Coaching

• Professors, faculty members with a venia docendi, faculty members with academic leadership responsibilities, post-doctoral researchers returning from a leave of absence

• Heads of WU’s service units

Coaching, as we see it, is a type of personalized, goal- and solution-oriented, temporary support measure – usually for leaders and supervisors – focusing on specific work-related issues.

• Personalized means that we primarily offer one-on-one coaching (team coaching is an option as part of our personnel development advisory services for WU units). Personalized coaching also means that our coaching services are not intended to provide ready-made, one-size-fits-all solutions. Instead, our coaches work with you to find approaches that are tailored to your specific needs.

• You formulate one (or more) specific question(s) that serve as a starting point for the coaching process and define the goals to be achieved. On this basis, coaching techniques will be selected that are likely to yield appropriate solutions to help you achieve your goals.

• Personalized, goal-oriented one-on-one coaching is very efficient. A coaching session usually lasts 50 to 90 minutes. Depending on the type and scope of the issue(s), the coaching process may comprise one or several coaching sessions. Experience shows that usually no more than seven sessions are necessary.

• Coaching requires your active participation, from identifying a specific issue from your work to be discussed during the coaching process to developing goals and adequate solutions together with your coach. We believe that it’s not coaching if you just sit back and have somebody tell you how certain things should be done – in our opinion that would be consulting, but not coaching.

• Coaching is not therapy – it is not intended to address private issues, your personality, or your childhood. Coaching focuses on job-related issues.

Different coaches work differently, and coaching sessions are highly personalized, so it’s hard to describe in general terms what a typical coaching looks like. Frequently, coaching processes include the following elements:

1. Introduction: getting to know each other and warming up, building trust, discussing open questions and the basic conditions of the coaching

2. Exploration: You describe the issues at hand, the relevant questions, and the problems.

3. Defining goals

4. Finding solutions: Your coach will work with you develop possible solutions.

5. Conclusion: You identify specific steps to be taken and evaluate whether the goals of the coaching have been met.

Coaching services can be used to deal with such a wide variety of different issues that we can only give a short overview of what we have found to be particularly frequent topics and problems:

• Dealing with contradictory expectations regarding professional roles

• Dealing with stress and stressful situations •Getting used to new responsibilities or a new position

• Assistance with regard to complex decisions

• Processes of change

• Finding new ways of dealing with familiar situations

• Dealing with the challenges of leadership

• Team dynamics

• etc.

Are you unsure if coaching may help you to resolve a specific issue you’re struggling with? Contact us or the coach of your choice for a preparatory meeting and find out!

• New perspectives

• Stepping out of the context of your day-to-day work into an appreciative and non-competitive environment

• Working with an impartial, competent sparring partner who will help you deal with your challenges

• Recommendations, tips, and new ideas to break up old routines that may have become an obstacle in certain situations

1. Please get in touch with your contact at the Personnel Development and Planning Office. After the first meeting, we will recommend 2-4 suitable coaches. We won’t ask you to go into detail about the issue you’d like to address or any problems you’d like to resolve – you decide how much you’d like to tell us. As a general rule, all matters concerning your coaching process are kept strictly confidential. It is always up to you to decide if and how much you’d like to tell others about the coaching process.

2. Please contact the coach of your choice and arrange the date of the first meeting. During this session, you will make an agreement with your coach regarding the expected number of coaching sessions required to deal with the issue. Please complete the “Application for coaching services” form together with your coach and send it to your contact at the PDP Office.If you have any doubts or second thoughts after the first meeting, you can of course select a different coach.
   Please note that we can only cover the costs of coaching services that have been given prior approval by the PDP Office.




3. We will consider your application and approve as many coaching sessions as the budget allows. We will inform you and the coach about the number of coaching sessions that have been approved.

