An e-mail inquiry and a Globe & Mail article last week, converged to illustrate the rapidly growing need for organizations to significantly boost their coaching and development skill-building efforts.

The Globe & Mail article proclaimed that “a growing number of employees now want a lifetime commitment with one organization.” The piece cites recent studies by Towers Watson and Kelly Services showing that “after years of workers thinking of themselves as free agents the tide has turned.” Around the world a rapidly shifting number of people are looking for long term relationships. That conclusion forms the article’s title, “Employer, will you marry me?CLICK HERE to read it (as long as The Globe & Mail keeps the link freely available.)

Just as our economies begin to recover, the bulge of aging baby boomers will be retiring. So a new generation of frontline and management staff will rapidly need to be developed. And that newer generation is now yearning to love their work and organization, and be shown genuine care and commitment in return.

This demonstrates both a tremendous opportunity and a critical threat for forward-thinking executives as they build their organization for growth over the next few years. The CLEMMER Group is getting a rising number of inquiries for help with coaching, training, succession planning, personal growth, and leadership development.

Last month’s e-mail inquiry for consulting and training help read in part:

“…we’re heavily invested in the talent management process. Similar to many organizations, many of our managers are getting close to retirement and we realize the urgency to identify high potentials within the organization and be able to provide leadership opportunities for them through formal methods as well as through informal processes such as coaching and mentoring.

We are looking for help with coaching skills for our 75 managers and creating a culture of coaching.”

This Client’s inquiry is very timely since we’ve developed an extensive series of highly customized modules, programs, and services around coaching skills and culture in the past few years. One critical question is whether this organization wants a training workshop to build awareness and the need for coaching on a leadership foundation (such as connecting around organizational competencies, values, performance management system, etc.) or a narrower and deeper dive right into practical coaching skills.

In the first case, the broader awareness session can be done with 75 participants at one time. The second approach is much more effective if the group size is about 25 participants so they can get into more intimate and tailored practice and application sessions.

Another critical element in building a culture of coaching is involving senior management in before and/or after preparation and follow-up sessions to increase culture alignment and accountability.

You can peruse a series of my articles and excerpts on Coaching and Developing and Training and Development. I’ll be addressing “Why Most Training Fails” in my next blog post.