Personal Planning for Retirement

WORK/LIFE CHANGES APPROACHING?

We so often define ourselves through our jobs that it can be challenging to think about who we will be when we choose change, or circumstances mean that we have to change.
What are we talking about?
When you start out in your career, you spend time and effort making plans, developing ideas to carry you through the years that follow. Making sure you leave nothing to chance regarding decisions which will affect your career. Does that sound like you?
When you are approaching retirement, you have the benefit of experience, knowledge about what works for you, time to develop and fine tune interests you have never had time for, family grown up and maybe even left home, all kinds of opportunities.
But not everyone looks forward to retirement as a positive move. For many people, it is a time of uncertainty, worries about who they are, what will they do, what can they achieve, how will they be identified.
In your working life, you were known as a teacher, accountant, salesman, driver, office worker, nurse etc, you had an identity because of the job you did. But what about during retirement? Who will you be then?
The answer is you can be anyone you chose, because you have the time to develop the skills, take on new interests, learn how to be yourself again.
Look at the following questions/statements; see if you answer a quiet “YES” to any of them:
Am I approaching retirement in the next 2 years?
I am looking forward to it.
Am I concerned about what I will do with myself?
Am I concerned about how to keep my mind active?
Am I dreading the thought of no routine in my life?
Have I always been governed by strict times/bells at work?
Has my career involved other people making decisions for me?
Am I feeling less than confident about retirement?
Do I have concerns that I can’t express to my nearest and dearest?
I have a long term plan which will guide me through my retirement.
Do I need some help to devise plans to develop me into retirement?
Do I see retirement as the end of my life as I know it?
I have someone I can talk to someone about how I feel.

Have you answered a quiet “yes” to any of these questions?
Do you recognise that you need to plan your retirement to get the best out of it?
You have all of the answers you need, but maybe you need some help to put those plans into some kind of order. Retirement is as important as your working life, possibly more so, because you will make the choices about what you do, how you do it, who you are. You have worked all of your life, now work at enjoying your retirement.
We, at Coady Consultants Ltd, offer you the opportunity to work with one of our Personal Coaches who will provide Coaching for Personal Development into Retirement. This will involve working with you to look at the concerns you have, removing barriers, prioritising, planning.
WE ARE NOT FINANCIAL OR LEGAL ADVISORS, we are professionals in our field of personal development.
We can help you to find the answers you need in order to make your retirement a successful one. We can encourage you to develop the thinking, strategies, planning and self awareness which will allow you the opportunity to look retirement in the face and say “I AM PREPARED AND LOOKING FORWARD TO IT.”
Our by-line, as a company is “Working with you to improve”, so, here’s your chance to find out. We can work with you to improve your chances of enjoying the retirement you have worked so hard for.
If you would like further information, please contact us enquiries@coadyconsultants.co.uk

Coaching In Workplace-Enabling Interventions

Coaching In Workplace-Enabling Interventions

Coady Consultants understand the challenges Leaders and Managers face in recruiting and retaining their workforce. We know that substantial investments of finance, time and emotional energy are made in training and developing individuals and teams. We fully understand the cost, both in human and financial terms, when valued colleagues encounter challenges either at work or in their personal lives. We have been approached by Senior Mangers to work with colleagues who it is felt may need to look at their approaches to their work role. When we are asked to do this, we understand the massive investment of trust made in us by managers and those we work with. We understand that each individual is unique and we respond to their specific circumstances accordingly.
We understand too the need for employers to deliver their duty of care to their workforce. Here are some examples of how we can assist.

§ We have been approached by Leaders and Managers and worked with team-members where it is felt that an individual tem-member may benefit from increasing the inter-personal options and communication strategies they have available to them that in turn enable them to work more effectively with others.

§ We have worked with long standing and valued employees who may be experiencing a difficult time in their lives and whose performance is becoming a cause for concern.

§ We have enabled individuals to begin to resolve sometimes complex areas of life/work balance, increasing their sense of well-being and achievement on doing so.

§ We have helped individuals come to terms with aspects of their personal-life that are having an unwanted impact on their work-based performance

§ We have enabled individuals to, on occasions, re-align their goals and ambitions. In a minority of cases this has resulted in the individual making choices that ensure a “dignified exit” for all concerned-enabling them to move on with a sense of resolution, closure and purpose.

