One of the great things about my role as Chief Allied Health Practitioner and Wellbeing Officer is I get to see all the Metro North Health Best Practice Australia survey results that you completed last year.

I note, from the survey, that the majority of line managers across Metro North are viewed positively. While that is a great outcome, your collective view is that many staff would like more structured feedback and support. To address this Metro North is developing a service-wide coaching program to ensure that staff at all levels of the organisation have the skills to facilitate better conversations at work and by doing so, achieve better outcomes for our care participants (patients).

Although coaching is often thought of as an expensive one-on-one activity that only executives get to have, in fact coaching skills are important for all staff members within an organisation. Coaching skills can be used in everyday conversations as well as in more formal settings. Corridor conversations, tearoom discussions, PDPs, supervision sessions – all of these are and can be improved by taking a more ‘coach-like’ approach to conversations.

How? Learning the core coaching skills enables us to be more coach-like in our interactions with our colleagues, our teams, and our supervisees. Being coach-like simply means staying curious a little longer, avoiding giving advice, and asking powerful questions, to really understand what the other person needs rather than just telling them what to do, and then encouraging action to help them to get there.

Being coach-like is not about fixing the other person or the other person’s problem, nor is it giving advice or being the expert who solves the problem. It is about supporting other people to think about what they really need or want, increasing their sense of self-efficacy, encouraging them to take responsibility for taking action, and getting results.

To achieve a ‘coaching culture’ in Metro North we are developing a three-tiered strategy:

• Coaching Conversations workshops with peer trainers available to all staff in all facilities, to develop the core “coach-like” skills (available now – register via TMS for a workshop near you),
• Internal coaching with certified professional coaches for staff who would like more intensive coaching support,
• Partnerships with external partners for specialised coaching (executive, group).

I hope you will make time to explore the coaching development opportunities to help make Metro North Health a truly great place to work.

Kind regards,

Mark