Coaching will particularly help you if you have specific issues, problems or skills that you want to address - goals that you want to achieve. These will normally be work related, but there is often a strong overlap between these and other non-work issues.
Your coach will work to support you to define your priority issue(s), help you to set some goals and assist you to set out some actions. They will do this by careful listening, skilful questioning and a range of other coaching techniques. Your coach will try to avoid giving you advice and will try to keep you focussed on your top issues. If you do not have any top, burning priorities - but want to talk around issues or get advice on, for example, specific technical matters, then coaching may not be so effective.
Coaching might be helpful at particular times in your career and is normally time limited to an agreed number of sessions. Coaches will usually be independent professional people, working outside your organisation, that make a charge for coaching sessions. They do not necessarily need to have any detailed knowledge of your work sector or context - so you could choose a coach with little healthcare experience if you wanted to. You might also choose someone with a strong background in this.
Some coaches offer telephone coaching and this can be effective and is often used as an add-on to face to face coaching. It doesn’t, of course, offer the face to face advantages of richer contact, and time away from the office!
Increasingly, coaching is now used to support development programmes and learning courses - so that participants receive coaching support in parallel with the primary programme and other inputs. This can be very effective, since it allows the coaching to support the development programme and can become a source of personal development that includes wider contextual elements but focuses on coaching and a coaching style.
The IHM offers an e-learning element on coaching, or you can find out more from:
http://www.coachingnetwork.org.uk/
