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Training is dead - long live PPI Business Coaching!
Added: (Fri Nov 04 2005)
Communications In Action and PPI Business NLP have merged to create a new company - PPI Business Coaching - delivering business coaching services to UK and International businesses
PPI Business Coaching has arrived - born from the merging of Communications In Action and PPI Business NLP.
Communications In Action is a leading business coaching consultancy, well known for innovation in leadership and executive coaching. PPI Business NLP is a well established and respected NLP training company that delivers exclusively business focused training in a pragmatic and professional way. Together, the two companies have focused their resources on the business coaching market to address a need for high quality professional development services that is not being met.
Peter Freeth says, "Coaching services have traditionally been provided in a very piecemeal way, with freelance coaches selling themselves on a small scale and clients dipping their toes in the water to find out if coaching works. The simple truth is that coaching does work and is far more cost effective than training. The reason that it has been slow to establish itself is that none of the other suppliers know how to sell coaching to a professional audience"
PPI's research demonstrates that training does not support a company's strategic needs, yet many companies continue to use training as a development tool simply because it's what they have always done.
The adoption of coaching as a corporate development tool has been perceived as slow in the past, and the traditional training providers say that this is because the long term value of coaching has not been proven.
"Training has been around for a long time, so people think it must be the way to go. In fact, the long term value of training is poor, for a number of reasons." says Peter Freeth. "Firstly, training fails to address the needs of the individual. Once staff have all the knowledge they need to do their jobs, training stops working because the problem is not knowledge but the application of knowledge. For example, training sales people in new sales models does not work. Helping them overcome their individual barriers to spending more time talking to customers does work."
"Secondly, training fails to provide the high quality of support needed by experienced people in businesses today. We live in the Google generation, where people need answers to specific questions right now - not when the training course is scheduled."
This situational, just in time approach is key to coaching's high success rate. By working on issues that are real and present for managers, coaching delivers highly personalised development, where and when it is needed most.
Another perceived problem with coaching in the past is cost - it's cheaper to have 10 people on a training course than to coach one. If the training is not delivering the right outcomes, it doesn't matter how much it costs - the money is wasted. When companies paid freelance coaches a day rate for one coaching session, it was expensive. When coaching is adopted on a large enough scale it becomes far more cost effective than training - because it delivers results which are tangible and directly relevant to specific and current business demands.
PPI Business Coaching builds on the success of Communications In Action with many long standing client relationships that have delivered real and measurable value to client organisations.
The transition to PPI Business Coaching begins now, and is expected to take up to a year before all client accounts are migrated. When that process is complete, Communications In Action will remain in place as a specialist publisher of business and personal development books and CDs. The website at http://www.ciauk.com has information on the titles currently available.