’m not working. At the risk of sounding smug, I am enjoying life.

On a personal level, one of the most valuable things I have done over the past 12 months was to enrol at Henley Business School for its Professional Certificate in Coaching. I reasoned that, if I was to sell my accumulated knowledge and experience in leading a law firm, I ought to make sure that my coaching and mentoring competencies were up to scratch.

I approached the course with a degree of cynicism. It wasn’t like the ‘serious’ learning we all used to undertake to pass the old-style law exams, but it wins as a leadership style.

Over the years I have been told that I display reasonable emotional intelligence and self awareness (but not by my wife and children). However, living a full-on professional life never really left me a huge amount of time for self-development derived from reflective thinking.

It’s obvious really, but how can you hope to get others to understand themselves in order to realise their potential unless, in the coaching role, you have the ability to really understand your own thinking? I was both practical and pragmatic as a leader, always willing to lead from the front with my sleeves rolled up, but oh how I wish that I had invested some time in this particular piece of self-development at a much earlier point in my career.

In my last blog post, I poked fun at ‘cereal packet leadership’. In his analysis of six core leadership styles, Daniel Goleman noted that the coaching style is the least used, but is the one that is capable of transformational change within organisations.

The retention of really bright, talented people and the realisation of their potential is a fundamental requirement in building sustainable competitive advantage and demands the development of a coaching culture.