Meet our Belgian coach – Nicolas Delebois

Today we introduce one of our Belgian coaches, Nicolas Delebois.

Certified in Map & Match for more than a year, Nicolas is an all-round HR professional with deep generalist expertise, and particular strength in compensation and benefits, organisational development and staffing, training, consulting and coaching. He spent years in large Belgian and international companies, in several HR roles. In 2003 he decided to put that experience and expertise at the service of organisations as a trainer and consultant with L&AD, where he became a partner in 2009.

1. What is the coaching culture in your country? Is bringing in a coach a normal way to support performance, or is it seen more as a remedy for a problem?

In terms of support, Belgium is a country where a problem tends to be what leads to coaching. So we usually have fairly concrete, operational cases to address. In that sense coaching is generally easier, for more than one reason:

• there is a sense of working on solving a problem;
• a sponsor is committed around the issues identified;
• and during the coaching you can zoom out and look at the team leader's own stance, the culture of the organisation, and so on.

2. How does Map & Match help you grow in your market?

For now, we have not yet built Map & Match systematically into our offers. We take it case by case, depending on what comes up and what is needed. We are entering a new phase in April 2023: we are inviting people to discover the Map & Match approach and model through playful workshops ("Can we cook together?"). The idea is to give a taste of team cohesion using the talents already there — and of how a team can organise itself around talents that are missing or under-represented but that the organisation cannot do without.

3. Can you tell us about a concrete case in your market? Individual or team? Hiring or team performance?

We used Map & Match to bring new partners into an architecture practice. The tool let us work at several levels:

• comparing where the leadership team stands, given the strengths present, with where it ought to be (through the team profile);
• identifying the needs and expectations around the incoming partners;
• developing a better split of the load between partners.

"Thanks to Map & Match, I sleep properly again. We were finally able to put our finger on an underlying problem, by clearly separating the operational axis (over-performing) from the forward-looking one (under-invested by the partners)."

One of the partners

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