Webinars - latest web support offerings to help

If you plan on team coaching or facilitating action learning sets online these online tools will give acceptable results for free or reliable, professional results for a fee:

•  Skype or Skype for Business (formerly Lync)

  The article covers when you might need to start paying for a professional Skype for Business service and also the limitations to free Skype

•  15 Best Webinar Products from the Web

  What it says in the title from the Elegant Themes Blog by Nathan Weller. Thanks Nathan.

• Appear.in

  Video conversations with up to 8 people for free.
  No login required — no installs

• GoToWebinar

  Very reliable but a monthly fee. 
  
• ON24
  
  Apparently the market leader - with a free entry model
  
• Google Hangouts
  Another great article by Pat Flynn at Smart Passive Income Blog about using Google Hangouts to deliver webinars for your online business.

eCoaching for Millennials should work well

This article from Work Force Insider shows what trends are emerging in the wants and needs of Millennials who are becoming the largest part of the current working population. Any companies wishing to succeed through staff engagement (all of the successful ones!) need to take notice.



Millennials want balance and options to telecommute for example. They also want to be developed so coaching and mentoring beat management dictating policy. So the clear match here is for companies to offer remote coaching or eCoaching to more of it's workforce than has traditionally been the case.

My only misgiving about the article is that the things listed as Millennial "wants" I am sure that other groups want too. Maybe Millennials are less likely to tolerate poor treatment from employers and simply demand a better work life balance.

So you want "Innovation" - what do you mean by Innovation?

When someone mentions coaching and there are so many different views expressed about what coaching is that the only rational response is to ask them to say what they mean by "Coaching".
The same holds true for "Innovation". It is always a good idea to first agree what was meant by "Innovation".

For me it also helps to say what it is not.

Again a personal view is that Innovation is not:

1. Creativity - although it's helpful to have some of that in the mix
2. Invention - another great thing to have when trying to innovate but not the whole story
3. Ideas - you can't have innovation without good ideas but the idea isn't all of innovation
4. A new spin in product or service marketing - no matter how clever!

To have an innovation you have to bring together the ideas, execution and delivery of the value from that novel idea. flying car might be novel ( they did flying cars in the 1950s), it might be different from all other personal aviation solutions before, but if it's not actually on sale and being used by people in numbers greater than the Sinclair C5, in my view it remains an invention and not an innovation.

So much for my view of innovation. There are many different types of innovation, beyond the most commonly used radical or distruptive innovations. This web article lists 15 types and describes them very well from the wonderfully named blog "The Gentle Art of Smart Stealing":

15 Types of Innovation

How to improve performance of remote workers

This article asks is your business ready for remote working?

http://blogs.technet.com/b/work/archive/2014/02/16/the-true-value-of-the-remote-worker.aspx

When you have a significant out of office team, and large international companies have this already,  put some thought into how that team and it's individuals will be developed.  For senior directors and managers, remote coaching is a highly effective way of increasing performance through increased reflection, clarity and focused actions resulting from the opportunity for reflection during the sessions.

Remote coaching offers:
- Cost effective development of remote staff, wherever they work
- Convenient timing
- Reduced staff isolation when working remotely
- improved performance

Ideas not needed !

Many people still associate innovation with idea creation.  Innovation is much more than that as shown in this article which includes results of a US business survey of needs around the innovation arena:
https://innovationnews.com/wow-ideas-are-not-the-problem-new-data-just-in/

As they say '10% inspiration and 90% perspiration' - good teams and hard work implementing new ideas is what most companies need help with.

See Oxford Innovation's Open Improvement service.

Can we achieve a good coaching relationship with only texts or emails?

Today I had the pleasure to speak at some length about the e-coaching process proposed by e-CoachPro with one of the founders of e-CoachPro, Anne Ribbers.

Anne Ribbers and Alexander Waringa created e-CoachPro as a platform to support the training, accreditation of text based e-coaches, and the following client engagement on a remote basis. Backed by a research grant from the Dutch government the eCoachPro team have researched writing based coach to client interaction for leadership development purposed.

Take a look at the new English translated site for eCoachPro.

Although many e-Coaches use telephone, video coaching (via Skype for example), Anne has seen coaches who have ceased to use video coaching after experiencing the strong, productive relationships developed with clients using this flexible written word only approach.