CoachFest - Talent is Everywhere, Coaching Opportunity Isn’t

In an ever-changing and progressively unsettled environment, coaching is a critical and impactful tool to effectively support, motivate and nurture all employees. The intrinsic purpose of coaching is to build self-belief, self-awareness and self-management. To ensure people are equipped to innovate, thrive and collaborate in a highly complex and diverse work environment. However, is the coaching offered fit for purpose for ALL employees? How do you effectively coach someone whose culture, sexual identity, family background, religious background, social class, or physical or neurological characteristics are very different from yours?

This session explores why coaching through a wider systemic lens of inclusion, belonging and equity is becoming crucial to serving a diverse population and covers:

• what is coaching through a lens of diversity, inclusion, belonging and equity?
• why we need to understand and acknowledge the importance of the lived experience in coaching
• the danger of performance management being cloaked as performance coaching
• why equality, diversity, inclusion and belonging (EDIB) in coaching should be part of the environmental, social and governance (ESG) agenda
• why we need to offer a diverse pool of coaches to everyone
• why all talent needs access to ‘high quality’ coaching

Salma Shah is the founder of the unique award-winning Mastering Your Power – a certified coach training programme designed with a wider systemic lens of diversity, inclusion, belonging and equity. She has been coaching clients and delivering workshops for over twenty years.

As well as developing coaches and leaders, Salma addresses the specific complex systemic challenges faced by global organisations; moving from transactional performance coaching to transformative coaching that enables professional and personal development for all. Her approach is an invitation to dig deeper into what it really means to be inclusive and create equitable and diverse organisations. Salma’s expertise has helped a number of companies, including the Co-op Group, John Lewis Partnership, Pearson, Skipton Building Society, Infor, Oxford University Press, the British Transport Police and the Metropolitan Police.

Acting as a game changer, Salma is passionate about unlocking the hidden potential for all members of a team, sowing the seeds of long-lasting confidence, developing healthy resilience, common connection and purpose.

Salma is also author of Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging in Coaching, which was shortlisted for the 2023 Business Book Awards, and has been described as ‘timely, challenging and compassionate’.