THE FUTURE IS PEOPLE FOCUSED

By Louise Watts

The future is something I've been speaking about, reading about and exploring over the last two years. Visions of our future, the future of our work and of humanity abound as we move through this transitional industrial chapter. More specifically what might it mean for our particular profession, coaching and development.

As the co-founder of HPC Global, High Performance Coaching, over the last 15 years, I have brought together a wonderful team of coaches, who have transitioned from the performing arts and business, and together we coach and develop exceptional people across the world.

HPC was established after I transitioned from working as a professional ballet dancer to become an executive coach focusing on presence and impact. Early on, I recognised that our transferable skills as performers could be so valuable for top executives across the world.

This marriage of performance and business became our signature and enabled us to work with professionals to develop their presence and performance skills, learning to embrace their creativity, collaboration and connection.

During the last 15 years, we have built up a global business that now connects us with some of the world’s largest institutions, coaching senior executives to millennials entering a very different workforce.

This year we launched an innovative personal career transition program, Transition Hub, partnering globally with WeWork as a response to the changing needs of people in the future of work and the evolving focus of our coaching business in this new career landscape.

Where and how we work is reflective of the broader professional ecosystem in which we are operating. Transition Hub, our people- focused human work solution, takes people on an immersive seven-week personal development program, and we have been so fortunate to align with WeWork as our global home.

WeWork’s strong focus on community, on bringing people together and collaboration is a key part of our program delivery, as individuals and organisations from vastly different sectors and with distinct professional stories come together to share, to learn from and to inspire one another.

People have become very isolated due to redundancy, freelance working and technology driving less physical interactions, and in order to coach individuals successfully in the future we will need to demonstrate the effectiveness of a community vs a solo journey.

Our coaches define the strength of our programs, blending the creative with business, to guide professionals to think differently about how they view the work they do, who they are and what’s next for them on their career trajectory, and this holistic approach is a direct response to the hyper-focus on technology and efficiency at work which has neglected human skills for too long.

At Transition Hub we are welcoming a different and new set of talent to be coached, and this will become a large and very important segment of the global coaching client base. Talk of AI and robotics driving changes to jobs is ever present at many of the future work events that I have been attending and speaking at this year.

As a recent MIT research paper attested, it is likely more that jobs will evolve owing to automation rather than to disappear. However, there is widespread uncertainty and a lot of people’s professional futures will need to be reimagined.

To put it simply, many jobs that exist today will not exist in the same form in coming years and so many people will find themselves either being made redundant or having to evolve and to transition from one professional iteration into another.

The one thing that is certain is that we are in an age of disruption and that change is the new normal.

At Transition Hub we believe that during this process of change, many people will require support to navigate their new reality and find their purpose in the future of work.

We coach individuals to understand and build their own brand, harness their innate skills and offer them the psychological support and network they need.

These are the pillars of coaching and personal development that are required for a successful journey and stay in the future of work, and Transition Hub keeps the spotlight directly on the people that join us and our presence as a whole, not alone.

The future of work is our chance to reset humanity, and coaching will be a big part of that.

Louise Watts

'A progressive thinker highly attuned to the future of work on a global scale, Louise Watts is embarking on her latest role as the founder of Transition Hub, a dedicated personal development accelerator with a creative and engaging approach to redeployment and transition skills for individuals and organizations preparing for automation, partnering with WeWork as Transition Hub's global home.

For over 15 years, Louise has elevated the personal development coaching space, building an elite client base and a network of expert coaches across high performance, employee engagement, personal brand and career transition."

www.transitionhub.com