62 EXECUTIVE COACHING employee who wants to be coached on any agenda of their choice. I personally experience a lot of joy and learn a lot, coaching the youth and leaders alike. In my personal experience, I find coaching at the mid-management level most relevant to business benefit. Meaningfully designed coaching programs and journeys can positively impact business performance and shape the future leaders of tomorrow. Digitisation in coaching tome simply means, finding a way to integrate technological advancements with systemic change & coaching needs for an organisation. For example, as the scale of any organisation grows, talent development and talent retention become two key business priorities. Developing the new talent and retaining existent ones becomes essential. Coaching alone can provide that singular and personalised approach for every employee to feel heard, enable high performance, realise their full potential and thereby enhance the sense of belongingness talent feels towards their organisation. Digitisation would enable ‘anytime’ and ‘anywhere’ coaching. No employee has to wait in a queue or be part of a select few to be coached irrespective of their time zone, location or the nature of the coaching dilemma. If you have a clear understanding of your business priorities, a closely aligned coaching strategy can create the requisite impact by creating a landing strip for the emerging future of any organisation. I invite all the leaders across the globe to suspend their voice of judgment, connect with their inner Priyanka, you are a Professional Certified Coach credentialed by the International Coaching Federation. What does being a coach mean to you? Coaching in its true sense offers a non-judgmental space for any individual. Being a coach, to me, means holding that safe space for my coachees and/or clients. A conversation, which empowers them to bring their most authentic selves to their coach. An engagement, from which they walk out feeling empowered and ‘wowed’ with themselves. You are very passionate about institutionalising coaching as a strategic function within organisations. Can you tell us more? I feel very passionately about taking coaching from its current state, which is usually a small group of coaches attempting to coach a select few leaders in silos, to institutionalising coaching via democratising and digitising it as an offering within organisations and making it accessible to all employees. This disruption in the coaching industry is imminent. By democratising coaching, we are enhancing the accessibility of coaching across all levels within an organisation. Coaching should not be available only to a select few. In fact, most organisations think of only ‘leadership or executive’ interventions and programs as they think of coaching. Coaching, instead, should be available to any sense of curiosity & wonder and ask themselves, ‘What has not been tried in coaching yet within our organisation?’ What is your opinion on the use of Artificial Intelligence in coaching? I see polarised views when it comes to the utility of artificial intelligence in coaching. We cannot overlook the fact that the ‘A’ in AI stands for artificial and coaching in its true sense means having a very ‘humane’ interaction. Having said that, I do see organisations experimenting with focused use cases to bring these technological advancements in coaching to support growing scale and widen the reach of coaching to serve their people. One must be extremely intuitive to hold a coaching conversation, exercise deep listening and ask powerful questions that challenge the coachee and provoke insight generation within them. Continual understanding of evolving human behaviour combined with the use of innovation in artificial intelligence would be the right direction to explore for the coaching industry. Even if organisations institutionalise coaching, will a coaching department be able to service all coaching needs within the organisation? Yes! It will take a lot of effort, patience, and technological advancement to build a sustainable coaching practice, but it can definitely be done. In my opinion, relational grounding always helps.
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