§ We have enable individual to accept mediation as a means of resolving inter-personal difficulties in the work place.

Every intervention is supported by a Coaching Plan, this included a confidentiality agreement and stresses that our work is not advice, therapy or counselling may address specific personal projects or general conditions in the client’s life or profession. We are able, where agreed, to support our interventions by “e-coaching” and telephone coaching.

Choose To Change

Teams fascinate me! The presence and sometime absence of interaction, where the real power lies and how the team talks about itself add up to an exciting series of questions, the answers to which can be a little disturbing. Like icebergs, the visible bit isn’t what we need to be concerned about, it’s what goes on underneath that sets the real climate.

We have been invited to work with a number of teams and I want to out together an outline of what we do. Some of this will have been discussed in other blogs-some elements will be new-however that is very much the way of working in an exciting and developmental role. Some time ago, at a particularly intransigent period in my professional life, I was advised that “If the only tool in your box in a hammer, you will treat every problem as if it were a nail!” Since that day I resolved to carry a comprehensive box of tools around with me and to use them!
I like to start with a few questions well in advance of the event-I need participants to understand that this is a great opportunity to move things forward and that they should take their individual roles seriously by committing themselves to some pre-work. This is always feed back in anonymity as a “Team Overview”.

There are some important core areas to work through. No matter whom we are and what we are doing, we would be very unwise to reject the notion that in these challenging and insecure times your job is an asset. I don’t want to frighten people but it is sometimes worth spending a few minutes getting them to think what life would be like without it. I ask participants to accept that, whatever we’re doing it can be done cheaper by someone else and to accept what we all know: most expensive isn’t always best, cheapest isn’t always worst. I want the answers to these questions:

§ Who are we and what are we like?
§ What values and beliefs do we stand for?
§ How do we know?
§ What impression do we give to our customers?
§ Do we know who they are and what they want from us?
§ What are the impacts of our behaviour on others: our co-workers, our managers, our customers, our competitors?
§ Who would miss us if we weren’t there?
§ Why?

It’s a challenging session. I’m deliberately taking participants beyond what a valued colleague described as “nodding dog syndrome” (sorry to all our nodding dog readers!) and into asking some tough questions about their professional identity. I’m saying to them: the way you present yourself, talk about your job, your boss, your colleagues, the language you use and the conversations you have are your very own “designer label”. Let’s be very careful about the association we want others to make because of the labels we wear and present to the outside world. Like a bumper sticker, they’re with us all the time and whereas we may have forgotten that the sticker was still there, everyone else can see it and will assume something about us because it’s there. If that sounds a tad harsh I make no apologies: live with it. We can choose to change our personal labels and stickers sometimes we just have to take a hard look to see if there are any that are visible to others only because we’ve forgotten about them-things have moved on since we first put them there!

There’s a real conflict between our need to change and our need to retain stability. We’re biologically set up to retain “sameness”. When we’re too hot we need to cool down and vice-versa: we want to reach a point of sameness most of the time. We accept inevitable change, the seasons, life, death, joy and grief and in doing so try to hang on to those things that we think should stay the same yet change at an accelerated pace: our jobs, our roles and relationships and the expectations of others.

Some stability is desirable, some change is inevitable-it is we that choose how we deal with change-led challenges. Teams grow, contract and adapt-the way the team is led, the vales transmitted within spread leadership, the type of dialogue developed enable us to better understand what it we need to do to deliver our roles in a shifting context.

Our programmes encourage participants to take an honest audit of what it is they believe in and what they can do at an individual level to contribute to the well being of the whole. We can not wish away the pressure for change in a rapidly changing context-at the end of one of our Team Development Days it is our belief that participants will have a greater understanding of what they need to do, to change and to “be” to deliver their role with a degree of integrity.

It is with more than a nod to Steven Covey’s excellent work that I state that adapting your personality is easy enough, delivering on your character is a different thing altogether our work gives an opportunity (without over-doing the navel gazing!) to help and challenge people to better understand their characters in the context of the work place as an aspect of their day-to day being: we give participants the tools with which to Choose to Change

Implementing Organisational Coaching and Mentoring

Introduction

This is an "active piece of work": we'll update as things develop!

