ManagingProgrammers.com
"Wouldn't You Rather Work With Someone Who Gets It?"
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We're The Best Coaches For You
ManagingProgrammers.com is unique in the coaching world because we know the world of software development intimately and understand how programmers and development managers think. Bruce Taylor has a background of over thirty years in the software industry, and has written extensively about the different tools and techniques that are appropriate for coaching programmers. You can browse Bruce's book Working Among Programmers: A Field Guide to the Software World, or listen to his seminar on coaching programmers. If you're ready to give your managers the benefits of professional coaching, contact us to talk about your needs and how we can help you meet them.
What is Coaching?
Coaches help people identify get past the blocks that keep them from reaching their goals. Here are some of the things that coaches do:
- help to clarify to goals and make sure that they achievable
- help make a realistic plan for reaching the goals
- help the client carry out the plan, setting and checking interim goals
- provide support, encouragement, and reality checks as needed
Of course, there is more to coaching than that - a good coach has been professionally trained and has a large repertoire of techniques for helping clients move forward. For a better idea of how coaching works, read this short example of a coaching session. And to find out more about how coaching benefits the organization, read this article published in the Harvard Business Review.
Coaching vs Training
You may have turned to training to help your managers, and it may have be beneficial, but training suffers from some predictable shortcomings:
- training classes rely on artificial simulations, rather than realistic problems
- the benefits of training start to fade after 36 hours unless they are systematically reinforced
Our coaching relies on a completely different model than training:
- the managers themselves identify what they need to work on
- the managers practice on real life situation
- the coach holds the managers accountable for making progress
- the managers actually learn to change their behavior
- the managers learn how to coach their own staffs
There is no real contradiction between coaching and training, and in some situations a combination of the two is the best way to retrain your managers.
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“However, after trainees underwent one-on-one executive coaching, archival data were collected indicating that training alone increased productivity by 22.4 percent. Most importantly, training, when augmented with coaching, yielded productivity increases almost four times the level achieved by training alone (88.0 percent).” |