related case studies

Training planning & evaluation Fifth discipline training

For many firms, coaching -- the act of having a more experienced person work with one who is less experienced -- has become a significant method for providing valuable point-of-need ongoing training. In this project, twelve persons familiar with the coaching approach generated 100 statements that describe the characteristics a good coach should have. The map divided coaching issues into four broad areas: personal qualities of the coach; interpersonal skills; the individual being coached; and, the process of developing people. These four were further divided into ten subareas.

Figure 1. Concept map describing the characteristics of a good coach.

The areas seen as most important for a good coach were "Concern for the Individual" and "Integrity and Communication." The problem is, how do you train for those things? The developers thought that the best way to do so was to develop scenarios that illustrate how a coach should perform in real-life situations. But scenario development is a tricky business, and concocting realistic scenarios is often difficult for a development team to do. The development team decided to use the concept map as a creative catalyst to help develop these scenarios. For instance, the map helped identify the most important clusters -- areas a coach must perform best in.

Figure 2. Schematic describing how the statements in a cluster can act as a catalyst for developing realistic scenarios for training.

One of the most important sets of characteristics has to do with integrity and communication. How do you develop scenarios for this skill set? The developers had experienced coaches in the firm look at the statements in the cluster and "describe a work situation in our company in which an individual in a supervisory role exhibited superior skill in their communication with you or with others." This task was considerably easier for the coaches to address than asking them to develop scenarios addressing issues of integrity and communication.