A Coaching Model Created by Marie Lenail-Chouteau
(Corporate Coach, MALAYSIA)
Guiding co-creative and effective coaching partnership for activation and austainability of performance.
The 5A Coaching Model is a holistic process based on a sustainable and effective co-creating partnership between the client and the coach.
Both the coach and the client are mutually responsible for the coaching process. The coach is responsible to create an environment where clients can flourish, to set a strategic and positive learning environment where clients can discover new ways of thinking and overcome challenges.
The client’s responsibilities are to be willing to know more about themselves, to be willing to change, to move forward and to seek improvements.
The 5A Coaching Model is a powerful process to help clients to improve their performance, develop their potential, and follow a process of empowerment for a greater professional and personal development.
The 5A Coaching Model framework
Co-creating partnership principle
The coach creates a collaborative and supportive space where clients feel comfortable to share their experience and feelings and where the coach challenges the clients to make them consider moving beyond their comfort zone.
Master in building genuine and valuable coaching partnerships, the coach wants to understand the client’s feelings, goals, fears and dreams.
The co-creating relationship has four main core values. Confidentiality, accountability, integrity and trust are the key-components of a sustainable and effective partnership:
- Confidentiality: the coach creates a safe environment where the clients can share their thoughts in a 100% confidential space, “all what is said in this room, stay in this room”.
- Accountability: the coach holds the clients accountable and responsible while they work on their behavior, approach, or attitude. The coach helps the clients to take the ownership of anything they commit to.
- Integrity: the coach shows commitment to the clients, ethics and best practice in the coaching profession.
- Trust: the coach is transparent about the process and provides a safe space for clients where they can develop the ownership of that process.
Potential growth principle
The coach believes in the potential of the clients and helps them to identify their potential, their strengths and hidden talents.
The 5A Coaching Model helps clients to be improvement and growth oriented. Through developing a positive and productive mindset based on qualities and strengths and not deficiencies, the clients feel more confident in reaching their goals and overcome challenges.
Pro-active process principle
In today’s organization, proactive behavior is an increasingly important component of performance. The coach helps clients to take conscious control over their professional and personal environments, to set goals and find innovative ways to achieve them. The pro-active process principle is all about developing a “problem anticipating” and productive mindset. It helps clients to develop their ability to visualize alternative responses.
Having this habit to anticipate problems, helps to create a high level of energy needed for breaking through any obstacles and blocks.
Learning approach principle
The power of coaching is to give the opportunity to clients to learn from themselves, from their successes and failures. They design their own solutions to solve problems; they take decisions, which are aligned with their values and purpose.
The 5A Coaching Model gives to clients the opportunity to learn during the whole process, to learn for themselves and discover their own knowledge and strengths.
One of the coach’s roles is to show to clients how curiosity of learning is powerful and create value.
Outcome focused principle
Without outcome, the goal is not achieved. The 5A Coaching Model allows the coach to checking-in with clients throughout the process on the steps they have undertaken and the goals they have accomplished.
By being outcome focused, clients are more able to implement changes in their lives/workplace and therefor increase their productivity.
The 5A Coaching Model process
Gaining Awareness helps clients to have a better understanding of their professional and personal identity, who they are and how they interact with other people. By being focus on the self and not others, clients start to build their own pathway and to lead their lives.
A great way to develop self-awareness is to identify values that clients believe are important in the way they live and work.
Through Values identification clients:
- Look at the relationship to themself, what they do for their work and others,
- Draw their professional identity, determine priorities,
- Explore where their source of energy come from,
- Develop a better understanding of the root causes to successes and failures,
- Know better whom they are, how they behave and therefore take decisions, which are aligned with their values and true goals.
Self-awareness is one of the greatest quality in the workplace. It helps clients to better understand how they react to events. They are able to go through the process of feeling, recognizing and validating emotions they have when reacting to a particular event, and make these reactions useful.
Activating Ambition is the idea of expanding client’s horizons and remove any obstacles to achieve performance and success. Clients will work on developing the eagerness to achieve their goals.
For activating this ambition, clients have to design their own vision, which inspire and energize them.
By going through the process of designing their vision, clients will work on:
- Expectations: What do the clients want their career to be? How do they see themselves in 6 months, 3 years?
- Definition of ultimate success: How does success look like for the client?
- Motivation sources: What give the client energy to achieve their goals?
- Obstacles: What is holding clients back from reaching their goals? Looking at the blocks, which keep clients away from success, how to overcome them?
- True purpose: clients will work on finding more meaning to their career and answers to the “why” question. They will work on what are their missions within the organization.
- Talents and strengths: What strengths/talents do they need to develop, improve and adjust to make it stick to their missions, purpose and vision.
Identifying values and defining a vision are part of a strategy clients will put in place to reach their goals and overpower their missions.
Designing Alignment contributes to close the gaps between the “where I want to be?” (purpose, vision, missions) and “where am I?” (current situation).
Through powerful questioning around the “where am I” question and active listening the coach investigate client’s current situation and help them to open up to new ways of thinking. The coach is also a consistent reminder of real priorities
Creativity and curiosity are great tools to help clients to feel comfortable to embrace what seems to be the uncomfortable. The coach supports clients to reinvent themselves by creating new and innovative solutions to overcome obstacles.
This stage is also a great occasion to align the corporate environment and values with the personal development of employees and how to make them stick.
Taking Action is a very important stage in the coaching process. By using the 5A Coaching Model, the coach inspires action to clients and helps them to feel comfortable with change and new habits. Success is all about taking action. Now what actions do clients take to overcome their challenges?
Clients will explore and identify the action milestones needed to reach their true goals and perform at their peak. It is important to understand that no milestone exists in isolation; clients must to have in mind the broad overview and see it as a system. One of the coach’s roles is to regularly checking-in with clients throughout the process if the direction taken suits the overall vision and aim.
The coach will emphasize the importance of experiencing, practicing, taking control and putting in place on a permanent basis a life/management style change and transform it into a good habit.
The 5A Coaching Model is strategic and positive learning oriented and will contribute to make the learning stick and transferable to real life/workplace.
Manifesting Appreciation help clients to reflect on the process and the experience. When the clients manifest appreciation, they use the action to create the learning, investigate feelings during the process, evaluate the results and celebrate.
Before being at ease with manifesting appreciation and making it a valuable stage of the process, clients need to learn and practice it.
This quality helps to:
- Identify takeaways, be able to appreciate both the process and the results,
- Make the experience valuable and be improvement and future oriented,
- Maintain the level of performance,
- Develop the sense of achievement.
The 5A Coaching Model helps clients to be the best they can be in their lives and the workplace. As the Model is a holistic approach, the idea is to keep clients active in their search for performance.
The coach creates an environment where clients take time to reflect on the process and the results. The coach encourages the clients to be future oriented and think about the next goals to reach, to keep in mind the sentence “I am not arrived yet” e.g. “I do not see the result as the very end but I appreciate it and look at the next goals”. This future oriented thinking help clients to develop a positive and continuous improvement mindset.