d o ss i e r · m a n a g e m e n t
Evie Roos (ArcelorMittal)
Artur Sosna (Berlitz Luxembourg)
Sebastian Eberwein (FranklinCovey Luxembourg)
Coaching
prompting the leader Major companies tend to offer personal training programmes, which accompany their managers and help them to improve their personal performances. Four experts discuss the coaching approach and its potential benefits on both the executives’ results and the organisation’s growth. Photos: Laurent Antonelli (Blitz) Today, most companies consider training not as a legal obligation, but more as a longterm investment in employee’s skills and the organisation performance. The expected return has to be measurable and at least equivalent to the initiated investment itself. If for Eric Quémard, professor of strategy at the Hautes Etudes Commerciales School of Management (HEC) in Paris, initial training is nowadays considered as an important asset when hiring new personnel, it is now clear that it must be continuously updated. So it is for technical and job training, which remain important and valued. These unfortunately do not completely fulfil companies’ skills and performance requirements. Therefore also, “management training has nowadays become an important issue; companies that are searching for possible alternatives are looking for tailor-made solutions,” Eric Quémard explains. Executive coaching counts among those opportunities. Primarily dedicated to business executives, entrepreneurs and managers, this one-to-one personal development programme focuses on a variety of problems and challenges, which professional people are confronted with: from typical day-to-day team conflicts at the office to specific business objectives to achieve. Or from personal skills development to accompanying the new promoted executives in their new challenges. ArcelorMittal, the world’s largest steel company, which employs 320,000 people in over 60 countries, implemented a Global Executive Development and Performance (GEDP) programme, a scheme devoted to all the managers within the company. It is also an opportunity to identify and plan for individual development
needs. Part of this process is the succession planning: we look at people in their current position and see who could be their potential successors within the two or three coming years. We accompany these persons to their next job with a range of training programmes including external coaching if needed,” Evie Roos, Vice-President, Human Resources and Communications at ArcelorMittal tells us.
Sparring partner Berlitz, the professional languages company – which settled back to Luxembourg six months ago – is among the few training institutions in the country to provide a set of business coaching seminars devoted to leaders and business people. Artur Sosna – the newly appointed regional director of the Grand Duchy at Berlitz language and business training – describes the main coaching principles: “management coaching takes place in a face-to-face conversation normally, as well as in small groups. It is mainly about the content learned in the management training or about individual topics that can originate in this context. For companies and executives a coach represents a sparring partner for thematics they have no one to talk with and about. According to Sebastian Eberwein, managing director of FranklinCovey Luxembourg, a global professional services, training and developing company, “leaders are not simply people maintaining a position, but rather people who take a decision for their life. Concerning training for managers, our aim is to develop the potential of a manager in order to achieve highest quality at all levels – people, teams and organisation. It is all about helping companies to succeed by unleashing
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