An update from Prof. Rebecca Jones – Managing Consultant, Talent Development edition

You’ve spent your career at the intersection of coaching, psychology and behavioural change. What first drew you to coaching as a discipline, and what continues to fascinate you about its role in developing talent?

What first drew me to coaching was the realisation that sustainable change rarely happens through insight alone. Early in my career, I became fascinated by the gap between knowing and doing. Organisations invest heavily in leadership models, frameworks and training, yet behaviour often remains remarkably difficult to shift. Coaching offered something different. It created space for reflection, challenge, experimentation and accountability in a way that felt deeply human and highly practical.

What continues to fascinate me is coaching’s ability to unlock potential that is often already there, but constrained by confidence, context, organisational dynamics, or simply a lack of space to think clearly. The most effective coaching is about helping individuals develop greater self-awareness, clarity and agency so they can navigate complexity more effectively themselves.

In today’s environment, where leaders are operating under increasing pressure and uncertainty, I think coaching has become even more important. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can provide information, analysis and efficiency, but leadership still fundamentally involves judgement, relationships, meaning-making and human connection. Coaching helps people strengthen exactly those capabilities.

You’ve worked across remarkably diverse sectors, from elite sport to financial services, manufacturing and higher education. What can corporate HR leaders learn from how high-performance environments approach the development of potential?

One of the biggest lessons from high-performance environments is that potential is rarely developed accidentally. In elite sport particularly, development is highly intentional, personalised and continuous. There is a recognition that performance is not just about technical capability, but also mindset, resilience, recovery, adaptability and the environment surrounding the individual.

I think corporate organisations sometimes underestimate the importance of creating the conditions in which talent can thrive. High-performance environments tend to integrate development into day-to-day practice rather than treating it as a separate activity. Feedback is more frequent, coaching is normalised, and stretch experiences are deliberately designed rather than left to chance.

Another important lesson is that progression is not only about identifying talent, but actively accelerating it. The organisations that do this best are often very clear about the experiences, support, exposure and behavioural capabilities people need to succeed at the next level.

Finally, high-performance environments recognise that confidence and belief matter. You can have highly capable individuals who never fully realise their potential because they lack visibility, sponsorship, opportunity, or belief in their own readiness. Great development programmes therefore work on both capability and confidence simultaneously.

If you could give your early-career self one piece of advice about building a career in talent and coaching, what would it be?

I would probably say: spend less time worrying about having all the answers, and more time developing the confidence to ask better questions.
Early in my career, I think I sometimes felt pressure to demonstrate expertise quickly. Over time, I realised that the best coaches, consultants and leadership practitioners are often the people most willing to stay curious, challenge assumptions, and keep learning.

I would also remind myself that careers are rarely linear. Some of the most valuable opportunities in my own career came from stepping into unfamiliar environments or saying yes to experiences that initially felt slightly outside my comfort zone. Working across sectors, industries and cultures has probably shaped my thinking more than any formal qualification ever could.

As AI reshapes how organisations think about learning and development, where do you see the enduring value of human coaching, and what risks do HR leaders need to navigate as AI-driven coaching tools enter the market?

I think AI will undoubtedly play a growing role in learning and development. It can increase access, personalise learning, support reflection, and provide scalable development support in ways that were previously difficult to achieve. There is real opportunity there.

However, I think there is also a risk that organisations overestimate what AI coaching tools can genuinely replicate. Coaching is not simply a sequence of well-structured questions. At its best, it involves trust, empathy, emotional attunement, ethical judgement, contextual understanding, challenge, and the ability to navigate ambiguity and complexity alongside another human being.

Many leadership challenges are deeply relational and emotionally nuanced. They involve identity, politics, power, confidence, conflict, uncertainty and values. These are not always issues that can be resolved through pattern recognition or algorithmic prompting alone.

There are also important ethical considerations emerging around confidentiality, bias, psychological safety and the quality of guidance being provided. HR leaders therefore need to think carefully about governance, transparency and where human oversight remains essential.

I suspect the future will not be AI versus human coaching, but a more blended model where technology enhances certain aspects of development, while human coaches continue to play a critical role in deeper behavioural change, judgement, leadership transitions and complex organisational challenges.

What’s one leadership or coaching book you find yourself recommending again and again to clients, and why?

One book I frequently recommend is Your Brain at Work by David Rock. What I value about it is that it translates neuroscience into highly practical insights about how people think, react, make decisions, manage attention, and respond under pressure in the workplace.

In leadership and coaching, we often talk about behaviours such as resilience, emotional regulation, decision-making, focus, or managing difficult conversations, but this book helps explain some of the underlying cognitive and neurological processes that shape those behaviours. I think that understanding is incredibly valuable for leaders.

What also makes the book particularly relevant today is that modern organisational life places huge demands on people cognitively and emotionally.

Leaders are dealing with constant information flow, ambiguity, rapid change, competing priorities and increasingly complex interpersonal dynamics. The book provides practical ways to think about attention, threat responses, overwhelm and performance in a way that feels both evidence-based and immediately applicable.

For many clients, it becomes a useful bridge between leadership theory and the realities of day-to-day human behaviour at work.