INTERVIEWER: MAHMOUD MANSI
“Without the right mindset you won’t be able to have the level of focus required to creating new opportunities for yourself.”
Miral El Ramlawy
ABOUT THE INTERVIEWEE
Miral is a people and business enthusiast who promotes the idea of continuously reinventing yourself and re-creating your career. She founded Thrive Consulting in 2017 on the shoulders of the 18 years experience she had back then in the human development field covering HR, coaching and training. She currently works with businesses, aspiring entrepreneurs & professionals on developing their core business messages and offerings, designing their solutions and improving their business processes. With a passion for learning and continuous development, she holds an MBA with a specialization in Entrepreneurial Marketing, certifications in coaching, training and administering several behavioral and skills assessments
She lived and worked in diverse communities and has a special interest in art and authentic cultures. People around her know she’s always up to something and it’s very normal to find her coming up with new ideas.
THE INTERVIEW
1-HR Revolution Middle East Magazine: We hear a lot about Life Coaching and how it helped many individuals, but what about coaching and consulting services for an organization, what does this include?
Coaching is a well-defined and structured conversation that brings clarity to key outcomes the coachee wants to achieve and finding the leverage points for change of a situation or challenge. A big part of unresolved performance issues in organizations is due to lack of clarity and uncovering the root cause. What coaching does starts from that point of problem clarity, defining the outcomes and designing a plan to bridge this gap. The plan is executed on the individual and organizational level of course depending on the performance issues being addressed and who is involved.
2- HR Revolution Middle East Magazine: How can an organization detect if it needs coaching or not?
There are many reasons an organization needs to introduce coaching. It can be performance issues as I mentioned. It can also be for aligning a team, for conflict resolution, for improving internal communication. Performance and engagement are key to any organization as you know, and coaching is a very powerful tool for improving and sustaining them. It’s also used to keep people on track and help them deal with the daily challenges we all go through and helps keep our thought and emotion processes at a healthy productive level.
3- HR Revolution Middle East Magazine: Before you started your coaching career you were working in Human Resources, how did this help you later on in coaching and organizational development?
I believe that people and processes are the two main pillars of any entity and I was very lucky to build and start the HR departments at two of the organizations I worked at. One of them a Fortune 500 company and the other a prominent educational institution in Egypt. This gave me a lot of knowledge in building structures bottom-up, creating processes and first-hand experience with all employees as I was doing all the department functions before it eventually expanded. I understood people, their concerns, what causes performance issues, miscommunication, disconnection within a team or between individuals and their managers. I also had a lot of hands on experience with workflow, designing and improving processes. So, working closely with people and on process building, helped me in developing processes for organizations as well as facilitating human development programs involving coaching and training.
4- HR Revolution Middle East Magazine: In one of the recent conferences held in UAE you were a speaker and you advised all HR attendees to become certified coaches, can you please elaborate on that?
Yes, I’m a big advocate of coaching as a communication tool. About being certified, they only need that if they will take on the role of an internal company coach. However, if the role is not a full-time coach, then I highly recommend foundational coaching skills not just for HR professionals, but also for everyone in a role leading one or more team members. This starts from supervisory roles and up to C-level executives. It’s very important for people to know that coaching is an approach for highly effective and advanced communication, which is really what is needed for constructive conversations that drive results. Coaching is a communication style and skill for standing out as a leader and that’s why I recommend it. It helps a leader facilitate the empowering of teams to become better leaders themselves and this reflects on the whole organizational success.
5- HR Revolution Middle East Magazine: Is coaching still an alienated term in the GULF region?
People are still confused about the term and it’s sometimes considered an embarrassment to visit a coach or use coaching services. So, it’s very important that organizations understand the true definition of coaching and the huge value it brings to the individuals and to the organization as a whole. Almost all the top executives and leaders in the US and Europe have coaches and they openly name them and are proud of the value they bring to them by settings goals, clarifying their vision, allowing them to the see their blind spots, holding them accountable, and making better decisions.
6- HR Revolution Middle East Magazine: Miral, you promote the idea of people continuously reinventing themselves. That sounds very interesting, can you tell us more about that?
