Coaching Through Times of Personal Change

Most HR professionals understand that a lot can change throughout the lifecycle of any single employee. Employees can go through many ups and downs of different magnitudes during their term. Today’s Workers likely encounter personal stresses, including pregnancy, becoming a new parent, marriage, divorce, caregiving, grief, starting a new career, and retirement. Major personal life events like these can significantly impact an employee’s work and life. It’s likely that at any given time, a handful of employees on the team are facing private challenges and responding to personal circumstances while also trying to show up to work as invested as possible. 

HR professionals seek ways to support employees when they find themselves at various points of personal challenge or evolution. One goal is to shape a productive work plan around the individual variables influencing an employee’s outlook and capacity. 

Coaches as First Responders to Personal Change 

Personal and professional coaches are teaming up with HR to work with employees continuously, letting workers keep developing themselves and steadily increasing their value to the organization no matter what comes their way. Coaches are uniquely positioned to support employees in times of personal change.

• They have a trusting, intimate relationship with the employee.
• They regularly ask introspective questions, prompting productive reflection. 
• They’re highly intuitive and can sense when the employee is “off” on some level.
• They provide sound advice and actionable steps that give employees a sense of power over their circumstances.
• They have loads of experience navigating change, challenges, and emotional responses.

HR and Coaching Alignment 

Employees can lean on a coach through life fluctuations to help them do a new self-assessment that can uncover new needs, goals, and passions. Then, the coach can make helpful suggestions that HR may need to prepare. This can mean that HR is willing to support employees in the following ways.

• Adjusting their job function 
• Layering in certain priorities 
• Lateral moves across departments
• Offering work-life flexibility and mobility 
• Adding or removing responsibility, and 
• Evaluating which perks the employee values

Personal change can be very positive and positively affect work performance if both a business coach and the HR team stand ready to support the employee. Both can help employees make the most of the new perspectives they’ve gained, and coaches can help them carry these perspectives through future career phases.  

Leadership Coaching to Raise Personal Connection 

Managers can reach out to employees in addition to coaches. There’s no way to know if or how the employee has changed inside or what prompted the change unless managers find out through healthy dialogue. Changes in employee behavior can point to the condition, but behavior isn’t always a reliable prediction. Managers need to keep a running tab on employees, checking in with them about how they’re doing personally. 

Leadership coaches can help managers create environments where modest personal information sharing is expected for a healthy team. They need to convey their willingness to make adjustments that help employees continue to meet expectations while enabling them to meet personal needs. Managers of teams can discuss the importance of open communication in meetings, emails, and one-on-ones, encouraging their employees to share personal concerns whenever they come up. Resolving any personal issues publicly in front of other team members can be especially helpful for highlighting a people-first work culture and leadership style and bringing the team closer. 

The Coach’s Path to Progress Through Personal Change

The coaching relationship can bring expert clarity to managing personal changes within oneself or an employee on the team. Personal changes can create a lot of unnecessary worry and stress if an employee or their manager lacks the skills to navigate them. But good preparation helps people in working teams handle any issues brought on by personal change productively and compassionately. Coaching about personal change can include skills such as 

• creative thinking 
• flexible leadership 
• tactful communication
• conscientious decision-making
• having a solution-oriented mindset
• career advancement

Employees who already work with a professional coach as part of their career development offerings stand to navigate personal change quite well, even leveraging their shifting attitudes and feelings to move into a new phase of productivity in their careers and lives. A manager who handles personal changes of the team skillfully likely has a high-performing, highly engaged team. 

Coaches can prepare leaders and employees to perform well professionally through potential twists and turns in their personal lives. New environmental influencers are already on the horizon. Leadership and career coaching can protect and strengthen organizations through personal change by shaping effective responses to the inevitable.

The TaskHuman Global Coaching Platform offers a multi-layer approach where professionals can find career development coaches and coaches who specialize in different aspects of health and well-being. The depth of coaching options enables individuals to treat their symptoms and the root cause of personal stressors through multiple coaching relationships. Personal change happens to everyone; it doesn’t have to be isolating. TaskHuman Coaches can help.