Coaching helps you amplify your awareness of self and others, find clarity in chaos, revitalizes your creativity, navigates life changes, make informed decisions, and develop strategies to achieve your goals.

“Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximize their own performance.” It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them”.

The demand for change in business practice has never been greater than it is today. That the traditional culture of businesses has to evolve is hardly questioned now – the dot.coms have shaken up the way things have been done and are helping to redefine the relationship between organizations and their employees. In doing so, they are reaching into reservoirs of previously untapped performance. Bright sparks graduating from university have typically fought for internships at blue-chip corporations like Goldman Sachs. Now many of them dream of an internship at Google (Alphabet), Facebook, or the like, organizations that are doing things differently and pledging to provide a meaningful and exciting journey for their employees. This represents the next evolution of business, the reconnecting of business to its purpose, to its reason for being – after all, don’t all businesses exist to serve a need? This toolkit will set out the reasons why all organizations need to embrace a new way of doing things, how coaching is central to that, and how it is a triple win for people, planet, and profit.

Leaders must be experienced as a support by their team, not as a threat There is a paradox in coaching leadership, because the leader traditionally holds the pay check, the key to promotion, and also the axe. This is fine so long as you believe that the only way to motivate is through the judicious application of the carrot and the stick. However, for coaching to work at its best, the relationship between the coach and the coachee must be one of partnership in the endeavor, of trust, of safety, and of minimal pressure. The check, the key, and the axe have no place here, as they can serve only to inhibit such a relationship.

Building awareness and responsibility is the essence of good coaching and enables the activation of natural learning Awareness and responsibility are without a doubt two qualities that are crucial to performance in any activity. In spite of considerable variations in other areas, awareness and responsibility consistently appeared to be the two most important attitudinal factors common to all – and the attitude or state of mind of the performer is the key to performance of any kind. Let’s explore the meaning of each of these aspects.

So far we have established the essential nature of awareness and responsibility for learning and for performance improvement. We have also looked at the context of coaching, at the parallels between coaching and leading, and at company culture and high performance. We have explored the role and the attitude of the coach, and we have considered powerful questioning and active listening as the primary focus of communication in coaching. We now have to determine what to ask questions about and in what sequence to ask them.

This toolkit gathers together all the questions that we at the Leadership Academy SA consistently find helpful in coaching, in bags labeled according to topic. We invite you to dip into each bag as you need. The golden rule is to be clear and brief. Sometimes the most powerful questions lead to a long silence, so don’t feel the need to jump in with another question if there is a long pause. Silence really is golden

As your coaching skills develop, so will your needs for further development. It might therefore be a good idea to run through this list every few months. You will see that, after some time, certain coaching tips will hold no mystery for a high performance coach anymore and others will attract your attention and reveal different nuances over time.

ICF Credential-holders should be able to demonstrate a clear understanding of this body of knowledge. A broad team of ICF coaches serving as subject-matter experts contributed to the creation of the ICF Coach Knowledge Assessment, a tool that can be used to measure this understanding. We believe that requiring passage of this exam will help ensure that ICF Credential-holders understand the foundational knowledge that we believe is so important for the development of high-quality professional coaches.