VOLUME 6

VOLUME 5

VOLUME 4

VOLUME 3

VOLUME 2

VOLUME 1

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Presented by

Jenny Plaister-Ten

Jenny Plaister-Ten

Cross-Cultural Coaching

Shape of the session

·  Background and summary research findings

·  Introduction to ‘The Kaleidoscope’ model

·  Knowledge café : Exploration of culture in

coaching practice

·  Reflections and application to practice

The importance of culture

Discussion: Is culture important to the coaching

relationship? Why?

Why culture is important

·  A global market

·  A mobile global middle class

·  Emergence of ‘global nomads’ into leadership

positions,

·  Coaching intervention for global executives,

expatriate postings, multi-cultural/remote teams

& during international mergers & acquisitions

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CLICK HERE FOR ANNE SCOULAR CAW CONFERENCE 2011

CLICK HERE FOR ABOODI SHABI CAW CONFERENCE 2011

CLICK HERE FOR MARK MCKERGOW CAW CONFERENCE 2011

CLICK HERE FOR JACKIE KEDDY CAW CONFERENCE 2011

For more conference material click below

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]]> http://www.coaching-at-work.com/2011/05/17/coaching-and-mentoring-at-work-beyond-frontiers-banne/feed/ 0 http://www.coaching-at-work.com/2011/04/13/the-coaching-chronicles-the-egyptians/ http://www.coaching-at-work.com/2011/04/13/the-coaching-chronicles-the-egyptians/#comments Wed, 13 Apr 2011 18:05:58 +0000 Coaching at Work http://www.coaching-at-work.com/?p=5525 Hello, I am Roach the Coach and I will be your guide through the Coaching Chronicles. There are 4,500 species of us cockroaches so we are well placed, across the globe, and across time, to tell you about coaching…

This time it’s the Egyptians. When you think of ancient Egypt, what does your mind picture? A pyramid? Tutankhamun? The Sphinx? A camel? Cleopatra? Well, all of these were created in honour of the contribution coaching made to its civilisation.

The pyramids are proof of how people learn. Egyptian society was highly stratified and social status was expressly displayed. The highest was nobility and just below that were the experts – priests, physicians and engineers. Then there were the scribes and officials, closely followed by artists and craftsmen. The lowest were farmers, who made up the bulk of the population. And slaves? Well, they were just slaves.

When a pharaoh demanded that the first pyramid be built, everyone went into apoplexy. The enormity of the task seemed insurmountable – how could they ensure they got the job done and that they learned from it? There were two bright Egyptian Engineers called Kohl Coach and Libby (or Lib for short) Mentor who had worked on hundreds of building projects over the years. They had very different styles in how theory managed people – Kohl Coach liked to help people find their own answers, Lib Mentor liked to share her experience and impart pearls of wisdom.

Through their collective experience, they developed a process they thought might help accelerate the learning of pyramid building. So this is what they did: the slaves would push and pull the blocks into place (doing or concrete experience), the artists would draw them working so they could see how they worked, and the scribes would record the techniques they used (reflective observation).

The priests and engineers would often offer advice and suggestions on what the slaves could do to improve their efficiency (abstract conceptualisation) and the slaves would make the necessary tweaks and changes when laying the next level of blocks (active experimentation). From this was born Kohl and Lib’s Learning Cycle.

The engineers received great acclaim and their different yet complementary styles were captured in hieroglyphics across Egypt so people would remember their approach.

When Tutankhamun, the ‘boy King’, ascended the throne, his supporters had a problem – how do you develop a boy to be a great leader? The answer was CAMEL…

Was this young lad to learn and perfect camel whispering techniques to develop empathic ways of gaining followership?

No, high priests were aware of Kohl and Lib’s work. One, Colin Mittee (Co to his friends), wanted to create something that would live beyond his lifetime. His colleagues had of course wanted him to design something like a HORSE (Hero Orientated Result for Success Every time) but instead, he developed the CAMEL:

Coaching

And

Mentoring

Enlightens

Leaders

Tutankhamun’s learning needs were quickly identified and a team of top-notch coaches and mentors worked with him and developed his leadership capability to such an extent that he became one of history’s best known leaders. So remember, a CAMEL is in fact a HORSE designed by a Co Mittee!

