Toni Addinall is a highly experienced management and leadership facilitator, who has developed and delivered leadership programmes from supervisor to executive level.
Here she explains a little more about her role with OTD Quality Apprenticeships and why coaching is key to producing capable leaders …
At what point in a professional sports person’s career would you expect them to seek a coach?
Perhaps before they turned professional or in the build-up to a grand slam or Olympic gold medal attempt?
The answer may be obvious to us in a sporting sense but in business it is more often the case that leaders do not get offered or seek out the guidance of a coach, until they are in a senior position.
I remember securing my first line manager position. I inherited a team, a computer and was given a set of processes to manage, but I wasn’t given any training.
I learnt as I went along, afraid to make mistakes in case my line manager thought I wasn’t capable of doing the job.
At that point, even if it had occurred to me to ask for training, I wouldn’t have known what to ask for.
It is for this reason that coaching is an incredibly powerful part of an apprenticeship programme.
The apprenticeship itself details very clearly the knowledge, skills and behaviours that the apprentice will be developing over the course of the programme.
What I do is relatively simple – I listen and I ask a lot of questions. As one of my learners put it: ‘you really make me expand my thought process’.
I also approach each coaching session with intense curiosity. If I can understand what challenges learners are facing, I can provide guidance to support them and enable them to consider how what they have learnt can help them overcome a difficult situation in the future.
I asked one of my learners how my support adds value to the guidance they receive from their line manager. She described how she seeks answers and direction from her line manager when making operational decisions; I help her to think.
After all, whether you’re in a boardroom or serving for a grand slam title, you need to be equipped with the skills to navigate your own way through.
Perhaps the most critical part of my role is to build confidence in my learners, so that they believe what they are doing is achievable. Apprenticeships aren’t easy, they are designed to be completed alongside an already busy and demanding day job and there is a lot of work that needs to be done, especially in terms of producing assignments. I can help them to visualise what’s possible.
The power of coaching has allowed me to see a group of first-time managers blossom into confident and capable ‘people leaders’; the type of leader I would have loved to have been when I first started out as a manager all those years ago.