Drive Clarity of Thought and Action by Deploying Advanced Communications Skills To Your Team 

If you’re a leader or executive looking to drive stronger engagement and increased performance, then you already know that you must give your leaders the tools they need to translate strategic objectives into operational goals, and to drive the action.  You need to give them the  confidence and  perspective to take decisions on the fly that reflect clarity around your strategic intent.

This program gives your leaders the ability to learn and apply proven coaching skills to build strong trust and relationships upward, downward, and across the organization.  Lasting success depends on them understanding all of their team members and stakeholders and building the relationships which are the foundation of that success.

By the end of this program,

participants will have learned to …

• Apply a proven five-step process for a coaching conversation

  Participants will learn a process synthesized from over 25 years of coaching research. These skills and concepts are used daily by over 30,000 International Coaching Federation certified coaches.

• Listen actively, considering all dimensions of a conversation

  Leaders will make their teams feel completely heard.  They will engage fully in both the logic, the context, and the emotion at the foundation of each critical conversation. 

• Ask powerful questions that evoke new insights and accelerate development

  Instead of telling others what to do, leaders will ask powerful questions to encourage their teams to establish new context, beliefs, context, and perspectives, and to think independently.

• Establish meaningful and motivating goals and workable plans to achieve them

  Leaders will help their teams move from clarity about a situation to developing goals and actions which are both exciting and actionable, and which propel them to achieve the outcomes they seek. 

• Provide performance feedback in a way that is caring, constructive, and effective in motivating employees and teams to grow in their roles.

  Leaders will help their teams articulate standards of performance and develop effective ways of holding themselves accountable to those standards

•  Catalyze bigger and bolder action plans

  Graduates of this program will empower their teams to apply new ideas with greater confidence to achieve their targeted outcomes.

• Work through conflict in ways that are passionate and unfiltered, while strengthening relationships rather than destroying them

  Properly done, conflict strengthens teams.  When focused on relationships and shared values, it enables enables the team to be honest and open to achieving shared goals and less on  competition, politics or pride.

About this program

• Ascendent Leadership is a licensed  trainer for the 5.5.5 Coaching Skills Training Program™ from Coaching Out of the Box.  The program has been delivered successfully to over 30,000 participants in the US and Canada.
• The program draws from the most advanced knowledge base in the coaching field and is translated into a simple, intuitive, and highly transferable framework for busy executives and managers.
• Ascendent recognized that more hands-on practice and mentoring better locked in the outcomes of the program.  The nine-session program includes a total of twelve hours of group practice and mentoring.  
• Ascendent further supports it's learners by offering their learners a full year of support, including live office hours and a support newsletter.

What’s Inside the 5.5.5 Coaching Skills Training Course? 

Common to all sessions

Highly interactive instruction with extensive  practice, feedback, mentoring, and on-the-job application

Mastery of these concepts and skills requires clear explanations, realistic demonstrations, practice, and mentoring.  Between sessions, learners will apply the learning to their on-the-job leadership opportunities

Training Approach:

• Prior to each session, participants will view a brief video program to introduce the key concepts for that session and  how those concepts support the program objectives
• At the beginning of each session, each learner will discuss the results of their field work from the previous session to lock in successes and get group discussion of the challenges
• The facilitator will review the key ideas learned in the pre-session e-learning video.
• Each session will provide over an hour of total practice and mentoring.  Small break-out groups of 3-4 learners will practice the skills and give each other feedback.  The facilitator will circulate around the breakouts to answer questions and provide additional feedback and mentoring. 

Session 1

The case for integrating coaching skills into leadership

In this session, we let the class get acquainted, review the course  resources,  introduce the business  case for these skills and invite the learners to create their own business case for improved leadership through applying coaching ideas and skills

Session Highlights:

• Class introductions and program overview
• Modern definition of coaching
• Creating, sharing, and refining each participant's individual business case for learning coaching skills

Session 2

The Five Core Coaching Skills – Listening,  Encouraging

In this session, we begin learning and applying the five core coaching skills.  We start with Active Listening, the foundation for all effective communications and coaching.  We move to Encouraging, which is critical for building the relationship between two people, and reinforcing the learner’s commitment to positive change.

Session Highlights:

• Active listening involves reflective listening, full presence and silence; Listening with the intent to understand and learn
• Encouraging starts with listening but is included in all skills; People have unique preferences for encouragement; Encourage the person more than the results

• Language, recognition, focused time and trust are common components of encouraging

Session 3

The Five Core Coaching Skills – Questioning

In this session, we investigate the skill of asking powerful questions.  We focus about an hour on practicing, giving and getting feedback and mentoring.

Session Highlights:

• Powerful questions unlock a coachee’s resourcefulness and teach the coachee they have the answers within them.

• To ask powerful questions, the coach needs to ask from a place of genuine curiosity.

• Constructing powerful questions requires the use of open ended, clean and a variety of questions.

• Four foundational kinds of questions in coaching: Clarifying, Self-Awareness, Challenging, and Action.

Session 4

The Five Core Coaching Skills – Requesting and Planning

In this session, we investigate the skill of moving the coaching to ACTION. We focus about an hour on practicing, giving and getting feedback and mentoring.

Session Highlights:

• Requesting asks the coachee to think bigger, act bolder or liberate themselves from something; Use a request when the coachee is stuck, holding back or selling themselves short.

