Musings of a Coach and Facilitator

It is now 2021, and 2020 has gone and passed in a flash. What year it has been for my coaching business. The major and “forced” change is that most professionals (unless in essential businesses) had to work from home. For many years I have always had the mindset that coaching and most training is most effective when conducted face-to-face. Options like video-conferencing and tele-conferencing just don’t allow for that "personal touch" specific to coach. Now all of my coaching and training (even team development programs) has to be conducted virtually. At first it was my bias-ness, but now I realise that there are some training organisers and leaders who are looking for training (and coaching) who have also not embraced the virtual approach in the area of leadership and team development.

Let me muse over this theme by sharing some of my experiences in running my coaching programs and also Webinar-training programs over the past year.

Coaching

One of the key characteristics of coaching is that it is very personal, tailored, relational and needs a very strong foundation of trust. When COVID struck, the need for social distancing imposed a critical change in how coaching could be conducted. Fortunately, for me, I already have coaching-clients who had been with me for a period of time and the progression to using a virtual platform for coaching wasn’t too much of a transition (at least for my clients, as it’s the coach who needs to find ways to continue to ensure all the essential elements of coaching are still in place and that coaching continues to be effective). The key challenge was more for those who are planning to start or explore a working with a coach.

However, I was very impressed that those who were serious about coaching, did not seem to let the virtual platform discourage them. I believe that this is also largely because most of my clients (new and existing) are from referrals.

So now coaching is done on Zoom and all is well, right?.... Wrong! There are other challenges. My experiences were that different corporate clients are only able to use the virtual platform that their own corporate issued laptops are allowed on. So that means the additional adjustments and learning for me to have to familiarise with the use of other virtual platforms (screen sharing, virtual background, etc).

Besides the different virtual platforms, the quality of wi-fi connection from home or from the client (who is working from home) is often not consistent and there is often the fear of not being able to “hear” or ‘be heard’, to “breaking up” and or being thrown out of the meeting. All these add to the challenge of virtual coaching.

Webinar and Facilitation for training

With the onset of Covid, my team and I had to literally overnight “transcribe” all our programs to virtual webinars. The questions we looked into was about what would be the ideal duration of a webinar. Do our participants have the “mental stamina” to endure a half-day program or full-day program? How do we ensure that we maintain activities that facilitates active learning and also activities to keep the participants engaged.

These and the challenges of weak Wi-fi connections were new variables that we had to learn to manage and find solutions to. Despite this, we ran numerous webinar programs (many thanks to our loyal and supportive client-partners) and have developed new skills, program design, activities and processes that ensured that we now are effective on the new “virtual”platform. To my own surprise, our program development had progressed to a level that even had clients embracing “virtual team-building” programs for their senior leaders and managers and found the programs to be just as effective. These programs generated further awareness of needs for individual interpretation, team-analysis and change planning.

Summary

Now, at the start of 2021, we are not able to foresee what the following months will bring, but with the learning pains and the long hours of preparing for change to a virtual platform, we have broadened our capabilities and increased the number of webinar programs that we previously would not have developed as a result of being busy with the “then” normal everyday business of work.

In my view, there are more challenges to come, however we are now ready to be effective on both face-to-face and virtual platforms! On reflection, I realised that while we have coached, trained leaders and teams in the areas of change, resilience and adaptability, we now had to walk the talk, and I am glad we did! We truly learnt a lot as adapting to the virtual platform was a very steep learning curve for us.

It’s now about keeping our eyes open to what 2021 brings! We wish all our clients, partners and readers a Safe and Wonderful New Year of 2021!