Marissa Watts is the CEO of Change Agents UK, a Charity and not-for-profit organisation. They help recruit young people into ethically-driven organisations that have a sustainability focus. Unlike recruitment agencies, their job doesn’t end when the employee starts their new role. In fact, getting the job is just the beginning.

The Change Agents UK team are driven to make a bigger impact. They want the young people they recruit to have as big an impact in the World as possible. They want each graduate to have the best chance of becoming an agent for change. Their philosophy is simple, yes, so rare; we were drawn to it.

Marissa and the Change Agents UK team recognise that crossing the chasm from education to employment can, for some, be a bit of a leap. If you think back to your experience, the World of academia and the ‘real’ World of work are different beasts entirely.

Marissa knows that the recruitment phase is just one small part of what they do. Arming the young people for the realities of employment means helping them develop the skills they need to adapt to the world of work. It also means offering them the support to help them thrive and make a difference in their own right. That vision and drive saw the development of their own Skills Development Programme.

A programme designed specifically to help ‘Early Careerists’ or ‘Change Agents’ as they call them, make the transition from student to employee. But it’s not just the young person that gains from the experience. It’s the employer. In a classic case of win-win, the employee gets the personal benefit of the support and development, but the company gets the value of having an employee that fulfils their potential.

Maximising potential

And fulfilling potential means giving people the core skills that can help them achieve more. The kind of competencies that will help them integrate into the World of work quicker. But Marissa also recognised that helping young people fulfil their potential isn’t a one-off activity. In addition to their development programme, it was important to be there for their candidates when they needed support. The Change Agents UK team make themselves available to help their Change Agents when they have a challenge. Marissa was introduced to Know You More after one of our coaches met a former trustee of Change Agents UK at a networking event. She was suitably intrigued to make the introduction, and before long, Marissa and I had our first conversation. Marissa was interested in how we could take on the responsibility to coach their candidates.

The idea was to start the coaching once the employee had found their feet, typically after they’d been in post for six months. While Marissa’s team had been providing some low-level coaching, she recognised that to do this properly; it was time to professionalise the coaching experience. Her team didn’t have the skills or the time to deliver the vision. But neither did they have the budget to afford traditional, commercial coaching.
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The fact that our model is different and that we’re also a socially-minded business were a big factor in turning the conversation into a real project.

But getting to that first project wouldn’t be easy. In those early conversations, there were, quite rightly a lot of questions. And the central theme was one I think we can all relate to – will it work? Will the coaching be of a level that will add value?Because, ultimately, if it doesn’t deliver for the candidate, and crucially the client who is paying the bill, then it’s not an investment, it’s purely a cost.

The pilot

and, of course, it’s also difficult to sell what you don’t understand. Context is everything, and in this case, that context would be provided by experience. We recommended to Marissa that taking our coaching ‘for a spin’ was the best way to address the ‘will it work’ question. We agreed to run a pilot with Marissa and two of her team.

To demonstrate the scope of how we can work, we recommended delivering one-to-one coaching as well as trying three-way contracting with one of her team.Three-way contracting includes the coachee’s sponsor, normally this would be their line manager. In this case, Marissa.
Marissa had her first ‘chemistry’ meeting with her own assigned coach.
Something didn’t feel right. Marissa had been excited about the opportunity to work with a professional coach, but the reality didn’t match her expectations.Those feelings were compounded when she saw the strength of relationship her team member enjoyed with their assigned coach. Marissa wasn’t sure what to do. She felt deflated.

Marissa had two options. She could follow it through and hope that it would work itself out, or she could let us know that there was an issue. Thankfully for us, and for her, she chose the latter option. We reassigned a new coach to Marissa. This time, the coach assigned immediately made a connection, and Marissa had a renewed excitement about being coached.

For Marissa and the Change Agents UK team this was the perfect opportunity to see how we handled a ‘what if scenario’. For us, it was straightforward. The relationship between coach and coachee is critical. There needs to be a level of connection and trust. We thanked Marissa for telling us and explained that it’s part of the process.

We do our best to match the right coach to the right person, but if it takes a couple of attempts to find the right fit, then that’s OK. We’re fortunate that we’ve got a pool of 150 coaches to tap into, so assigning a new coach wasn’t an issue. We’re continually refining our coach matching process, so, ultimately we all gained something out of the experience.

From pilot to project

Marissa enjoyed her own coaching experience with her new coach; her initial expectations were exceeded. And, we’d also demonstrated our ability to deal with areal-world problem. But it was the change she saw in the other pilot participants that ultimately gave her the confidence to move from a pilot project to a live roll out. They both had renewed personal confidence and, having lived through the coaching experience; they knew that the level of coaching was ideal for the young people they helped.
After some more meetings to flesh out the plans and create a partnership agreement, the commitment was made for Dot Coach and Change Agents UK to work together. That work started in May 2017 when the first 5 people were assigned a coach. They’ll work with the coach for six fortnightly hour-long sessions to support them and help them grow into their role and to personally thrive.

The Change Agents change

What does this mean for Marissa and the Change Agents UK team? Here’s what Marissa had to say.

“This level of coaching gives us another string to our bow. By adding a professional coaching service, we’ve enhanced our offering, which gives us even more credibility. The service is delivered by Know You More under the Change Agents UK umbrella which is quite a nice combination. It means it has our seal of approval, because we’ve already gone through our own coaching experience and can vouch for the quality of the coaching.

We’re practising what we preach because Know You More is aligned beautifully with what we do. We share the same values; we’re ethical and responsible organisations with a passion for sustainability. It feels like we’re two teams that are heading in the same direction.

And that, for us, means a lot. Working with like-minded people is an important part of what we do. Having a shared vision for what coaching can do for young people means we have the same goal – maximising potential and making a bigger difference."