By Liz Hall
Kuwait hosted its second coaching conference in May, attracting delegates from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Dubai, as well as Kuwait.
Although the concept of coaching is relatively new in Kuwait and the Gulf States, several speakers were able to link coaching principles with Islamic principles.
Speakers included Waleed Al-Tararwa, chief HR officer at mobile telecommunications provider VIVA, who spoke on building a coaching culture through staff engagement: “The combination of behaviour, values, directing, influencing and managing, encouraging others and communicating effectively.”
He said VIVA developed a coaching culture to help it identify talented individuals and build a quality team from within, help executives focus more on staff engagement, build a high-performing environment where high achievers can grow, and to enable and foster the organisation to respond to change.
The advantages of a coaching culture include fostering a learning organisation, identifying a new pool of leaders, minimising cost and maximising profit and developing customer-orientated quality services delivery, he said.
The conference, which had the theme, Maximize the Power of Your Human Capital, was held on 6-7 May, and was sponsored by Gulf Lead Consultants, Safir International Hotels Limited and K-Lue Kuwait.
Vikki Brock kicked off the conference with a keynote address on executive coaching, Raghad Al-Motabaggani from the Woman Training Academy, spoke about the benefits of the GROW coaching model to improve performance, and Nic Woodthorpe-Wright addressed “ethics as the cornerstone of the
coaching industry”.
Day two focused on organisational coaching, with Norma Nielsen’s keynote on ‘Manager as coach: managing people in a complex world.’
Raja Yousef Al-Laho, Kuwait’s first ICF accredited coach, spoke about organisational coaching. It is her vision that coaching be an integral part of Kuwait society. Abdalla Al-Jurf, training and development senior specialist at the National Water Company, Saudi Arabia, shared the Wheel of Life model and Nadia Al Attar introduced delegates to ‘Multi-modal coaching – coaching in logical levels.’
Kuwait’s third annual coaching conference is scheduled for March 2013.
Volume 7, issue 4