COACHING | Leadership Coaching Programmes

What the client wanted

Supporting Academee, a leading learning solutions consultancy, Impromptu has provided the role-play content for a series of coaching workshops across the client organisation – a multi-national pharmaceutical company. These workshops have been aimed at further development of coaching skills in senior leaders who already have experience and expertise with coaching. The longer term aim for the client is to embed coaching in the organisation and these workshops are seen as a key component of achieving that aspiration.

The brief to Impromptu has been to provide role-players who have the necessary capability to portray plausible senior managers in the client organisation and to write detailed, client specific role-play scenarios.

What we did

The design element of our brief has required, for each coaching workshop, developing an understanding of the relevant area of the business, for example, clinical research, marketing or finance. The writer has needed to assimilate the information necessary to write comprehensive scenarios that provide sufficient detail for the role-player (the coachee in a coaching meeting) to portray a senior manager in the appropriate area of the business. In general this process requires a keen understanding of the client’s business and the pharmaceutical market.

The Impromptu role-players, who take on the role of the coachees in coaching meetings with the participants, need to be credible in senior roles. For example, on the International Sales and Marketing Organisation version of the workshop, the participants were Country Managers and the role-players, their coachees, were at the level of Sales and Marketing Director. Therefore role-players need have a great deal of general commercial awareness, the presence and stature to be plausible at this level as well as a detailed understanding of the pharmaceutical business.

In addition to the expertise the role-players needed to take on these roles, they also made and active contribution to the learning process by giving coaching demonstrations and giving detailed feedback in terms of the effectiveness of the coaching session, requiring them to have a very good working understanding of coaching as well as an appreciation of the principles that inform it.

The outcomes

There have been consistently positive outcomes from these workshops:

• Significant change in the skill level of the participants in relation to coaching;
• A clear commitment to embed coaching in their part of the business and to develop strategies to achieve this;

Other very valuable feedback for the participants in terms of their interpersonal skills and personal impact which they have taken back to the business as part of their overall leadership development.