4. After that, you’re free to arrange sessions with your coach.

5. The coach will send us his or her invoice.The invoice will not contain any information about you, the coachee.

6. We will inform you when we’ve received the coaching invoice or check back with you if we haven’t heard from your coaching process in a while. You don’t have to use up all the coaching sessions that have been approved. If you feel that a sufficient degree of closure has been achieved and that you don’t need any further coaching sessions, you don’t have to arrange any further meetings. In that case, please let us (and ideally also your coach) know that you would like to end the coaching process. If you need coaching services again at some point in the future, you can submit a new application at any time. This also means that there is no need to save coaching sessions for later – you don’t need to keep coaching sessions for later if you’d rather use them now. If you run out of approved coaching sessions or need a new coaching process at a later point, please simply get in touch with us.

7. Once the coaching process has ended, we’ll ask you to complete a feedback form. This is very important for quality assurance, so please note that the PDP Office can only pay your coaching invoice if you complete the evaluation form. If you have to pay a deductible (see following section), we will send you a bill.

 

• You’ll only have to pay a deductible of 30€ per coaching session (50-60 min) (if the coaching was given prior approval by the PDP Office and you’ve completed the feedback form). Employees who have just started out in a position with leadership responsibilities are exempt from the deductible and can use our coaching services free of charge.

• You can either pay the deductible yourself or your unit can cover the costs from its budget.

• No travel expenses are charged for coaching sessions held in Vienna. Please note that the PDP Office cannot cover any travel expenses your coach may charge for sessions held outside Vienna.

 

• Confidentiality:
  

  • Trust between the coach and the client is absolutely essential for a successful coaching process. Whatever you discuss with your coach must remain between you and your coach. It goes without saying that any information you disclose to the PDP Office during the process of selecting a suitable coach will also be treated as confidential.

  • We’ll also make sure that your name does not appear on any invoices and bills and that you cannot be identified as the coachee during the administrative processes involved. If you’d like to tell somebody else about your coaching process or some aspect of it, you’re of course free to do so.

• Equal footing:
  Coaching conversations should be held on equal footing. We believe that nobody knows your specific challenges and the details of your work better than you yourself. For this reason, it is unrealistic to expect that anyone could offer ready-made solutions to your problems or that a coach could tell you exactly what to do to improve your work. We see coaching as a process where the coach puts his or her expertise at your service during solution-oriented conversations, helps you to discover new perspectives, and assists you in developing results that suit your specific needs.

• A solution-oriented approach:
  You’re looking for viable solutions for the future – for this reason, most coaches don’t spend much time on interrogating the problem itself or analyzing the past. Instead, the focus is on finding practical, feasible solutions that are tailored to your specific needs.

• Loyalty:
  The coach’s responsibility is to work for your interests alone, as long as this doesn’t run counter to WU’s interests as your employer and certain ethical principles. We expect our coaches to refrain from actions that could, for instance, support employees in bullying others, covering up criminal offenses, etc.

• Neutrality:
  The coach should be unbiased and impartial in his or her work with you. To guarantee neutrality, we make sure to only recommend coaches who haven’t previously worked with people in areas close to your own area of responsibility at WU. According to our quality standards, employees from the same unit or employees with leadership responsibilities who report to each other cannot work with the same coach.

• The client is in control:

  • You decide if and when you need coaching sessions (your coach should not tell you to arrange further coaching sessions if you don’t think you need them).

  • You decide if the coach you’ve selected is the right choice. An atmosphere of trust between you and the coach is essential for a successful coaching process. If you don’t feel comfortable with your coach, please don’t hesitate to choose a different person (it’s OK to change coaches based only on a gut feeling, and you won’t have to give detailed reasons to justify your decision).

• The WU Personnel Development and Planning Office is working with a pool of about 40 experienced external coaches with different backgrounds, approaches, specializations, and personalities. The variety of different specialists in our pool allows us to select the right coach for your specific needs and preferences.

  • All specialists in the WU pool of coaches meet the following criteria:

    • They have a solid coaching or equivalent education.

    • They regularly participate in continuing education and training programs.

    • They have experience as a coach.

    • They work in accordance with the principles outlined above.

    • They have introduced themselves to the PDP team in person during an interview.

• After a preliminary meeting, we’ll recommend 2-4 coaches who we believe are suitable for your needs. You’ll be able to choose from these recommendations.