One of the things that increasingly frustrates me is how development professionals have come to make a distinction between coaching someone to develop their leadership skills and coaching someone to manage their career.

Typically, we use the term Leadership Coaching to describe a deliberate and personalised process to promote the leadership growth of an individual and drive the necessary performance and progress in the organisation.

We use the term Career Coaching when addressing individual's career concerns, abilities, potential, career choices and career decisions.

What we don't recognise is the connection between the two.  In my experience, when coaching talented, ambitious individuals in high-growth, changing organisations, the two are not distinct.  And nor should they be.

That's why I use the term Talent Coaching.

Talent Coaching takes a holistic approach looking at the individual in the context of the organisation.

Talent Coaching focuses on the individual helping them develop clarity on who they are, what they have to offer the organisation and what they want from their career.

But it doesn't do that in isolation.

Talent Coaching also focuses on the organisation looking at what it needs from its leaders and what success looks like from the perspective of all the different stakeholders.

So the desired goals and outcomes of the coaching recognise and address the ambitions of the individual while being firmly rooted in the context of the business and directly connected to delivering the business plan.

Talent Coaching helps skilled and ambitious individuals implement strategies to develop their career by developing the organisation.