Case Study
"Train the Trainer" - or "Inspirational Coaching"
One of our core beliefs is that "doing is believing", and that's why we incorporate so much experiential learning into all of our training programmes, outdoors and indoors.
We were asked, by one of the world's largest companies, to deliver their "train the trainer" programme to graduates who had been in the business for a year, and were about to be given the responsibility of developing the new graduate intake. This is a huge responsibility, and one we, and our clients, take very seriously.
In addition to introducing some of the best and most useful coaching models and systems, we gave them many opportunities to practise coaching each other in tough situations, and then helped to translate these experiences back into the workplace.
Coaching a bobsleigh team was just part of it...
Further Information
One of the main challenges for this group is that they themselves, still relatively inexperienced, are being put in a position to coach and develop other people. This has great advantages, not least being able to empathise with the new graduates entering the business, but there are potential difficulties as well. To give hands-on experience of what this would be like, we created coaching sessions where the coach had very little information on how a task needed to be done; they therefore had to rely very heavily on non-directive coaching to help their people develop.
Some of the ways in which we did this were:
- Giving some of them a brief insight into speeding down a bobsleigh training track, and then getting them to coach others and improve their times; and
- Training some to perform a "high ropes rescue" of a stranded individual, and then asking them to coach someone else to rescue a real person dangling from the trees.
As we took the group through many, many more exercises, we consistently focused on coaching them to coach, to help them coach others back in the workplace.
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