24 / 40
Coaching is releasing a person’s potential
to maximise their own performance.
It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them. Every coaching interaction
is different and indeed every coach’s approach is diverse.
What is coaching?
Gary Wyles, Managing Director, Festo Training & Consulting
I
t is easy to become immune to the
jargon that we use everyday in our
role in training and development. Just
because we’ve been speaking about
coaching for decades, we assume that the
industries in which we work and the
people we are talking to, have a similar
amount of knowledge.
In manufacturing and engineering, some
of the main sectors we operate in, this is
certainly not the case. Perhaps at senior
leadership levels in large corporations it
might be different. Here they would have
read about coaching, they could have
experienced coaching themselves, but in
smaller companies and in the middle and
first time management positions, there is
still confusion over coaching.
Yes, we can use the sporting analogy but
what that fires in people’s imagination, is
a manager and coach jumping up and
down on the side-lines and shouting
loudly and berating the players. That’s
about as far from the truth as you can get.
When Festo first decided to instil a
coaching culture throughout our
engineering organisation, it wasn’t
enough just to tell people what we were
doing. We had to first of all convince them
why the organisation needed to change
and why their behaviour needed to adapt.
In our situation, we had to find a way to
differentiate ourselves from the myriad of
other manufacturers who could offer