Coaching Skills: Professional Development For HR Business Partners

Line managers often approach HR Business Partners with a request: “I have a particularly difficult employee, and I’ve given up trying to manage him. I want you to fix it!”  Most skilled HR professionals know not to take on that responsibility, but many still don’t know what to do other than to tell the manager what not to do, in order to avoid legal problems.  The most effective and beneficial response would be for the HR business partner to say, “I’ll be happy to help – I’ll coach you on how to manage this person more effectively.”

Since many HR business partners have never been line managers themselves, they may be reluctant to tell a manager how to manage, and may offer only traditional HR caveats. While legal advice may be important, it does nothing to help the manager turn the situation around. Coaching skills can make the difference.

HR Business Partners who are skilled in coaching can provide extremely valuable just-in-time coaching at these critical points. Skilled coaching can not only avoid legal issues, but more importantly provides other significant benefits:

• Stronger management and leadership skills in line managers
• Just-in-time solutions to difficult employee issues in real time
• Strengthened partnerships between line business units and HR business partners
• HR Business Partners sought out for their expertise instead of avoided as an obstacle in the business process
• A net increase in the corporate wisdom on key matters

NOTE: This training is a good follow up to our Coaching Skills training.

Coaching Skills Training highlights:

• How to shift from being the HR/Compliance cop to being a trusted expert and advisor
• How to respond when they ask you to take the responsibility
• The coaching model – steps and techniques
• The essential coaching skills
• How to use questions to diagnose the situation, to help the manager gain a new perspective, and to help generate options
• How to get the manager to practice difficult conversations with you
• How to help the manager gain confidence
• How to coach a difficult or resistant manager
• How to follow up to ensure success

Coaching Skills Methodology

Participants in Coaching Skills spend most of their workshop time in practices with coaching and feedback in P2P Videolabs™ – AlexanderHancock’s trademarked process for rapid development of business communication skills. They bring their own real situations to use in the practice sessions. They gain insight and skills through customized exercises and case studies.

Customized Solutions

To ensure that training is not just an “event,” but instead produces enduring results, we customize Coaching Skills to fit your unique situation, business strategy, culture, and people.  After discussion with you and other experts within your organization, we select the emphasis, specific skills to be developed, key learning points, exercises, and case studies for practice to create a solution tailored just for you.

Coaching Skills Applications

The following are some of the ways our clients have used custom versions of Coaching Skills:

• To reduce the incidence of complaints about poor management handling of employee issues
• To build the professional skills of HR business partners
• To help HR business partners to be sought out for their expertise and insights rather than be avoided as irrelevant to or obstacles in the business process
• To help HR generalists to become more skilled at working with internal client managers
• To develop

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