Kingsley Aikins, CEO of The Networking Institute, was drawn to the UCD Smurfit Executive Development Coaching for Impact at Work course by a desire to add coaching skills to his already highly developed repertoire.
“I am a trainer rather than a coach,” he explains. “I had wanted to do a coaching course for a long time. It was almost a bucket list thing. I wanted to understand the coaching process. I didn’t have sufficient appreciation for the difference between it and training. A trainer delivers content and people absorb it or they don’t. Coaching is about conversations and there is reciprocity in it. The person being coached has the answers to the questions being asked of them and to the questions they are asking. I wanted to understand the difference between the two. And I decided that I might want to be more of a coach in what I do.”
What Aikins does is train people in those skills which they don’t acquire during their formal education, key soft skills he found necessary to acquire during his own career as a regional director with Enterprise Ireland and CEO of the Worldwide Ireland Funds.
“I worked in six countries over a 30-year career and I started off by hating networking,” he recalls. “I thought it was a rather greasy, slimy activity carried out late at night by people flicking out business cards at a ferocious rate. However, I soon came to appreciate that networking is not a luxury but a necessity. For career progress it is not a ‘nice to have’ it’s a ‘must have’. I realised that when you go to a country where you know nobody you need a strong and diverse network to survive and thrive.”
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When he returned to Ireland, he found himself in demand to give talks to organisations where he would explain what he did. “I realised that nobody was teaching networking and I started working on it with banks and other financial services organisations, law firms, and so on. Graduates can be highly skilled in their subject area but can be very poor when it comes to soft skills. I began to develop some intellectual property around it. I put videos online, created courses, and built a business which became The Networking Institute.”
He found the Coaching for Impact at Work course helpful in his own business in a number of ways. “How do you engage in a conversation rather than delivering content?” he asks. “The course helped to put a shape onto a soft topic. Not all schools and colleges teach subject matter like empathy, attitude, resilience and emotional intelligence. Sometimes, it can be just about the lone ranger knowledge acquisition, rather than learning key skills, so the person can go out and start work.”
And that’s where networking comes in as well. “A lot of people don’t realise that the technical skills and qualifications that got them their job become less important as time goes on while their ability to form relationships becomes more important. Connections with people matter more. People have to know about this and understand it.”
His choice of the UCD Smurfit Executive Development course was influenced by personal knowledge and experience. “I was very familiar with UCD Smurfit School and have taught on its MBA programmes. I’m not in a position to do a 10-month programme and the three day course suited me very well. Also, I live 50 metres from the UCD Smurfit campus. It’s a super venue in an outstanding location. The faculty and staff are terrific; they are really great people.”
While short in duration, the course involved a lot of work. “I was quite tired by the end of the course. You are concentrating all the way through and need to really immerse yourself in the three-days. It’s about being aware of being aware and really being present; being conscious of listening as an activity, rather than hearing. There is real depth to these things.”
The course participants also made a great contribution to his experience. “There was an interesting mix of people in the group. There was a lot of different experience there. We were all on the journey to learn about coaching. Everyone had different reasons for doing the course, but we got on well. There was a great esprit de corps, and we became very friendly with each other over the three days.”
He has been able to put learnings from the programme into practice in his own work. “I came away with a much greater appreciation of the difference between coaching and training. I’ve been able to take elements of that and apply it to the work that I do. Subsequent to the course I did a number of workshops for corporate clients. I took different elements from the course and applied them to those workshops. Techniques like reflection and being a better listener were very useful. I was able to use them straight away. They were early wins for me. I developed a new online training course that uses some of the concepts and I am currently writing a book on networking and will use some elements in that as well.”
He has no hesitation in recommending the course to others. “I certainly would, particularly if they are going through the same thought process that I was. You don’t have to commit to 10 months. It’s a first step in learning about coaching, a very good toe in the water. It gives a very good snapshot of what the whole thing is about. For a lot of people, the evolution is from management to leading. That’s a big step and this course helps with it.”
The next intake of Coaching for Impact at Work takes place from 8th - 10th May 2023.