assessing the situation

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This stage is all about establishing a coachee's career aspirations and goals. However, many people have many different views and goals of what they want to achieve at work. As a coach it is up to you to help the coachees identify a realistic goal or career objective.

This can be fairly easy to establish, the hard thing to do is to assess what the coachee is capable of at the moment so that you can decide how to help them achieve their goals and objectives.

In order to do this there are a few things that you can do:

Learning to challenge

Sometimes it is appropriate to ask questions and challenge what coachees say because more often than not what they say might not be entirely true. However, it is extremely important that you do not do this in a subtle way so that the coachees do not become defensive. For instance, if the coachee says oe thing and you know that it is not true, do not just say it, ask questions that will allow the coachee to think and discover the truth for themselves.

Understanding the importance of goals

It is extremely difficult for most people to think about goals they want to accomplish in the future because so many unexpected things can happen. However, it is still important that you try and help a coachee think about where they want to be in six months or in a year. As a coach you need to help a coachee think of a goal that motivates or excites them.

Most people are motivated and excited about many different things such as:

• Power

  Some people want to have an influence over others or like to be highly regarded by others.

• Achievement

  Some people are motivated by the need to perform better, working under pressure or even just the thrill of accomplishing results.

• Affiliation

  Some people are motivated by the need to establish and retain close relationships either with colleagues or customers. They like to feel useful to other people and are motivated to be part of a social group.

Therefore, out of these broad categories which one would your coachee fall into?

Identifying a long term goal

To help your coachee establish a long term goal you need to pose certain questions such as - �What would you like to achieve in your career?, What sort of projects would you like to be involved with in the future, What would you like to happen that is not happening at present?� As a coach you need to ask coachees further questions that will entice some emotions.

By doing so it will make the goal more appealing and motivating to them. For instance, you could ask, �How would it feel if you achieved this goal?�

Once the coachee has thought about a long term goal it may be a good idea to summarise it and write it down so that you can both look back on it at a later date. It should be a sentence and it can be as long or as short as the coachee wants. For example, it could start off with the words, �By the end of next year I aim to be....�

Establishing a starting point

As a coach you now need to establish what skills or abilities will help your coachee reach their target goal. You need to start by again asking several questions like, �What do you feel that you are good at in your team?, What areas do you need to improve in?.

Although these questions are a good place to start the conversation the coachee might not think they have any strengths or weaknesses so you need to probe deeper and help the coachee identify areas of strength or weakness. You can do this by asking about the following skills that are important in the workplace:

• People skills

  This related to communication, presentation,persuasion or influence skills.

• Decision making skills

  This is related to the ability to analyse information, manipulate, calculate and make appropriate timely decisions.

• Areas of skill

  This is related to your area of expertise. For example technical IT skills, understanding of market or competitors.

• Personal attributes

  This is related to your personal traits, qualities, listening skills or even the ability to understand other people's motivations.

Therefore, you can ask coachees if they need to improve or not in these areas.

Thinking about the impact on others

In the previous sections you have helped the coachee to see how they perceive themselves but more importantly then this you need to help think about how other people perceive them. This is important because it is well known that the biggest barrier to success is other people's perception of us.

You need to ask coachees questions related to other people that they work with such as their boss, colleagues, customers etc. By doing so it will let them see if people have the correct perception or not.

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