Executive Coaching

Some challenges require us to look deeper than the visible events. Coaching offers us the best method to look more deeply.

Skillbiz participates in the ARGroup Executive Coaching & Business Mentoring network, the largest and highest calibre business mentoring & executive coaching network, with business mentors and executive coaches located in Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Brisbane & Perth in Australia and Asia.

If an issue(s) was easy to fix, people would have done so on their own - immediately. People use coaching to:

• Make sense of their feelings (such as anger, feeling lost, frustrated, bored, fearful, or lonely).
• Seek another person’s perspective.
• Make a big decision when at the crossroads.
• Stop ruining or undermining their own life from their bad habits.
• Help resolve a difficult relationship.

In a work sense this can include negotiating and influencing, personal anxiety, career development, goal setting and decision-making, depression and loneliness, work and family balance.

Conventional training is scripted before you arrive. Coaching follows the issues that arise moment to moment. Managers find our coaching valuable because:

• Leaders need to learn on the job - for three reasons:
• coaching is a higher quality learning methodology
• they may have an ample theoretical base (e.g. an MBA), hence more classroom learning is not required
• managers can’t afford days and days away from production.
• Leaders needs are individual and personal - training courses are time and cost expensive, broad in focus, and too infrequent to meet this need. Sometimes the learning needs to be secure and confidential, for personal and legal reasons, so group forums are not appropriate.
• Expectations of leaders grow - so they need help to stretch
• Leaders face constant change - they are always being challenged by events. Seniority can itself isolate people. Its not always possible to be open and candid with others in the company, or even outside the company or with family. This is especially true for Expats.
• Leaders need to develop their relational skills, most commonly those who have been promoted from senior technical roles.

The structure of coaching can be:

Short term - to help you work around a specific challenge that you are facing. So, you might request 1, 2 or 3 meetings of one hour duration each, and that’s all, and/or

Long term - as a dialogue partner to help strategise your business, the team around you and your own development. So, you might request meetings of 2-3 hours duration, every one or two months for a year,

SkillBiz methods include 1-1 and team learning methods, such as:

• Active Listening: we ask questions about the business context; goals and expectations; the person or their team; their challenges and opportunities; lifestyle management.
• Experiential exercises such as mental rehearsals, scenario creation and assessment, relaxation and stress management, role play and simulation, and other techniques drawn from sport psychology and psychodrama.
• We help create achievable action plans and help process your successes and setbacks

How we meet is up to you as well: face to face, telephone, email, and a combination of each. When we talk, we can decide what is best.

Read our Case studies.

The whale is my metaphor for a career journey - migrating to warmer waters, occasionally sounding deep, at other times breaking the surface, moving purposefully.

One of the most common career problem corporate managers have is that they are successful. Once successful, it is difficult to change or see a new perspective. ‘I don’t know what else I could do?’ is a common comment.

Career development helps you explore new options and overcome your anxiety in doing so. It helps you find your own compass deep inside, and give expression to it, opening up choices for your life.

This can be done with counselling discussions which may include the use of career development tools.

Usually 3 appointments is a minimum to give the direction you need to keep swimming on your own.

We use a 4 step process:

1. Find a career focus: identify career fields and alternatives. This includes:
• reflection activities on your work history to date, personal values and interests
• occupational questionnaires and personality assessments (if desired) to discover the types of work that “people like you” often enjoy.
2. Research the job market and set your goals: identify the jobs, companies and industries that you want to pursue
3. Create a career plan: make a list of actions that will help you get the job, and build the career you want
4. Implement the plan: undertake your study, build your network, apply for jobs, practice your interviewing, build your resume

These steps can be done sometimes quickly, sometimes over months, depending on the readiness of the person.

Read our Case studies.