Coaching for Performance and Change: Foundations

Next course:

18 May 2027

Lead beyond your expertise

Develop the confidence and capability to get the best from others.

A practical, residential short course for specialists and senior professionals who need to get the best from others 鈥� grounded in Cranfield鈥檚 research and experience of leading performance and change in technically demanding organisations.

Programme information

Dates
- 18 May 2027
Duration3 days including a 2-day residential + online session + 1-day follow-up on campus
LocationOnline
Cost拢3,900 + VAT, including accommodation Concessions available

Module dates

3-day Programme between 18 May and 14 September 2027
2-day Residential 18-19 May 2027
1-day Campus visit 14 September 2027

Who is this for?

Technical specialists, principal engineers and consultants taking on leadership of a team.
Project and programme managers who deliver through other people.
Functional or departmental managers — in operations, IT, R&D, finance and similar — newly accountable for people and performance.
Established senior leaders who want to lead through coaching rather than instruction.

The responsibilities that typically bring them to the course:

Getting results through a team, rather than through their own technical expertise.
Developing, stretching and retaining capable people.
Leading teams through change, uncertainty and shifting priorities.

Programme features

Practical coaching skills you can apply at once, with your own team.
A period of workplace application built into the design of the programme.
Cranfield faculty who understand leadership in technically demanding, change-intensive organisations, drawing on real strengths in systems thinking and leading project teams.
Peer learning alongside people from other organisations and sectors, working on real challenges.

A clear route onward, for those who want to take their coaching development further.

Programme benefits

For you:

Practical coaching skills — listening, questioning, feedback and building trust — you can use with your team straight away.
The knack of building trust quickly in the pressured, cross-functional teams that deliver change.
A systems view that helps you see what is really driving performance, and judge when coaching is the right response and when it is not.
A period back at work to apply the skills, then a day to reflect on them with others before they fade.

For your organisation:

Managers who develop their people rather than doing the work for them, freeing capacity and building strength in depth.
A more consistent, coaching-based approach to performance and change across teams.
A proportionate first step that can lead into fuller, accredited coaching development if the value is proven.

Programme modules

Coaching as a leadership skill

What coaching is, and what it is not.
The core skills: listening, questioning, feedback and challenge.
Building trust quickly, and the psychological safety that lets a team perform.
The shift from the expert who tells, to the leader who develops.

Seeing the wider system

Looking past the individual to the way the work is set up and what it produces.
Asking what, in how we work, is driving a result before deciding it is a people problem.
Judging when coaching will help, and when the block sits in the system rather than the person.
Using coaching questions to help people see and act on the bigger picture.