Global initiatives: Coaching Squared

Teaming up with other organisations to help women progress their careers

The UK firm is helping to boost the confidence and career prospects of its women managers by teaming up with client organisations.

The Coaching Squared initiative, the first of its kind, is aimed at helping women overcome the barriers to career development.

The initiative brings together female managers from different organisations, who get paired up and meet regularly for nine months to offer each other confidential coaching support.

Participants are given the opportunity to share experiences about work and any career or home pressures with another professional woman from a different organisation, who may have some new and different perspectives to share and good challenges to offer. It's also an opportunity for them to support and encourage each other to develop, and to create useful business contacts and a network.

Following a successful pilot with a government organisation, Coaching Squared is now in its sixth round, involving clients such as Rolls-Royce and the National Grid.

Tina Hallett, the PwC UK partner responsible for setting up the programme says: "The initiative empowers women to do their own coaching without a mentor or professional coach to guide them or interfere. It's about self-development, rather than being part of a formal development programme".

To kick-start the course, participants attend a half-day session during which they are given input on how a successful co-coaching relationship works, choose pairs and then plan how they want to work going forwards. Six months later, the group meets again to share feedback and at the end of the programme meets once more to celebrate success.

The programme is now moving on to work with PwC UK's ethnic minority and GLBT networks; learn more about it in this online interview with Tina Hallett.