By Liz Hall

As its new president, John Leary-Joyce will be helping the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC) UK clarify its unique contribution.

“Each of the four bodies has a different character and offering so in this rich and flourishing profession I want EMCC UK to be clear about the unique contribution it makes to the market of coaching and mentoring,” said Leary-Joyce.
Leary-Joyce, who steps into current president Mike Hurley’s shoes in September, will also be working closely with his European presidential counterparts to build a stronger more integrated European network of practitioners especially for coaches/mentors within organisations.

A well-known figure on the European coaching scene, as CEO for the Academy of Executive Coaching (AoEC), John already has close connections to all four UK coaching professional bodies. Thus, an “important dimension of John’s presidency will be to engage vigorously at the Round Table discussions to promote both differentiation from and collaboration between the bodies,” said a spokesperson for the EMCC UK.

“I’m honoured to be appointed EMCC UK president. The community volunteer groups over the last ten years at EMCC UK have worked tirelessly to build the high level of market credibility and internal operational systems we see today. Taking over the stewardship from Mike Hurley who has done a fantastic job of steering such an effective and important UK institution, is a real privilege. The current executive and advisory board members’ are highly experienced coaches, mentors and consultants so I know they’ll be exciting and challenging teams to lead”.

The AoEC contributed to the initial EMCC research on competencies and standards which have now become an international benchmark for quality.

Di Newell, EMCC UK’s managing director recognised the outgoing president’s contribution in refocusing the purpose and helping the executive board to engage with a wider range of communities and organisations involved in coaching and mentoring. She welcomed working with Leary-Joyce to continue to build EMCC UK and to act on his fresh ideas.

“John’s experience, his understanding of and connections in the coaching and mentoring communities we serve will help us to continue to build on the great momentum EMCC UK has already created,” she said.

See profile of John Leary-Joyce

By Liz Hall

Many employers and coaches are barking up the wrong tree when it comes to the hot topic of employee engagement.

Employee engagement remains critically low because although it is employers’ number one concern, many are getting their strategies wrong. Employers need to shift the focus in their employee engagement strategies away from big-picture issues such as charismatic leadership and work/life balance towards rebuilding employees’ trust both in their employer and immediate manager, and the relationship between manager and direct report. These were the key messages in the Training Foundation’s white paper on employee engagement, The Rules of Engagement, launched on 14 June.

“This carries profound implications for the value of coaching, because the number one influence on employee engagement is the relationship between employees and their immediate manager – yet most have had no training on how to get the most out of their people,” said a spokeswoman for the Training Foundation.

The paper’s strategies have been endorsed by David Macleod, co-author of the Macleod report to Government on Employee Engagement (May 2009).

Employee trust levels in employers are low because of the current climate of austerity, wage freezes, lay-offs and short-time working. Rebuilding that trust in the employer, and in the manager, is an urgent priority.

Employers and coaches need to make sure they look at the role of emotions in decision-making. Recent discoveries from neuroscience and genetics are confirming occupational psychologists’ findings that the importance of emotions to decision-making is far greater than previously thought, says the paper.

The workplace climate is more important than organisational culture. Most employers are focusing their engagement strategy on organisational initiatives such as flexible working. Whilst important, these are not producing results because they are trumped by a far more influential factor – the importance of the employee/immediate manager relationship, which is the key factor in up to eight out of 10 decisions to leave a job, the ultimate measurement of engagement. Surveys by The Training Foundation and others show that less than 20% of managers have received any training in engagement skills and how to bring out the best in people.

Only 24% of UK employees are engaged with their job, according to the latest Gallup Engagement Survey and the CBI reported in May 2010 that employee engagement is now the biggest challenge facing employers. Sixty seven per cent of businesses said employee engagement was their priority going forward, while seven out of 10 said engagement would play a vital role in their business’ recovery

The rules of engagement are:
Rule 1       Engagement is founded on trust
Rule 2       Engagement is driven by emotions
Rule 3      Engagement is 20% culture, 80% climate

The Training Foundation, formed in 1998, is a performance improvement organisation focused on assisting employers to improve organisational performance in two critical areas; by sustaining high employee engagement and by effective learning and development strategies. For more information or to access The Rules of Engagement white paper, go to www.trainingfoundation.com

Appreciation of East-West cultural differences helped ensure a successful partnership between Singapore Civil Service College and Henley Business School. By Jane Campion

Henley adapted its Certificate of Coaching to help the college train coaches to support fast-track development for the future leaders of Singapore’s 74,000 civil servants and 50,000 statutory body employees.  

