Fit for the Future - Coaching for Business success at IDA Ireland

Fit for the Future - Coaching for Business success at IDA Ireland IDA Ireland is the Government Agency responsible for attracting Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) into Ireland. The success of the agency is dependent on the quality of the staff in the way they carry out their roles. Securing FDI to Ireland has become more challenging with a higher degree of competition and an increasing number of agencies fighting for the business. IDA has demanding targets each year on job creation for the country and each year the organisation needs to be more strategic in its approach to job creation and sophisticated in its engagement with clients and in its ability to generate solutions that meet client needs. To ensure we build the organisation’s capability to meet the future challenges in competitiveness and job creation, the organisational development strategy is clearly aligned to achieving this aim.

IDA's Organisational Development strategy The organisation has had a Performance Management and Development Review (PM&DR) process in place developed against a competency model that consists of nine competences indicating the skills, knowledge and behaviours expected at each level in the organisation. The competences are: 1. Sales and Marketing 2. Networking 3. Leadership and Management 4. Influencing and negotiation 5. Project Management 6. Communications and Personal Effectiveness 7. Creativity and Innovation 8. Knowledge 9. Client Focused Relationship Building Coaching and mentoring became an integrated part of the Leadership and Management competence. The organisation bases its annual Learning and Development programme on the output of the PM&DR process and the HR team tend to provide the development solutions. There were a number of training programmes delivered over the years which provided tools and techniques for staff to do their jobs better built around the core competencies and HR found through feedback that a move in the OD strategy towards a more individual approach to developing people and less focus on training programmes was required and that the best approach would be to offer a coaching programme to the organisation providing structure, focus and outputs. The organisation was looking for an outcome that would be about increasing the overall management capability in the organisation, improving the level of engagement with clients and stakeholders and develop more specifically the future talent of the organisation.

The Approach A discussion on the development opportunities for the leadership team commenced and a proposal for the introduction of external coaches chosen by individual executive members focusing on the key competence issues for them commenced with full agreement by the Executive team. The success of this programme over a two year period gave the impetus and support to cascade it down into the organisation. Although modular coaching and mentoring workshops were being delivered, the success of the programme at Executive level meant that the culture around the use of coaches and mentors became the norm and the value of the approach was easily recognised. IDA then introduced nationally accredited mentoring and coaching programmes delivered by Kingstown College targeted at management levels and simultaneously to senior HR staff became trained coaches at diploma level which supported the introduction and delivery of the programmes and this helped to embed the approach more smoothly into the organisation. The Executive team also played their part which gave status and recognition to the important of this approach to people development and became trained mentors. The benefits of a management wide approach meant that the culture of coaching and mentoring in helping people to deliver their objectives and ultimately the organisation’s objectives was and still remain very powerful.

Outcomes There has been observable positive performance in behaviours, managers are better able to manage their own behaviours as a result of having an understanding of their approach and the practiced tools to apply in a variety of interactions with staff and colleagues particularly; Staff have reported their application of the tools of coaching in their client engagements, listening and probing more to find out what the client’s real concerns are how they could respond more succinctly; Performance conversations have become more focused and challenging and managers have more confidence to deal with issues using a coaching approach; Coaching conversations around the development of talent for the future have become an integral part of IDA’s approach to establishing peoples’ interest in the career and to encouraging them to move on in their careers; Coaching and mentoring have now become an important part of IDA's organisational development strategy for the management and development of its people for the future.

Breda O’Toole January 2013.