One-to-One Executive Coaching
The challenges facing higher education are complex and demanding. Leaders at all levels need access to support and development that allows them to reflect and build on their current practices. With increasing pressures including financial pressures and the need to be agile, we have witnessed the power of coaching to support leaders to deliver critical projects, to manage teams, and to define and deliver strategic outcomes. One-to-one coaching also remains a core component of many of our leadership development programmes.
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Our coaching services
Advance HE offers a dedicated one-to-one executive coaching service with a pool of highly skilled and diverse coaches from across the UK.
Leaders increasingly require an informed yet curious mind-set, to be both focused and action-driven, yet intentionally reflective. We recognise the need for leadership which encompasses and speaks to the complexity of individual and intersectional experiences that includes a diversity of characteristics, all within the specific context of HE.
Our coaching can be tailored to your needs and that of your institution and can include the following types:
- Executive coaching
- Established leader coaching
- Technical expert to people leader
- Senior leader coaching
- Transitions leadership coaching
- Coaching to embed leadership programme learning
Coaching benefits
Coaching provides a confidential thinking space, an opportunity to create a personal and professional vision and a route to achieving it, an opportunity to understand and positively disrupt unhelpful patterns of thinking and behaviour, and the benefit of the safety and rigour of working with our professionally trained coaches.
Through a variety of approaches and techniques, our coaches will facilitate you in finding your own solutions to problems and challenges related to your role in the organisation rather than simply providing answers.
Coaching can help you in:
- Developing strategic thinking
- Managing difficult relationships and situations
- Articulating a vision
- Managing people
- Developing personal effectiveness
- Influencing with impact
- Achieving balance and integration of work and life
- Developing personal resilience
- Building self-confidence and working through imposter phenomena
- Managing career transitions
- Building leadership confidence and authority
- Managing upwards
- Working through organisational politics
- Moving from middle to senior management.
The impact of coaching
Offering coaching support made staff feel valued, and delivered a number of tangible and intangible benefits including direct increases in self-confidence/efficacy/awareness/cognition/insight and sustained behaviour changes which may indirectly improve leadership skills, skills development or job performance. Further intangible benefits, included people describing coaching as an opportunity to reflect on strengths, to feel empowered, and in a positive way, to provide a personally challenging experience for the coachee.2018 survey on the impact of coaching conducted by The Leadership Foundation for Higher Education (now Advance HE)
Exploring the Impact of Coaching in Higher Education
The growing use of coaching to support the development of staff in universities requires a significant investment of time and money, and yet the practice of evaluating the impact of that investment appears to be spasmodic. Higher education does not appear to have fully explored the value of coaching or the tools to evaluate it. Through this stimulus paper, the authors Harding, Sofianos and Box aim to fill that gap. They begin by presenting a snapshot of the ways in which coaching is used, valued and evaluated in higher education and have used these findings to develop a series of provocations to provide thought leadership and debate within the sector, specifically on how coaching is evaluated.
Additional resources summarising the impact and outcomes of executive coaching can be found in Erik de Haan’s 2021 book, What Works in Executive Coaching – Understanding Outcomes Through Quantitative Research and Practice-Based Evidence and his 2019 book, Critical Moments in Executive Coaching: Understanding the Coaching Process through Research and Evidence-Based Theory.
Coach profiles
Below is a selection of Advance HE coach profiles.
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Enquire about One-to-One Executive Coaching
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