Coaching Apprentice Process Improvement Leaders

We're well into college football season and many of us are acutely aware of the impact of coaching on team performance. Coaching matters, and not just in football. Across our client base, there's been a growing appreciation in recent years of the importance of coaching to develop new process improvement leaders. With all the advances in technology for learning, data analysis, and project management, process improvement is still first and foremost a people business.

To frame the importance of coaching, here's a view of what our clients see as their central challenge in building more capable people — skill at implementing change:

Implementing change is messy and difficult work that requires skillful interaction with other people in order to accomplish anything, and those skills are often best developed in an apprenticeship model built on active coaching and abundant practice.

On the surface, it may appear that eLearning technology eliminates instructors from the skill‐building model, but that's not the case at all — in the best models, the technology shifts the nature of instructor interactions from delivering standard learning content to customized coaching at the point of need — providing "apprentices" more time for one‐on‐one tutelage by a master practitioner. At MoreSteam, we're exploring new ways to provide useful analytics to guide those interactions and technology to facilitate management of the coaching process.