Technique 6.5: Coaching for Success

Coaching is the way we bake KCS into our organizations: it is the opportunity to make KCS personal. Coaching sessions provide knowledge workers with visibility to their impact, addresses their questions, misconceptions, and objections, and helps them put KCS training into practice in a way that creates value for them, the requestor, and the organization. Coaching for Success is a also KCS Core Concept.

Coaching is a good investment. Coaching skills have long term benefits for the organization well beyond KCS. A recent survey of 100 executives, conducted by Manchester Inc. found that coaching provided an average ROI of almost six times the cost of coaching.

There is a push for more coaching in today’s work world which is based on the results of research studies.  Organizations are not only hiring coaches to coach their executives, but they are making the investment to develop coaching skills in their supervisors and managers in order to realize various benefits including:

• More productive and motivated work groups
• More consistent, replicable bottom-line results
• A work environment characterized by flexibility, innovation, and loyalty

-Get Fit For Coaching

A coach's focus is on evolving an individual's KCS skills, then shifts to developing team capabilities. Although organizations recognize the need for training, they often overlook the need for coaching. An investment in training becomes largely wasted without the follow-up provided by a coach's on-the-job reinforcement and support. This is especially true with KCS, which requires knowledge workers to develop and foster a set of new work habits, not just skills. An effective coaching program will shorten adoption time. 

Note: the intent of coaching is to develop individual habits of proficiency and team performance, not simply to ensure the correctness of KCS article content. The quality of content is promoted through the development of individual proficiencies.

Coaching for the knowledge worker is only effective if the knowledge worker wants to learn KCS. It is leadership's job to create demand on the part of the knowledge workers to learn KCS.  The job of the coaches is to satisfy that demand.

The coach must have a profound knowledge of the KCS Practices as well as strong communication and influence skills. It is most effective to have coaches be part-time KCS Coaches and part-time in the role of the peers they are coaching. A good rule of thumb is for coaches to split their time equally between handling requests and KCS coaching. More details on the role of the KCS Coach.

The benefits realized by the organization are directly proportional to the time invested in coaching.