Coady Consultants has delivered a Coaching and Mentoring Skills Based Programme to Middle Managers with the following intended outcomes:

To up-skill Managers
To introduce a range of materials to support the processes
To rehearse and practice skills and approaches
To agree on developing a professional support group
To further develop and extend the skills gained within the context.
Is significantly different in its approach to existing structures:
1:1 Meetings
Key Performance Indicators
Appraisal
To work within the contexts of Ethical Behaviour and Human Dignity

The programme has combined the key elements of coaching and mentoring in order to produce an intervention and support strategy that is specific, flexible accessible and replicable. It enables participants to establish goals that are in kilter with organisational needs and requirements whilst retaining a high degree of personal ownership.

Participants have explored the ethical context of the intervention; have acquired an overview of the importance of clarity, rapport and feedback. An established coaching model (The GROW model) has been deployed within the context of the programme. Feedback was positive: participants established support networks (4 above) prior to leaving the event with the intention of engaging with each other on specific areas of work. Whereas it was felt important to allow a period of time for participants to engage with each other and to practice the approaches discussed during the Development Day, it is noted that participants felt that they would need a period of ongoing support as they implemented the processes and incorporated them into their practice.

Securing the Development

We are in a position to offer participants access to further support from the programme facilitator using the following model.
Our client purchases an initial allocation of on-going support from the facilitator. Participants are then able to contact Coady Consultants to “book” a specific telephone support, enabling both parties to:

Set aside a specific amount of time
Reduce the likelihood of interruptions
Be focussed on the issues for discussion

Telephone calls can be further underpinned by access to e-mail support from Coady Consultants on matters related either to emergent issues from the development day or those which are related to practice. It is envisaged that this would be delivered on a “purchased entitlement” basis.

Spreading Good Practice

The initial cohort of 10 has been asked to engage with other Managers to model and deliver the Coach/Mentor processes. It is clear from individual and collective responses to the programme that the group will deploy the techniques used with their own teams.

Coaching led approaches within organisations can make a significant impact on morale, motivation and matching personal and organisational goals. Whereas the programme delivered combines specific elements of Coaching and Mentoring, it emphasises that a coaching relationship should be a consensual one. Furthermore, our development programme acknowledges that there will (hopefully infrequently) be occasions when the relationship between the Coach/Mentor and their “Client” is no longer sustainable and an alternative Coach/Mentor may be better suited to the process.

We would therefore seek to increase the number of the Company’s Workforce who have had access to the development in order to:

Increase the workforces’ awareness of coaching/mentoring processes
Increase the workforces’ capacity to deliver coaching/mentoring processes
Increase the workforces’ capacity to receive coaching/mentoring processes

We are therefore proposing that consideration is given to extending the Coach/Mentor delivery programme to a wider cohort of the Workforce over a phased and agreed period and that the Telephone/e-mail support strategy discussed earlier be incorporated as part of the process.

Coaching & Mentoring-Bringing It Together

We were approached by an existing customer organisation to explore the use of a combination of coaching and mentoring approaches to increase the confidence and competence of mid managers in order to develop teams and individuals across the company. Our remit was to create something different to appraisals and 1:1 supervision. There’s a difference between Coaching and Mentoring-so to start with a couple of definitions


Coaching

“Coaching is a one-to-one interactive relationship that helps people identify and accomplish their personal and professional goals faster than they could do on their own.”

Mentoring

“A slightly less formal arrangement that allows participants to access support as and when they feel it to be necessary.”

Our client wanted to develop the supportive aspects of mentoring together with some of the more specifically targeted features of coaching”


The programme was designed and delivered to embrace three areas: Mentor, Professional Friend and Facilitator.

Fabulous results-high quality evaluations, follow-up work and a satisfied client.
The drive from the North West of England to the Midlands, is on one of the busiest motorways in the country. The M6 was a joy that night,
We’re going to underpin our programme with a support strategy that involves telephone and e-mail contacts with those who attended the event. They have, with minimum prompting, arranged a mutual support work. It’s a National organisation and where geography is in the way, video-conferencing has been organised.

Fantastic!!