Types of coaching
Coaching can be categorized according to the nature of the objectives pursued and whether it is individual or collective.
Coaching based on objectives pursued
Coaching can be focused on the person, on the team or on a situation.
Examples of coaching focused on a person or a team:
- Developing leadership
- Taking up duty
- Developing individual and / or collective interpersonal skills
- Team building development
- Stress management
Examples of coaching focused on a situation:
- Overcome interpersonal conflicts
- Overcome an occupational barrier or a temporary difficult situation
- Manage change, become fully actor of the situation
- Operational support to the implementation of a project
Individual or collective coaching
Individual coaching
Individual coaching supports persons focused on issues related to work and / or personal ones, is person- or situation-centered.
Examples of individual coaching in professional life:
- Stand back and clarify objectives
- Be proficient in a new position
- Develop adaptability to change
- Delegate
- Speak in public
- Prepare a negotiation, an interview, a decision
- Solve a problem
- Be better at managing time and priorities
- Manage conflict situations
- Cope with changes in culture, work organization, strategy, mergers
Examples of individual coaching as part of private life:
- Better understand one’s ways of communicating
- Improve relationships with those around
- Provide the means to assert oneself
- Manage stressful situations
- Developing one’s resources
- Learn to ask the "right questions"
- Have a balance professional life/ private life
Team coaching
Fundamentally different from individual coaching, team coaching aims at performance. However, it is no longer the individual who is the main concern, but the group with the objective of enabling people to work efficiently together.
Coaching a team means both considering individuals who compose it and knowing how to gather these individuals within a project or determined action, with a common goal.
Coaching's mission is to make these individuals function, and allow them to express their respective talents, in a one and single team: ensure cohesion, involve different personalities and make them coexist.
The most common approach is to involve the manager, who defines with the coach what the coaching objectives are. Intermediate meetings between the manager and the coach can be held between workouts with the team.
Examples of team coaching:
- Increase the cohesion of a team
- Clarify the objectives
- Develop the potential of the team (handle vigilance points of a team)
- Developing synergy
- Establish effective operating rules
- Manage a relationship problem between the emblematic figures of a group
- Reconciling hierarchical and transversal organization (cope with an internal change that transforms a hierarchical organization into a transversal one)
- Incorporate a change by adapting the way the team functions
Group coaching
Group coaching is halfway between the individual and team coaching. The techniques used are those of individual coaching, but aimed at developing collective solutions around common goals, that will be translated into individual action plans.
Group coaching tends to develop and is mostly practiced in the professional field, the coachees working in the same company.
Examples of group coaching.
The examples for group coaching are of the same type as for individual coaching. One can also add:
- Enhance the exchange of practice among peers
- Incorporate a change made across the organization into one’s personal practices
- Find solutions together to common managerial issues:
- Manage addictive behaviors, stress management, …
- Develop lines of conduct adapted to new and common problems: mixity and diversity, sustainable development, …