Skip navigation.
Home

Transition Coaching

Transition coaching for managers - its benefits and outcomes

Each year you make senior appointments to key divisions in your business. You hope that the new appointees will get up to speed as quickly as possible, perhaps in the first 90 days. You will know that this often doesn't happen.

Many managers who leave a company relatively soon after arriving say one of the key reasons is that they felt they were not given sufficient help in settling into the responsibilities of their position.

This is where Pinoak Consulting can help you, thereby saving you time and money. It has been established that:

§ The actions a new jobholder takes in the first three months will in many cases determine whether they will fail or succeed on the job.

§ Failed transitions do great damage to organisations and every hour saved to achieve "break even point" (the point at which new leaders or jobholders contribute as much value to a new position as they have consumed from it) is an hour gained for the organisation.

§ Transition failures occur largely when a new appointee misunderstands the essential demands of the work situation or lacks the knowledge, skill and flexibility to adapt to them.

§ Well focused transition coaching whether by means of individual coaching or by means of a carefully targeted development programme can significantly speed up the time it takes to reach break even point.

§ There are tried and tested methods that can be deployed to lessen the likelihood of failure that work across disciplines and industries.

§ There are procedures for achieving "quick wins" that can form the basis of success in transitions at all levels and across all geographical boundaries.

§ Transitions are also a vital part of leadership development for the person themselves as well as for the organisation and should therefore be viewed as critically important.

And finally:

§ Every year many people change jobs inside of organisations as well as enter them from the outside and these numbers are on the increase. Every transition affects large numbers of people who have to adapt to the new person and their abilities to succeed. As the impact of this is immense, it helps profitability and growth significantly if everyone speaks the same transitioning language, has a set of guidelines, and has access to the required support, which might include a targeted workshop and transition coaching. This type of support is significantly different from the usual induction or orientation programmes that organisations offer, which do not address the critical factors at play during transitions.

Hundreds of thousands of Rands can be saved by means of a good transition acceleration strategy, while people who have experienced proper transition support use this knowledge in bringing their own teams and reports up to speed far faster than those who have not experienced it.

Our research indicates that most people in organisations, especially at the senior levels report that they received little or no transition acceleration support and would have appreciated it immensely. Each one had to invent their own models and this hard won knowledge, which is rarely shared is a great knowledge management loss to the organisation.

The transition coaching approach that we use runs for 3 months and assists and prepares the new manager to:

§ Take charge by assessing his/her own strengths and skills

§ Diagnose the job, the organisation, the culture, the people and the new team -- a carefully designed guide and set of tools is provided

§ Devise a learning plan (informal and formal)

§ Develop the right strategy for the situation - different types of transitions and their respective needs require different strategies

§ Secure early wins

§ Create coalitions

§ Learn to negotiate both upwards and downwards for success - a set of simple practical tools

§ Aligning strategy, structure, systems, skills and culture

§ Identify and avoid vicious cycles

§ Keep balance and build a network for advice and counsel

§ See the forest for the trees, develop the holistic vision for accelerated momentum and performance into the future