“We needed a collaborative and transparent partnership; flexibility to customise a programme without losing its core essence; a clear focus on our desired objectives and target coaches; care in selection of coach candidates, and strong monitoring of progress,” said Singapore Civil Service College director of leadership development, Paul Lim, who presented the case study at the APECS conference with Henley programme director Patricia Bossons and lead tutor Denis Sartain.

A key challenge was understanding relationships which, in a collectivist culture like Singapore’s, means forming a relationship first and never sitting down in business with a stranger. 

Sartain explained: “In the West we come to coaching as individuals. Singaporeans focus on broader goals above self and have a greater emphasis on role.

“In the East, grey hair equals wisdom so mentoring is inherent. We had to deal with this upfront because participants thought ‘if I have experience why on earth would I not share it?’.

“The intention was not just coaches supporting a leadership programme, but working for a higher purpose – the good of Singapore – which put coaching into a larger context,” said Sartain.

Fourteen of the original 18 coaches were deployed. They were required to have a minimum of eight years’ coaching, strong, clear communications, evidence of clear logical thinking, motivation, and be citizens or residents. Three modules ran locally and supervision ran via teleconferencing from the UK over six months. 

Coaching at Work, Volume 5, Issue 4

You’ve given the thumbs down to government intervention and the thumbs up to collaboration between professional bodies when it comes to dealing with incompetent, unethical and poor coaching practice in the UK.

Only 14 per cent and 13 per cent of you, respectively, feel that government regulation will prevent or reduce incompetence, and poor or unethical coaching practice, according to the Poor Practice 2010 survey.
Many of you want to see professional bodies jointly develop a code of ethics (84 per cent and 86 per cent, respectively) and a joint complaints procedure (76 per cent and 72 per cent). A joint coaching register was chosen by 56 per cent and 55 per cent.

Encouraging coaching buyers to use coaches who belong to a professional body and who subscribe to a code of ethics was the second most popular way of addressing incompetence, and poor or unethical behaviour: 81 per cent and 73 per cent, respectively.

The survey was carried out from April to June among Coaching at Work readers and members of the Association for Coaching, the British Psychological Society’s Special Group in Coaching Psychology, the European Mentoring and Coaching Council, the International Coach Federation and the Society for Coaching Psychology.

You’d also like to see cross-body collaboration on educational initiatives. Some 73 per cent of you thought incompetence could be addressed by the professional bodies working together to educate the public and coaching buyers on what constitutes excellent, good, and poor practice. This dropped to 47 per cent of respondents when asked if it could be addressed by professional bodies individually. Some 67 per cent of you agreed cross-body education was the way to reduce poor or unethical practice, dropping to 45 per cent of those who “voted” for education by individual bodies.
Just over a third of you feel an independent body with no professional body associations to deal with complaints would be good: 36 per cent and 37 per cent, respectively.

An overwhelming majority of coaches think developing a sexually intimate or “inappropriately personal” relationship with a client is unethical although 3 per cent and 12 per cent of you, respectively, have come across coaches who have done so.

Sexual intimacy with clients and misrepresenting one’s credentials or a professional body are your top two no-nos, followed by developing an inappropriately personal relationship and breaking client confidentiality.

The survey is one of a number of initiatives planned to step up the debate about what constitutes best and poor practice, and what we can do to encourage more of the best, while reducing poor practice. It was prompted in part by concerns in organisations including the National Health Institute for Innovation and Improvement and i-coach academy about how to respond, if at all, to poor practice they had encountered. See page 14 for more findings

Coaching at Work, Volume 5, Issue 4

A peer group supervision scheme using Action Learning Sets (ALS) has proved more cost-effective than supervision offered by external coach supervisors, according to an evaluation.