• Requests send a powerful message that the coach sees something bigger for them.

• Make the request and allow the coachee to accept, reject or negotiate the request.

• Anchor the commitment to the request by asking for a deadline or timeline and specific action(s).

Session 5

The Five Step Coaching Exchange - Identify, Discover

In this session, we begin learning the five-step process of each coaching conversation that will deliver the clarity that the coachee needs to develop toward their goals.  We will cover the first two steps, Identify and Discover.  We continue to lock in our learning by spending at least an hour  practicing, getting feedback, and mentoring each other.

Session Highlights:

• Identify WHAT they want to accomplish, WHO they need to be to achieve that goal,  and the gap between where they are and where they want to be

• Determine a succinct FOCUS for the time that is available in the session

• Through  joint effort and discovery, lay the foundation for a successful session

Session 6

The Five Step Coaching Exchange - Strategize, Clear the Way, Recap

We conclude our coverage of the coaching exchange by covering the last three steps,  Strategize, Clear the Way,  and Recap.  We continue to lock in our learning by spending at least an hour practicing, getting feedback, and mentoring each other.

Session Highlights:

• Strategizing bridges the gap from where the coachee is to where they want to be.  The bridge is built by verifying the commitment, outlining resources, determining timeline; prioritizing actions.
• Clearing the way means creating a path of least resistance.  That’s accomplished by addressing obstacles, ensuring necessary support, identifying what is missing, roadmapping key relationships, and letting of what’s not helping
• The Coachee does the verbal recap by bringing to light where the coachee is at, by cementing forward action, reviewing anchors, capturing new learning, actions and accountabilities, and forward movement to date.

Session 7

Five Guiding Principles - Be Curious, Be Supportive, Be Accepting, Be Focused, Be Committed

 To this point, we’ve focused on skills and process steps.  In this session, we respond to the question, “Who must a coach be, to be effective in that role?”

Session Highlights:

•  The Curious Coach moves aside what they know and considers the coachee the expert; joins with the coachee to explore their world, follows insights without judgments or assumptions; trusts that the coachee has the answers.
• The Supportive Coach demonstrates patience; is consistent; is encouraging and acknowledging; is available and accessible;  and is a collaborative partner.
• The Accepting Coach is open minded; is removed from their own filters; honors and encourages the coachee’s uniqueness; realizes the coachee is in a process of discovering.

• The Focused Coach is attentive, shows up fully present, is distraction free, is still inside, and is receptive.

• The Committed Coach is consistent in the relationship, shows up on time, does what they say they will do, is even keeled in their moods/emotions, keeps it ‘all about the Coachee at all times, has regular connection, is accessible, and creates a safe environment for learning, growth and discovery.

Session 8

Putting all the pieces together - A complete coaching conversation

In this session, we review all the material we’ve covered, and then we practice complete coaching conversations, embracing all of the skills, exchange steps, and coach-like attributes.  After a brief review of the material to date, we’ll spend the large majority of our time in coaching practice, feedback and mentoring.

Session Highlights:

• Material review and questions

• We'll practice complete coaching conversations, embracing all the skills, exchange steps, and coach-like attributes.  

• Three 30-minute rounds of coaching in break-out rooms of three participants, playing roles of coach, coachee and observer.  The facilitator will circulate around the groups, answering questions, and offering additional feedback and mentoring on what they observed.

• We’ll discuss how to integrate the coaching skills and values into their leadership when the participants return to their teams; how to create accountability partners to lock in the skills and values; how to take advantage of support resources that Ascendent offers graduates of this program.

• We'll work together to plan Session 9.our Coaching Practicum

Session 9

Coaching Practicum

We'll execute the practice plan we devised in Session 8. 

• We will work in triads.
• Every participant will have the opportunity to coach, be coached, and mentor their teammates.
• After each round, participants will share insights with the larger group.
• At the conclusion of the session, each participant will share their plan for integrating the skills into their work.

About the design of the program

Built on a program design that has successfully trained over 30,000 leaders

• Ascendent Leadership is a licensed delivery partner for the 5.5.5 Coaching Skills Training Program™ from Coaching Out of the Box.  The program has been delivered successfully to over 30,000 participants in the US and Canada.
• The program draws from the most advanced knowledge base in the coaching field and is translated into a simple, intuitive, and highly transferable framework for busy executives and managers.
• Ascendent has used it's coaching experience to customize the program.
• It recognized that more hands-on practice and mentoring would significantly reinforce the outcomes of the program.  The nine-session version of the program includes a total of twelve hours of group practice and mentoring.  Ascendent further supports application of the concepts by offering their learners a full year of regular live office hours and a support newsletter.
• Learners receive mentoring guides for each session.  Those guides give them a quick reference of new behaviors to look for, and a framework for mentoring their peers in the breakouts.

 "Coaching has affected my ability to lead, absolutely. Without a doubt, coaching has helped my performance." 

I have a large group and frequently run into situations where my coaching skills have really helped - especially the listening skills. There's an expectation that the leaders have all the answers but using coaching, I can turn some of the issues back to the people I coach and get even better answers and solutions from them. Coaching helps the coachees with the confidence to make more of their own decisions. Coaching has helped me to help my staff bring out the decisions and answers from within them."

Enroll Yourself or a Team in the 5.5.5 Coaching Skills Training Program Today