coach-led development centres

Who represents the key talent in your organisation?

Where do they see themselves in the future?

What do they need to do to get there?

It has never been so important for organisations to nurture the actual and potential talent of individuals and to maximise the value of their contributions. Our Development Centres help clients to identify where that talent lies and how individuals’ particular strengths can be further mobilised. Centres focus individuals’ attention on how best they can apply their strengths, align their values and grow their capabilities to benefit themselves and their organisation.

The focus is positive and very much on the individual. We help each person to reflect thoroughly on their strengths and how to refine them, apply them and role model them to best effect. Development priorities are not ignored, but the emphasis is very much on what people can do well. Only if there are aspects of style which could be detrimental to performance, are these recognised and technique improvements or compensating strategies identified.

Each participant works closely with a single coach throughout the process, so they can feel supported by someone who has been able to genuinely get to know them, their style, context and aspirations. Crucially, the coach also helps candidates understand their core values, as often-overlooked enablers or barriers to motivation, development and achievement.

A typical Development Centre includes coaching discussions about participants’ specific priorities and challenges. To gain an objective perspective about their capabilities, participants also take part in simulations based on organisational challenges. Observations and feedback are followed by plenty of reflection to translate observations into tangible principles for going forward. The process of enhancing participants’ self-knowledge is further reinforced by personality profiling to help them to understand where their strengths and barriers fundamentally come from.

In essence, our Centres develop participants’:

• Self-knowledge
• Ability to self-reflect and to learn from experiences
• Readiness to make links between their personal strengths, style preferences and their impact on outcomes
• Awareness of organisational competencies, espoused culture, values or ethos, and how they can best use their strengths to align themselves to these
• Motivation to learn and to progress within the organisation

Development Centres are also a great way of starting development programmes, particularly leadership programmes. They can either inform the content of programmes or give participants the ability to identify aspects of existing programmes which will be of most benefit to them.

Before...

• Consultation and clarification about function and intended outcomes of the Centres
• Consultation about organisational imperatives that need to be represented in the Centres
• Identification and design of simulations which are most closely reminiscent of actual situations and challenges, in close consultation with clients.
• On-line administration of leading personality profiling questionnaire. Our BPS level B qualified Business Psychologists select from a range of professionally approved questionnaires which give high levels of detail and which are directly relevant to performance at work and identified competencies.
• Joining instructions to participants to include the links between the Development Centres and organisational imperatives

...During...

• Coached discussions
• Interactive simulations
• Coach and peer feedback
• Personality profile feedback
• In-depth final feedback summary and reflection session with the coach to collaborate on action plans and individual summary report

...and After

• Feedback report to participants
• Summaries to client in the format appropriate to the agreed function of the Centres

assesment centres coach led development centres competency frameworks psychometric profilingrecruitment audit