The scheme piloted across the Welsh Public Service has been a “marked success”, offering more value for money and more CPD than supervision offered by other public sector networks. Coaches who had previously received external personal supervision deemed the group supervision “superior,” said Paul Pivcevic, an executive coach from CQ Consultancy, who carried out the independent evaluation of the pilot’s first year.

Coaches gained in confidence, while their clients said their coaches created “excellent coaching relationships” and that coaching “dramatically improved their self efficacy”.

Public Service Management Wales (PSMW), the Welsh Assembly Government’s leadership and organisation development arm, is now extending the scheme, training six more coaches for four and a half days to facilitate ALS and providing them with an external coach supervisor.

Kay Howells, executive director, coaching, at PSMW, said: “The challenge was to provide a credible, cost-effective and sustainable approach to coach supervision which would assist our internal coaches to improve and develop in their practice. We’ve been able to develop a creative and innovative approach to CPD through our Coaching Collaborative, and supervision was the natural next step.”

PSMW launched the Collaborative in July 2008. Some 70 coaches offer coaching alongside their day jobs across the Welsh Public Service, meeting quarterly to provide CPD and networking opportunities. Participant coaches must attend at least two of up to six one-day CPD workshops held annually and agree to coach at least one person outside their organisation.

The supervision service was benchmarked against similar schemes such as the West Midlands Coaching Pool, North West Employers Organisation and Kent Coaching and Mentoring Network. This showed that PSMW offers “more frequent support and the best value in the UK when taking costs of pool or network membership, supervision training and supervision provision by external providers into account”, says the report. 

Coaching at Work, Volume 5, Issue 4

Balfour Beatty Plant & Fleet Services’ multi-pronged wellness programme for managers in May proved a success, prompting plans to roll it out to all 450 staff.

Ei World delivered the programme, Resilience Edge, which includes personal coaching sessions and focuses on peak performance, emotional intelligence, wellness and use of the HeartMath resilience tool.

Geetu Bharwaney, founder of Ei World, said: “What is interesting about the programme is the unique focus placed on wellness for executives. It’s combined with real-time feedback on key health indicators and an emotional intelligence assessment. They also learn tools for resilience in the HeartMath system. In this way, individuals were supported at both individual and team level.”

She said Balfour Beatty Plant & Fleet Services is a highly diverse business with multiple operating divisions and a diverse range of employees, operating “in a very hard-edged context where typically ‘pink and fluffy’ just does not work”.

Each executive had a 20-minute health screening with a wellness coach to assess key health indicators. The executives were also given a Personal Stress biofeedback device, an EmWave, to monitor their “physiological coherence” – an important measure of executive stress levels and wellness, said Bharwaney.

Steve Farmer, managing director of Balfour Beatty Plant & Fleet Services, said: “For the first time we have in one simple document all the aggregated health numbers of our most senior managers. This is very powerful data and gives us a starting point for taking individual action. A healthy team is a healthy company. The personal ‘numbers’ help us to be able to gauge the readiness of our management team for the challenges we face in our business and to help wellbeing towards our sustainability vision for 2020. The good news is that everyone can work on their wellness and this programme provides a useful start with the use of HeartMath tools which have been proven to reduce stress and increase vitality and performance.”

The programme was delivered over a day and a half by Bharwaney with executive wellness business Beyond the Barriers, Olympic canoeist Anna Hemmings MBE and cardiovascular expert Dr Dorian Dugmore.

Ei World equips coaches with tools for sustainable performance and training. It was recently awarded a contract to deliver the HeartMath One-to-One provider programme.

Coaching at Work, Volume 5, Issue 4

The BBC is well on the way to developing a coaching culture, according to a survey of internal coaches.

“Nearly no one thinks the BBC has a coaching culture, but many believe it is developing one. This tells us our supervision is working,” said Christopher Winek, coaching consultant.

In April , Pulse Check surveyed 45 coaches with between three months and 10 years’ experience on perceptions of their employer’s coaching culture, supervision and CPD, coaching skill development, impact, balancing coaching with a day job, and challenges for internal coaches.

Some 35 per cent “tended to disagree” or were unsure whether the BBC has a coaching culture, while around 13 per cent disagreed. Only 2 per cent agreed.

However, more than 50 per cent believe their coaching skills are developing, another 40 per cent “tend to believe” they are and 5 per cent do not because they can’t take on clients.

