EmployID’s first train-the-trainer workshop on providing peer coaching training was held by Carmen Wolf and Pablo Franzolini from 7th to 8th March 2017 in Zagreb, Croatia. The participants were trainers, PES practitioners, HR specialists and coaches that work in different offices at CES.
The goal of the train-the-trainer workshop was to provide additional knowledge and skills of EmployID peer coaching to practitioners at CES who already participated in last year’s EmployID peer coaching kick-off workshop or the online-course or both. Another goal was to discuss and brainstorm on possible ways how to implement peer coaching process into business processes and into everyday work practice. The idea was to provide enough material and knowledge to provide further peer coaching training within CES. The workshop was a reaction on feedback from the previous workshop and online-course where some of the participants stated that they need additional knowledge and skills to provide further training into peer coaching.
After the first workshop day that focused on re-introduction of the peer coaching process including further exercises on coaching skills like powerful questioning and growth mindset as well as a full peer coaching session, it became clear that the practice of the peer coaching process is highly important for further work as well as further training in powerful questioning. While the participants were motivated to learn in this workshop they still admitted that some of them were sceptical at the beginning although they did agree with the structure of the peer coaching process and the benefits that implementation would bring with it. After them practicing peer coaching on the first training day they experienced the effect of peer coaching and how the structure leads naturally to a collection of solutions to individual challenges that the whole group can benefit from in the one or the other way. After presenting proposals of implementation of the process to the participants and reporting from the experiences so far from the trainers the session started, the second workshop day was restructured by the trainers in order to have another peer coaching session in the big group by making the goal of the workshop – implementation of peer coaching practice at CES – the challenge to be solved and by having the participants as clients (owner of the challenge) as well as advisors (experts).
At the end there was a large list of solutions and the participants decided to choose individually on what they do as a next step. The evaluation sheets show that the event was overall useful for the participants, but it did not fully reduce the feeling of not being confident with training peer coaching themselves. They will try to practice and exercise further in order to spread peer coaching within the organization. EmployID will try to support this as much as possible and the last years plan for implementation of peer coaching in CES was drafted after the workshop. The plan still needs to be specified, further elaborated and discussed and agreed with the CES management.
