Coaching for professional development

"Who exactly seeks out a coach? Winners who want even more out of life." Chicago Tribune

There are three reasons why coaching is a great approach to professional development for both individuals and organisations.

1. Individuals can develop holistically and improve their performance using a coaching approach
2. Coaching enhances the impact of learning
3. Coaching makes financial sense by providing a great return on investment

Being a health informatics professional is more than simply ensuring your skills and knowledge are up to date. The UK Council for Health Informatics Professions (UKCHIP) says professionalism is also about applying the right perspective and professional behaviours as well as demonstrating responsibility and leadership within your specific field and in the wider informatics community. Traditional courses are great in covering the technical skills needed to be an informatics professional however, they do not typically address the way we confront our issues, achieve our goals or how we demonstrate leadership in our work. It is in these areas where coaching adds real value to an individual to enable them to grow holistically.

According to the International Coach Federation coaching can benefit an individual by improving their communication model and their understanding of others. It can enable people make better and more effective decision making, develop clearer visions or specific goals, generate increased flexibility and an ability to view problems from new perspectives to find better solutions. Additionally, coaching stops procrastination, addresses stress, low self-esteem or lack of confidence, problems in communicating and performance issues.

Importantly, coaching makes financial sense. Coaching gives a return on investment of at least 5.7 times the outlay¹ and when used to augment traditional training, the improvements in productivity are four times greater². At an organisational level, coaching is a valuable approach in developing a learning culture. According to The Harvard Business School over a ten year period companies that intentionally used coaching outperformed organisations that did not³.

I believe coaching to be ‘the art of facilitating the learning, development and performance of another’. It is about supporting the reflective learner and their journey of self discovery. Mentoring on the other hand is about directing someone’s learning from the viewpoint or model of the mentor.

In contrast to mentoring, coaching is more structured and focussed on helping an individual firstly define a specific agenda and then within it, clear development areas or issues to be addressed. The coach will then enable the client to be solution-focussed in their thinking to achieve personal and organisation goals within their agenda.

Every coach has their own unique style. Underpinning my professional approach are a variety of influences. These include the 'GROW model' developed by Sir John Whitmore author of Coaching for Performance, the thinking framework developed by the GoMAD Thinking organisation, the Language and Behaviour (LAB) profile and conversational approach used by Shelle Rose Charvet, neuro-linguistic programming and a variety of 'Thinking Tools'.

The types of developmental outcomes I have seen from my own experience in coaching within the health informatics sector include:

• Removing self doubt and installing new approaches to handling and communicating with other people to get better results
• Developing more effective thinking to create stronger foundation for change by generating a wider array of a possibilities and options for planning
• Breaking through assumptions and stopping procrastination to cut through to the root cause of a problem, enabling action to be take
• Moving work out of a stuck state by changing perspectives and by understanding relationships between work to align them and develop specific and meaningful targets
• Describing complex situations clearly and transparently that make sense to enable effective decision making
• Motivate individuals by aligning individual development with organisational goals

Although coaching is not a new concept within health informatics it is not as widely used as would be expected. However, the current financial and other pressures of the environment the health and wider economy finds itself within shout-out for a different approach to developing the workforce. Applying the same approaches will yield the same old results. This cannot be an option. Coaching offers a proven approach to develop people, organisations and solution-focussed thinking to bring about cost-effective performance improvements. The stage is set for Coaching to really make a difference in health informatics, if the opportunity is grabbed by individuals and organisations now.

¹ “Maximizing the impact of executive coaching: behavioral change, organizational outcomes, and return on investment,” The Manchester Review, 2001, 6, pp. 3-11. 25 Sheila Kampa-Kokesch and Mary Anderson, 2001

² Executive coaching as a transfer of training tool:

effects on productivity in a public agency.; Public Personnel Management; 12-22-1997

; Olivero, Gerald; Bane, K.

Denise; Kopelman, Richard E.;

³ Corporate Culture & Performance; Free Press; John P. Kotter & James L. Heskett, 1992