How to Develop Emerging Leaders through Coaching: Introduction

A little more than two years ago, in an attempt to understand the issues faced by organizations with regards to developing emerging leaders, a colleague (Valerie Tremblay) and I ran a research initiative to gather insight on the context, trends and best practices in Leadership Development, Employee Learning and Professional Coaching. Thanks to the 110+ Canadian executives and professionals who answered our 13-question survey, and to the dozen of respondents who agreed to provide us with their qualitative feedback and professional viewpoints during individual follow-up interviews, the insight derived from our research was fascinating. So much so that our project – and accompanying whitepaper – was presented at two national conferences (CSTD 2014, HRPA 2015).  

One of the conclusions obtained from our survey and follow-up interviews highlighted the potential that coaching held as a practical approach for developing emerging leaders. In June 2016, we will once again have the opportunity to present our findings during the Institute for Performance and Learning annual symposium. For this conference, we want to expand our original presentation with the coaching best practices that we acquired during the last three years. Concretely, our goal is to share with the symposium participants the practical insights – our very own collection of “do’s and dont’s” – that we derived while coaching over 40+ emerging leaders working in 10+ organizations of different sizes and market focus.

During the next 6 weeks, I’ll be using our Blog (along with LinkedIn Pulse – which I’ve yet to figure out) to post some of these “best practices” related to leadership coaching. The important themes that we intend to cover are:

• Post #1: Onboarding the program participants (i.e.: emerging leaders)
• Post #2: Using assessments
• Post #3: Deriving the leadership development priorities
• Post #4: Establishing an optimal coaching approach and cadence
• Post #5: Maintaining an ongoing communication with the participants
• Post #6: Using learning tools and activities
• Post #7: Managing the participant motivation
• Post #8: Meeting the needs of HR/Management
• Post #9: Minimizing the program costs (and maximizing its value)
• Post #10: Summarizing and looking ahead (a conceptual Framework)

Aside from the self-imposed discipline of thinking and writing regularly, our goal with these ten posts is to collect enough feedback – either as comments through the blog itself or as direct email/phone conversations with our audience – such as to be able to produce a decent whitepaper in time for the June 2016 Symposium. Hopefully, this process of sharing our field-tested “do’s and don’t’s” and enhancing them with your feedback, will prove beneficial to us – coaches, L&D practitioners, and managers – who care deeply about developing better leaders.

If you have ideas to share or feedback to provide, please comment this post, contact me through our Blog, our website (www.crinq.com) or email me at: patrick@crinq.com.

Merci, in advance…

- Patrick