The biggest challenges were pressure on time, management support and commitment, organisational perspective and understanding, validation, feedback and development, client commitment, and recognition.

In spite of these challenges, more than 65 per cent agree or tend to agree they can carry on their coaching alongside their “day” job. Almost 90 per cent agree or tend to agree that maintaining their coaching practice is important to them.

Apart from Pulse Check, data is gathered from three-way meetings with managers, and evaluation.

Winek stressed how committed the BBC’s internal coaches are: “We are careful about how many communications we send, because over 90 per cent say they have a high commitment to coaching despite the strain of a day job.”

Coaching at Work, Volume 5, Issue 4

Coaching take-up in the UK is the highest ever, says a survey by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD).

More than four-fifths (82 per cent) of organisations use coaching although only a third evaluate it, according to the CIPD’s 12th annual Learning and Talent Development (L&TD) survey unveiled at the CIPD’s annual HRD conference on 21-22 April.

The most effective L&TD practices are coaching by line managers (51 per cent) and in-house development programmes (56 per cent). Coaching by line managers is used by more than 56 per cent of respondents.

The three most effective activities to manage talent are: coaching (39 per cent), in-house development programmes (32 per cent) and high-potential development schemes (31 per cent).

For almost half of the respondents (46 per cent), the biggest organisational change affecting L&TD over the next five years will be a greater integration between coaching, organisational development (OD) and performance management to drive organisational change. For 37 per cent, it will be greater responsibility devolved to line managers.

“What emerges is a dynamic and shifting picture with real opportunities for L&TD to benefit from the new emphasis on talent and the integration of coaching, OD and knowledge management into compelling change and agility programmes,” says the report.

There are indicators of strong connections between a coaching and mentoring culture and wider L&TD, according to the report. Employers who are not using coaching see more skills gaps in school leavers, university graduates and employees joining from other organisations.

The skills that employers say they must focus on to meet their business objectives in two years’ time are: leadership (65 per cent), frontline people management (55 per cent) and business acumen/commercial awareness (51 per cent).

Employers not using coaching see significantly more skills gaps in business acumen/commercial awareness and work ethic for all three groups and significantly more gaps in IT skills and specialist skills in school and university leavers.

Evaluation needs to be a future priority for practitioners or the real value of coaching could be obscured, warns the report.

“No learning and talent development intervention is beyond measurement although it is vital to ensure that this evaluation is meaningful,” it says.

No evaluation “is the worst kind of evaluation” – even a focus group of coaches and sponsors or some means of capturing and grading statements from coaching clients is better than nothing, says the report.

Systems rely mainly on the collection of post-course evaluations (58 per cent), individuals’ testimonies (56 per cent), on assessing the impact on business key performance indicators of coaching (44 per cent) and measuring the return on expectation (40 per cent).

Some 71 per cent of organisations either frequently or occasionally discuss with line managers and coaches their expectations of coaching when considering the intervention.

Sixty-nine per cent assess the likelihood that individuals or teams will benefit from coaching before starting any intervention.

A third frequently discuss the progress of individual coaching interventions at appraisal and performance reviews, while 18 per cent frequently collect and analyse data about the progress of coaching at agreed intervals.

The high take-up suggests that many L&TD interventions are being rebranded, as was suggested by the CIPD’s interim survey, Taking the Temperature of Coaching, which was published last year.

Coaching at Work, Volume 5, Issue 4

Coaching proved paramount in a merger at Schering-Plough, Julie Pelych and Sarah Law of Gap People told delegates at the Association of Business Psychologists’ 10th annual conference on 6-8 May.

The pair helped the US pharmaceutical firm maintain staff engagement during its merger with Merck in 2009, via training and internal change champions, writes Kate Thomas.

Coaching at Work, Volume 5, Issue 4

Coaches delivering cross-cultural coaching should use their lack of understanding as a tool, said Jenny Plaister-Ten at the EMCC UK conference on 5-7 May. Key aptitudes include: challenging assumptions, the coach’s cultural self-awareness and tolerance of/for ‘ambiguity’, writes Elaine Robinson. Plaister-Ten’s feature will appear in a future issue.