The EBRD has successfully conducted a project with coaching elements for Turkmen women entrepreneurs
The European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, with the financial support of the European Union, conducted in Turkmenistan the first of its kind three-month project with a coaching component, designed to help women entrepreneurs switch from the "manual" business management mode to a systematic one.
The coach of the project, Marina Pogosyan, thanked the EBRD in Turkmenistan for its openness to experiments, which was a successful project. Coaching is not just the transfer of any knowledge and skills, she noted at the final meeting of the training participants. This is working with a person's mindset — with how he thinks about his business and who he sees himself as.
During the training, which was conducted online on the Google Meet platform, the participants first had to figure out why there is a problem of non-systemic business. Then personal coaching meetings were organized for the representatives of each of the companies, during which individual problems were solved.
Every business goes through certain stages of development, and in order to move to the next level, sometimes an enterprise needs to decide on drastic changes. Various factors can interfere with this. And only the manager, realizing these factors, can stimulate further development.
As the project showed, most of the enterprises that applied to him were organized as families, which have their own long-standing, unquestionable traditions, Poghosyan said. This corresponds to one of the initial stages of the development of any business. Coaching sessions were aimed at making the managers aware of the limitations of such a "family" paradigm, and get motivated for further progress.
The purpose of the trainings was not only to give specific instructions and tools, but also to help understand the underlying reasons why the business stops in its development at certain stages. The thing is that the formal transition to a more rigid hierarchy in the organization and the creation of internal laws will not work if the team led by the head does not change their attitude to work as a whole.
At the final meeting within the framework of the project, business leaders made presentations, telling about the transformation of work in their companies after individual and group trainings. The project had a positive impact on labor discipline, helped not just to formally develop job descriptions and company rules, but to really realize and believe in their necessity and effectiveness for business.
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