I do believe in people’s ability to reinvent themselves and create new opportunities. As an HR professional, I used to get introduced to the applicant’s experience and education through the CV they submit but I was always interested to know more about the person than what they write on their CV. The normal practice is people would list the job-related experience and education so during the new employee orientation day I organized as HR Manager, I would break the ice with a fun activity that I called “Who I am beyond my CV.” I invited them to forget about their job for a while and write down their talents, inspirations, what people would say about them, their pets and so on. People tend to think that important experiences, events and defining moments outside their current or previous employment are irrelevant to their skillset while they are actually valuable and can evolve into real assets they can use in their career and self-development, hence continuously creating opportunities for themselves.
7- HR Revolution Middle East Magazine: You do a lot of work about embracing change and helping people become more resilient during times of adversity. What can you tell us about that?
Well, my generation grew up being asked the classical question “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and whatever the response was, we had this assumption that what we choose is what we’ll be doing in the same exact way 10 years later and forever. This is all we knew about the world and we weren’t taught otherwise. Change wasn’t as frequent and fast-paced as we experience nowadays and there has been a huge shift from how it was in the 1990s for example. Current changes can be personal, technological or related to market dynamics as we are experiencing now with Covid-19.
I had several encounters with huge changes in my life and career and this shaped the types of programs and service I provide. One of my strong beliefs is that many people have the foundations that they can use to reinvent themselves. The main issue at times of adversity is that people focus on what they may be missing not what they have or can build on. The job market goes through fluctuations as we are experiencing right now and we can only evolve through our ability to be flexible, resilient and innovative so I work with people on developing these 3 abilities and also looking at their knowledge, expertise and strengths. Mindset is a key ingredient as well and it is one of the core elements that I focus on as without the right mindset you won’t be able to have the level of focus required to creating new opportunities for yourself.
8- HR Revolution Middle East Magazine: Speaking about your programs, Thrive Consulting has launched “The Business Catalyst Bootcamp”. Can you please tell us more about it?
The Business Catalyst Bootcamp is designed for business owners, aspiring entrepreneurs, solopreneurs and professionals who want to create compelling business messages and offers for their clients, stand out in their market, gain advanced presentation skills and sell authentically and consistently. Many businesses, coaches, entrepreneurs and freelancers struggle with defining their service in a way that it compelling to their audience (ideal clients), reaching their ideal clients and creating a consistent income stream and this is what the Bootcamp helps them achieve through practical knowledge and guided implementation.
I meet a lot of people who have valuable knowledge and experience but don’t know how to package it. There are also professionals who have lost their jobs due to relocation or redundancies and they need the guidance on how to create a business to an audience who needs it. The Business Catalyst Bootcamp was built to serve those people.
9- HR Revolution Middle East Magazine: Can you share with us a case study with one of your clients that was challenging and how you designed a solution and resolved the problem?
I had a client who has been relocating several times with her husband in the last couple of years. She had wide experience in project management and through the bootcamp, she identified that she would like to work with women on managing change in their life. When we started working together, she was in a confused and negative state and she believed that the employment gap she experienced due to the relocation, is putting her in an un-attractive position for employers to hire her. I helped her package a program that she can offer to women going through change in their lives. She’s currently using her knowledge, experience and personal story to offer something that is very unique and caters to a specific audience who need it. So it has put her back on track with regards to fulfilling her purpose, using her expertise and helping people who need her knowledge and service.
10- HR Revolution Middle East Magazine: Can organizations benefit from this bootcamp?
They can benefit from it for people who need to sharpen their skills and discover new value they can provide to the organization. Another way to benefit from it is in the case of redundancies and as support to those who will be leaving the organization, to offer them to consider the bootcamp as an opportunity for using their expertise to offer solutions and services to clients who need them.
11- HR Revolution Middle East Magazine: How can people reach you if they’d like to know more about your programs?
They will find the programs on my website www.miralelramlawy.com and they can also connect with me through LinkedIn and Instagram.
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/miral-el-ramlawy/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/m.ramlawy/
Thank you so much 🙂