Julie Jansen — author, executive and career coach, motivational speaker, and resume and LinkedIn profile writer, empowers professionals to find success, satisfaction, and fulfillment at work. She works with clients of every age, across all functional areas and industries to develop and enhance skills and competencies. Julie is also a vocational expert for divorces and discrimination dismissal cases. She has been a senior consultant with Partners International for 20 years.
Julie works with senior leaders, managers, and individual contributors to develop the techniques, competencies, and skills demanded by today’s chaotic and complex business and work environments. Her industry experience includes advertising, consumer products, entertainment/media, fashion, financial services, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, technology, telecommunications, nonprofit, pharmaceutical, and more.
Julie is also the author of You Want Me to Work With Who? Eleven Keys to a Stress-Free, Satisfying and Successful Work Life…No Matter Who You Work With as well as a workplace coach e-booklet series. She is frequently interviewed on TV and radio and quoted in numerous national publications as a career and workplace expert. Her book I Don’t Know What I Want, But I Know It’s Not This: A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding Gratifying Work (Penguin; second revised edition) has also been published in the U.K., Germany, Austria, Romania, the Czech Republic, and Indonesia.
Below is Julie’s view on coaching and the powerful impact it can have on organizations.
How can coaching help to create retention and engagement?
When coaching is positioned in a positive way to the potential coaching client, this sends the message that the organization prioritizes professional development and is invested in providing support to employees to help them develop and succeed. When employees believe that their employer values them, they are much more likely to want to stay with the organization and contribute to the company’s goals. Coaching helps increase leadership effectiveness which leads to organizational improvements, such as greater productivity, better employee morale, and improved business metrics. When these things happen, employees want to stay involved and employed by the company. And the pandemic has turned the way we work upside down therefore the perspective of an experienced executive coach can be useful with engaging and retaining employees.
What makes a coaching program effective?
An effective coaching program elevates a coaching client’s awareness, purposefulness, and performance. To achieve these outcomes, there are four elements to a successful coaching engagement:
- Coachability – It is important for the employee who is being coached to be open to feedback and possess the desire to change their attitude, behavior, and habits.
- Trust – This is a crucial element of any relationship particularly when there is vulnerability. Trust needs to exist not only between the coaching client and coach, but also between the coaching client and his/her manager. This means that there is transparency, an absence of judgement, and complete confidentiality.
- Commitment – The coaching client needs to be engaged in the coaching process including dedicating time for meetings, preparing for coaching discussions, communicating with their manager and talent development throughout the coaching engagement, asking for feedback from their stakeholders, and practicing techniques in real-work situations. At the same time, the coaching client’s manager and HR partner should be equally committed and accessible to the employee and the coach.
- Alignment with business and team goals as well as culture – Partners uses a Contextual Coaching framework to tie coaching goals to the organization’s business objectives and cultural tenets. Therefore, the coaching engagement is not just focused on changing the employee, but also benefits the organization holistically.
What are some creative ways to offer coaching to a broader audience?
I have been privileged to coach employees for Partners’ clients in multiple creative ways which enable companies to offer coaching to larger numbers of employees from early career and high potential to new managers and senior leaders. These coaching formats range from small groups of intact teams and cross-functional participants who don’t know each other, as well as one-on-one phone and video coaching meetings in half-day and full-day time frames. They are all very popular with employees, and I can provide confidential, real-time information to the organization to raise their awareness of specific topic themes and issues that their employees are focused on and experiencing.