The Sphinx was built to remind people of the importance of perspective when coaching. One young pharaoh was being groomed for great things and started to lose perspective. His coaches and mentors continued to fluff him up and before you knew it, his ego has grown to such a size that he demanded a sculpture of his head be built. The Egyptian people got fed up with his continuing demands so they rebelled.

After this terrible anarchic episode, coaches and mentors had to go into hiding for they were seen as the root of the problem. They begged the people to allow them to learn from their ways and the people demanded that their payback was big. So the coaches and mentors agreed that they would make a symbol of the importance of perspective so that no coach or mentor would ever repeat this mistake – nor any for that matter.

For years coaches and mentors laboured to complete the Sphinx. What has this statue got to do with humility? If you look at the front of it you can see a very, very large head. The coaches and mentors agreed to add a very large rump to the statue to remind people that if you have a big head you become a big ar*e!

The coaches and mentors also begged that there be another message implanted in the heads of all Egyptians and so they lobbied for the King Ptolemy XII Auletes to give his daughter a name that would remind all of this terrible incident. And so he called his daughter: CLEOPATRA.

I know you thought this was just a pretty name but it does in fact have an important meaning: Cocky Leaders Enrage Ordinary People As This Reminds Always.

Who said there is nothing in a name.

They were very clever those Egyptians.

Coaching at Work, Volume 6, Issue 3

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]]> http://www.coaching-at-work.com/2011/04/13/the-coaching-chronicles-the-egyptians/feed/ 0 http://www.coaching-at-work.com/2009/11/04/top-dilemmas-revealed/ http://www.coaching-at-work.com/2009/11/04/top-dilemmas-revealed/#comments Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:39:12 +0000 Coaching at Work http://www.coaching-at-work.com/?p=2083 Feeling pressurised to reveal client information is one of the top 10 ethical dilemmas for internal coaches, finds research by the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC).

Other dilemmas include coaches knowing something about the client’s future that the client doesn’t – and not being able to tell them – and coaches being told by a client about inappropriate behaviour – such as harassment – by someone in the organisation but the coach having to maintain confidentiality.

“The results provide a vivid picture of the dilemmas internal coaches are facing today. They also highlight the range of arrangements organisations are offering for training and supporting their internal coaches,” said Katharine St John-Brooks, a member of the EMCC’s Ethics Committee who led the research.

St John-Brooks will present the research at the EMCC’s conference in The Netherlands on 26-28 November. She will also reveal how the EMCC plans to help organisations make their internal coaching effort more effective.

Volume 4, Issue 6

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]]> http://www.coaching-at-work.com/2009/11/04/top-dilemmas-revealed/feed/ 0 http://www.coaching-at-work.com/2009/11/04/submit-request-for-our-report/ http://www.coaching-at-work.com/2009/11/04/submit-request-for-our-report/#comments Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:27:21 +0000 Coaching at Work http://www.coaching-at-work.com/?p=2052 Please enter your details into the fields below these will then be recorded and we will contact you as soon as the report becomes available. The report comes at a cost of £9.99

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]]> http://www.coaching-at-work.com/2009/11/04/submit-request-for-our-report/feed/ 0 http://www.coaching-at-work.com/2009/08/19/force-for-change/ http://www.coaching-at-work.com/2009/08/19/force-for-change/#comments Wed, 19 Aug 2009 10:46:18 +0000 Coaching at Work http://caw.excaliburstudio.co.uk/?p=508 Is coaching in danger of repeating mistakes by ignoring lessons learnt in other professions?

The US military has devised two systems to help it learn from experience and avoid reinventing the wheel. One is called the AAR (After Action Review). Before returning to barracks, commanders gather troops in small groups and present them with six questions:

• What did we set out to do?
• What actually happened?
• What went well?
• What went badly?
• What have we learnt?
• What will we do differently the next time?

The first four questions focus on the purpose of the exercise, observing without evaluating and then evaluating what took place. The final two questions are about the present and future: can we articulate what we have learnt, and how can we ensure we will not make the same mistakes again or make sure we will be more effective when we do this exercise again?

Answers to the final two questions are noted by the commanders, who send them to CALL (Centre for Army Lessons Learnt). These “lessons learnt” are collated by CALL and disseminated back into the field so that everyone learns from everyone else’s experiences. The US military hopes to be a learning organisation that does not repeat the same mistakes, but instead sets up a structure for continually learning from what actually happens. Army effectiveness notwithstanding, the idea behind the AAR seems an excellent one. I use it a lot in supervision training as it tackles several areas:

• Can we learn from experience and ensure we do not repeat the mistakes of the past?
• Can we learn from others’ experience (what Leonardo da Vinci called “learning by proxy”)?
• Can we learn together?
• Can our collective experience help us to learn from the past and prepare for our future?

Coaching, as one of the newest professions, is in pole position to make best use of the AAR. Coaches come from diverse professional backgrounds, bringing a wealth of experience, knowledge and skills. I was around in the late 1970s and the 1980s, when counselling and counselling psychology was going through its adolescence. Looking back, there was a number of lessons learnt that could be of great assistance to our fledgling profession. We learnt a lot about tribalism, integration, competencies, the stages of professional development, supervision and its usefulness. We have a wealth of research on the curative factors in counselling provision and what makes the difference to an effective outcome. I am thinking also of coaching colleagues who come from other backgrounds business, marketing, HR, education, psychology – each of them bringing deep learning to the profession.

What a waste if we continue to invent wheels when there are already wheels to guide us in devising the best one. What might it look like if we set up the CCLL centre: the Centre for Coaching Lessons Learnt? A multiprofessional group could be a think-tank to gather lessons learnt from other professions and assess them for their effectiveness in coaching.

The centre could also collect the best practice of life coaches and executive coaches. It would then share these lessons with us. Wouldn’t we benefit both as coaches and as a profession? What might stop us from making this happen? The exciting Global Convention on Coaching (GCC), set up to discuss issues facing the professionalisation of coaching, could well use its participants’ vast experience to learn from the past and prepare its best scenarios for the future with something like a CCLL.

See “Firms sign up to GCC”, Coaching at Work, Vol 2, issue 5, and www.coachingconvention.org

Michael Carroll is an accredited executive coach and supervisor of executive coaches. He is director of the Centre for Supervision Training. mcarr1949@aol.com , www.supervisioncentre.com

Volume 2, Issue 6

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Gathering know-how

One of the most common questions I am asked when training managers as coaches relates to when and how they can bring in their own experience. Coaching is about drawing out the employee’s know-how, raising their awareness and helping them clarify their thoughts using questions. However, managers tend to be concerned about their own wisdom going to waste.

One helpful framework consists of a spectrum of places where know-how might emerge, with the colleague or ‘performer’ at one end and the coach at the other.

When coaching, managers should start by seeking the know-how of the performer relating to the context. Try the following questions.

1 What helped when you did this before?

Useful ideas often emerge through such questions – enough to make progress. If more ideas are needed, there are plenty of possibilities to explore before the coach/manager adds their own know-how.

2 What was the best you ever did at this?

Solution-focused coaching is about being on the look-out for things that helped the person concerned at some point in the past (rather than whatever might have hindered them). The time when the performer did their best is often a fruitful source.

Once the performer has identified the occasion (and there must be one if the performer has carried out the task even twice before), the manager can help pick out the useful know-how by asking: ‘what went well then?’, ‘what did you do that helped?’, ‘what else?’, and so on. The recollections can spark ideas for things to do next time.

3 When have you done similar things before?

Now we are looking for related events, ones that share elements with the challenge faced by the colleague. For example, in coaching someone making a key career decision, I asked about other ‘big decisions’ they had made successfully. This performer had been through a long drawn-out process of choosing their house, and we were able to pick out ways they had come to a good result. This gave some excellent strategies for the current situation.

4 Who else do you know who is good at this?

Moving further away from the performer’s knowledge and expertise on the spectrum, we come to the area where other people’s know-how can be brought in. We have not yet reached the ‘coach’ end of the spectrum, and so we ask the performer about other people or groups who seem to have ability in the area in which we are interested.

Suppose the individual wants to improve their website? Who else’s website is good and what do they like about it? How did they decide to do it that way? Encouraging the performer to take time before the next session to seek out and examine other people’s know-how can be very helpful.

5 And finally: the coach

If the performer discovers and values the know-how, they may put it into practice energetically. And you might learn a new way of doing something to add to your own repertoire.

Once all the obvious avenues for making this happen have been explored, managers-as-coaches can input their own know-how to coaching conversations – after all, if you knew something that might help someone, it would seem unethical to withhold it. However, it’s best to take care in how and when this is done, and we’ll take a look at this in the next column.

Mark McKergow is director of sfwork, the Centre for Solutions Focus at Work and co-author of several books on solution-focused practice including The Solutions Focus (Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2007).

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