Round-up of stories from the Coaching at Work: Beyond Frontiers conference:

Should coaches sniff cognitive enhancers before sessions?

Cognitive-enhancing pills and a spray of bonding hormone oxytocin could be just what the modern coach needs, a neuroscientist has suggested. CLICK HERE

Goal-setting findings should silence critics

Findings from neuroscience showing the importance of goal-setting should flatten opponents of the GROW model once and for all, suggested cognitive neuroscientist Geoff Bird. CLICK HERE

A whole person focus is ‘ultimate’ means to better performance

To perform or fail; to be a hero or a zero? We live in a culture of opposites: strengths or weaknesses, work or life, talent or effort, but in coaching it is never one or the other, argued Alex Linley, co-founder of CAPP. Linley drew on positive psychology and strengths-based coaching to argue that a focus on the whole person is the ultimate route to performance improvement.CLICK HERE

Lets get more flexible

Where, if at all, are the boundaries between coaching and therapy/counselling? Is there a third way? These were some of the questions raised at the Beyond Frontiers debate. Liz Hall chaired the event The line between coaching and therapy/counselling is getting fuzzier. A ‘third way’ of coaching has emerged that draws on psychological approaches, but there is no one way – each coach has their own approach. CLICK HERE

Kaleidoscope tackles cultural complexity

In a global market with a mobile middle class and the emergence of global ‘nomads’, an understanding of culture is essential for coaches working with clients in leadership positions, argued Jenny Plaister-Ten. CLICK HERE

AWP creates coaching by stealth

Many deem top-level support essential if change programmes are to stick, but for Avon & Wiltshire Mental Health Partnership (AWP) NHS Trust, not having the board on board proved an advantage. A community of solution-focused (SF) managers and leaders has been created by stealth at AWP in the past three years. CLICK HERE

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Thank you to these contributors for sharing their material:

click here to view Mark McKergow’s material

Click here to view Lis Merrick’s material

Click here to view Jenny Plaister’s material

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“Oxytocin helps with facial recognition and trust. Imagine the coach and client having a little sniff before they start the session,” said cognitive scientist and neuroscientist Geoff Bird in his keynote at Coaching at Work’s Beyond Frontiers conference. Dr Bird cited reports on increasing use of “cognitive enhancers” such as methylphenidates Ritalin and Modafinil – one in five students and many “clued-up academics” already take Modafinil, he said.

“Ritalin increases IQ points – think about the statistics linking IQ and salary increases of up to 36 per cent.”

Ethics panels may have a whole host of questions if coaches take up Bird’s suggestions. However, Bird had much else to say on how neuroscience can inform coaching (see conference report, News, page 9).

Conference tweets are on cawfrontiers

Coaching at Work, Volume 7, Issue 1

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External coaches will set themselves apart in coaching sponsors’ eyes if they stop treating them the same and understand their context, needs and interests, according to a working group of sponsors including KPMG, Fujitsu and Diageo.

“It goes back to really understanding the organisation the coach is working with…if they can’t specify what they want to see, be prepared to walk away,” said Simon Dennis, who heads up coaching at IT business Fujitsu.

“It’s a call for people to ask more about the client organisation and agenda,” said Louise Buckle, lead coach at KPMG.

Dennis said Fujitsu had invested just over £250,000 in training 110 employees in coaching skills. However, when he took over to head up coaching: “There was no (measurement of) ROI and I was told to deliver some business value.”

“Page after page of process decisions had been created, with flow charts and forms to complete. Until the end of last year, to get coaching, you were either clever or you knew me. Our model became like the Holy Grail. There were coaches there but you couldn’t touch them. There were no records of what coaching we were doing apart for about six of the coaches.”

Fujitsu has now simplified its coaching model to three levels, which is ‘bearing fruit,’ said Dennis.

Sponsors need to be clear what their role is – are they a provider of coaching services for individuals or are they there to act as a change enabler in the organisation?

The roles coach sponsors take vary widely and can include coach broker, recruiter of externals, budget holder, gatekeeper, standard-setter, advocate, fixer and strategy developer.

Getting together with other sponsors is helpful, working group participants included.

The group also included Jeremy Ridge, chair of APECS, who chaired the group. Other working groups are planned.

Coaching at Work, Volume 7, Issue 1

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By Jane Campion

Findings from neuroscience showing the importance of goal-setting should flatten opponents of the GROW model once and for all, suggested cognitive neuroscientist Geoff Bird.

Goal-setting provides a means for clients to achieve fast results and to boost subsequent learning, Dr Bird, a lecturer at the Department of Psychological Sciences at Birkbeck College, University of London, told delegates in his keynote address at Coaching at Work’s sell-out event:

“The ability to set goals is exclusively human and it is never too late to learn… This mobilises the unconscious parts of the brain and information we are not able to verbalise, but defines what we do.

“Your conscious mind doesn’t make you do anything. I can see your choices happening as unconscious brain activity on a scanner up to 10 seconds before you make them as conscious intention.”

As well as goal-setting, repetition is important. “Bringing about a change in an individual’s pattern of behaviour or thought is always the result of learning. This is defined by science as an increase in connections. To achieve it, we need repetitions until something is unconscious. We learn slowly, but retrieve fast and forget slowly.

“In goal-directed learning, we learn fast, linking our response to an outcome we want. This is conscious, so while we learn it fast, we retrieve it slowly and forget it fast.

“We still don’t know how it happens, but we do know that goals involve attention and emotion. These two in combination change how information flows through the brain. Neurons that fire together, wire together,” he said.

Bird recommends coaches use all automatic social systems, including imitation of language and how you dress. “Then forget about it. All we have to do is pay attention to the client.”

He said the client should set the tone. Conscious mirroring slows coaching down, he warned. He also advised that coaches do not sit opposite clients.

“Eye contact activates the brain’s reward centres. It is primitive and fundamental. But never sit opposite a client. Sit at a 45-degree angle so you can turn away if they need to discuss something sensitive without switching on their self-monitoring. Freud knew it. Now we understand it scientifically.”

Coaching at Work, Volume 7, Issue 1

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Responding to current challenges, such as the economy and demonstrating ROI/value for money (VFM), are top of the agenda for 2012, according to this year’s Coaching at Work annual readers’ survey.

Some 49.2 per cent of respondents cited responding to challenges including the economy as the most or second-most important priority, including coaching clients to cope with uncertainty, and making sure coaching is fit for purpose (13.2 per cent).

Meanwhile, 27.7 per cent of you say evaluation/demonstrating ROI/ VFM is the number one/two priority. It’s the third year running this has been high on the agenda; last year it was top priority, the year before it was at number two.

The emphasis is unsurprising given the current backdrop, with some economists predicting a double-dip recession in the UK. Some of you fear rising pressure to stay relevant.

“Generally, I think coaching is going to enter a tough period next year, where the need for coaches to distinguish themselves from the competition will be greater than ever,” said Julie Starr, director of Starr Consulting.

Andrew Armatas, coaching psychologist and trainer in Greece, said: “These times present an opportunity to separate the wheat from the chaff and to focus on demonstrating both scientific and practical value so that coaching will be considered an investment.”

More than 50 per cent of you think coaching is changing – 68.4 per cent agree it is becoming more aligned with business needs, 49.1 per cent that it is becoming more integrated into other initiatives, 24.6 per cent that we are seeing more brief coaching and 17.5 per cent that it is moving more towards consultancy.

Standards/professionalism/accreditation were top or second priority for 19.2 per cent of you.

“The top priority this year will be professional standards and ethics – how to ensure that we keep raising the bar and how we communicate the value of professional coaching standards to buyers of coaching,” said Deborah Price, president of the UK International Coach Federation.

l See pages 12-15 for more results. The Coaching at Work Coaching Person and Mentoring Person of the Year Award results will be announced in the next issue. The survey is now closed, but you can still nominate people by emailing liz@coaching-at-work.com

Top of the agenda for 2012

Coaching’s priorities (%)

1. Responding to economic challenges: 1st/2nd priority – 49.2
2. Evaluation/ROI/value for money: 1st/2nd – 27.7
3. Standards/professionalism/accreditation: 1st/2nd – 19.2
4. Team coaching: 1st/2nd – 13.2
5. Health/wellbeing coaching: 1st/2nd – 10.8
6. Supervision: 1st/2nd – 9.6
7. Widening its reach: 1st/2nd – 7
8. Focusing on line managers and leaders: 1st – 4.8
9. Careers coaching: 1st – 3.6
10. More collaboration between professional bodies – 3.6, and more creative thinking: 2nd – 3.6

Mentoring’s priorities (%)

1. Talent management 1st/2nd – 18.9
2. Responding to economic climate – 15.5
3. Working with youths – 6.8

Coaching at Work, Volume 7, Issue 1

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Responding to current challenges such as the economy and demonstrating ROI/value for money (VFM) are top of the agenda for the year ahead, according to this year’s Coaching at Work annual readers’ survey.

Some 49.2 per cent of respondents cited responding to challenges, including the economy, as the most or second-most important priority, including coaching clients to cope with uncertainty and through change, and making sure coaching is fit for purpose in the current climate (13.2 per cent).

Meanwhile, 27.7 per cent of you say evaluation/demonstrating ROI/ VFM is the number one/number two priority. It’s the third year running that this has been high on the agenda. Last year it was top priority, the year before it was at number two.

Tough times ahead

The emphasis is unsurprising given the current backdrop, with some economists predicting the UK is slipping into a double-dip recession, for example. Some of you fear tougher times ahead for coaching, and rising pressure to ensure coaching stays relevant and adapts to current needs.

At Coaching at Work’s recent conference on 23 November, panellist Aboodi Shabi said: “We stand on the brink of a future we cannot know, and we do not know what to do. We need to be able to help people answer those questions. We’re performing harder and harder, and to what end? There are things bubbling all over the world. I see something that says game over. We have a real crisis to face and young people are facing a future where they are less well-off than their parents. Coaches have the ability to sit with the discomfort of not knowing, so we can help people ask these questions.”

Mentors can respond to the current climate too. At the conference, panellist Jennifer Liston-Smith said: “The current crisis is a crisis in leadership. We need upward mentoring from junior people about flexible working and better ways of managing.”

One of the conference delegates, Leni Wildflower, said to the panel: “There is a tension inherent. There is not one person who could pay you 10 cents for coaching from the movement [Occupy] outside St Paul’s…a huge discrepancy between the rich and those not working. In the next year, the whole thing will be a world crisis. What would it be like to earn half the money we are earning because people won’t have the money to pay? How have coaches thought about this?”

Make the change

Liston-Smith said: “One of the things we can do is work where the change is taking place, for example, some of the leading investment banks – Citigroup’s diversity programme – because when all this shakes out we are still going to need women in positions of leadership. What if we had a slightly more diverse leadership? Would the same thing have happened if it had been 
Lehman Sisters? Be part of making the change happen, even if you are not saving the world. There’s still money in that sector.”

Interestingly, collaboration including between professional bodies was only mentioned by a small number of respondents to the survey (3.6 per cent), compared with 17 per cent last year. This could be because there are a growing number of collaborative initiatives.

Standards/professionalism/accreditation were top or second to top of the agenda for 19.2 per cent of you, while team coaching was a number one or two priority for 13.2 per cent of you, presumably for some at least as a way to add income.

Alison Carter, principal research fellow and consultant, Institute for Employment Studies, said: “Team coaching is not just the application of individual coaching to a larger collection of people belonging to the same part of the organisation, but a separate craft that draws not only on the field of coaching, but also the much older tradition of organisation development (OD), including process consultancy.

“The harsh economic conditions in many Western countries have led organisations to look for new ways to engage their teams and maximise the efficiency of their employees in order to remain ahead of their competitors. Team coaching is likely to increase further in popularity and so push coaching practice over the boundary line with OD consultancy. This has serious implications for aspects such as coach skills and supervision.”

Creating wider reach for coaching – related in some cases to how we respond to current challenges – is deemed to be important by 7 per cent of you. This included for a number of you spreading it in education: “helping children to understand coaching and use it as a life skill from a young age” and the voluntary sector.

Mentoring youths – disadvantaged and/or entrepreneurial – was mentioned by a number of you as a priority. For one, it was about “encouraging mid-20s/early-30s to volunteer their mentoring services to young unemployed who feel abandoned by society and unable to find work.”

Enhancing resilience

The survey included a question on how to enhance clients’ resilience (see table: What can we do to enhance resilience in our clients). This came into many of your answers on responding to current challenges. And health/wellbeing/stress management was a first or second priority for 10.8 per cent of you: “A byproduct of the current crisis has been that many of my clients are already aware of their own resilience [levels]. They have been taken over the threshold and are now simply looking for new ways of handling a prolonged period of uncertainty.

“Role modelling self-care is a recurring theme in my coaching and we often spend time exploring a slower pace to reflect the energy of major transition that is pervading. For many clients this is in fact a welcome shift, and discussions about work-life balance have become more integrated and real rather than the, sometimes, perfunctory discussions of old…

“This seems to be being generated by a need to keep in balance as clients are experiencing working harder now than ever, so down time is relished and part of shared conversations,” said Deborah Price, president of the UK International Coach Federation.

“Resilience to me is closely bonded to the relationship between what we notice and experience, and the story we create to explain it. In that mind-frame, we can help them be secure in understanding who they are, what they do well, what they are here to do, the values they can rely on, finding a bigger vision/something beyond self to contribute to and recognise and build the network of people around them who believe in and support them,” said Neil Scotton, co-founder of the One Leadership Project.

Your priorities for 2012

Is coaching changing? (%)

• Yes: 50.6
• No: 30.1
• