ITD World empowers CEOs, business leaders to become life, innovation, executive coaches

ITD World president and CEO Dr. Peter Chee talks about how executives should listen with empathy, ask the right questions, and encourage and appreciate people to effectively coach their employees towards achieving sustainable success and holistic happiness.

Top-level leaders, entrepreneurs, and HR, organizational development and training professionals discovered different life coaching, innovation coaching, and executive coaching techniques during the CEO, HR, and Senior Leaders Conference held at the Crowne Plaza Manila Galleria in Ortigas Center, Pasig City.

The one-day conference is an ITD Mega Guru event that featured world-renowned executive coach Dr. Marshall Goldsmith, ITD World president and CEO Dr. Peter Chee, and ITD World Philippines country head Serely Alcaraz as they shared insights on how executives can achieve ultimate results and happiness not only in their jobs but also in their personal lives.

Life coaching

The 1^st Asian ranked among the top 6 global coaching gurus, Dr. Chee engaged participants on how strategic coaching, executive coaching, and life coaching can be used to achieve sustainable success and holistic happiness. Emphasizing on life coaching as the key to sustainable and holistic love, happiness, and success, the ITD World president and CEO shared six “must do’s” for executives as a life coaching tool: listen fully and deeply, ask the right questions, appreciate and encourage, use positive voice and body language, simplify and focus on what’s important, and move to action and commitment.

Dr. Chee noted there are three important life coaching must do’s that Filipinos can adopt— encourage and appreciate people, ask the right questions, and listen with empathy. “The coach makes the coachee feel like a champion by appreciating and encouraging them, and by asking them the right questions to unleash their power and unlimited potential. Through listening to them with empathy, a coach can really pull out what’s best in them.”

Innovation coaching

Leaders play a crucial role in coaching to achieve breakthrough results in product development and service improvement. For #1 master trainer and ITD World chief coach Alcaraz, this begins with establishing an innovation coaching culture within an organization. This includes crafting an innovation strategy, championing innovation, allocating resources, developing innovation skills, providing management rewards and metrics, cultivating the culture, involving the enterprise, and collaborating with customers and stakeholders.

The second step in innovation coaching is ideation or generating creative ideas that can improve an organization’s product, service, process, or strategy, even in the face of competition. Among the ideation methods presented were mind mapping, wherein Alcaraz challenged executives to not only “think outside of the box” but to completely remove the “box” in coming up with ideas and solutions. Through a short exercise, the attendees were also introduced to Brainwriting, an activity where people in a group take turns in providing new and unique ideas on a key topic.

Alcaraz also talked about SCAMMPERR, a set of innovation techniques that can help executives find new ways to improve their product or service. SCAMMPERR stands for substitute, combine, adapt, magnify, modify, put to another use, eliminate, rearrange, and reverse.

The third step in innovation coaching involves subjecting selected ideas to “throughputs”, a development cycle wherein product ideas undergo research and refinement, rapid prototyping, testing, further research and refinement, solution development, pilot testing, additional research and refinement, and launch. “Throughputs is not so much about being thorough. Aim for quick wins. Don’t take too long about doing this because you still have results evaluation and building customer acceptance which is equally important in introducing a new product or service,” Alcaraz cautioned.

Executive coaching

In his executive coaching session, Dr. Marshall Goldsmith focused on improving or changing a person’s behavior as he talked about the feedforward exercise as a tool for coaching and learning from employees. It encourages leaders, decision makers and people from all levels of the organization to let go of the past and focus on future goals, offer ideas and help as much as they can, and listen to suggestions without judging and learn as much as they can.

World-renowned executive coach, Dr. Marshall Goldsmith, talks about the advantage of the feedforward exercise, as it teaches business leaders and entrepreneurs to focus on future goals and get as much help and learning as they can, especially from their employees.

The best-selling author also outlined guidelines on how everyone in an organization can change their behavior and develop themselves to become good leaders, at work and at home. The guidelines include asking others how one can be a better person, listening to suggestions or advice, thinking things first before doing something, thanking others for their help, responding to suggestions through positive actions, involving support groups to help achieve their goals, changing for the better, and following up on the goals.

Among these, Dr, Goldsmith sees three guidelines that Filipinos can readily adopt—asking, responding, and following up on suggestions. “Filipinos tend to be hesitant to give negative feedback, face-to-face. So, I like confidential feedback and if leaders ask for these, it is very important to teach them how to respond to feedback, to talk about what they want to improve. Then on the follow-up, especially important here is what I call a feedforward, where they ask for ideas which is much more positive.”

The CEO, HR, and Senior Leaders Conference was presented by ITD World, the global leadership development expert, with event partners IT & Business Process Association of the Philippines, Philippine Society for Training & Development, Asia Select Culture Solutions Company, Stratworks Marketing Communications and National Book Store, and exclusive media partner ANC. For inquiries, email itdmanila@itdworld.com, call (632) 887-7428, or visit www.itdworld.com.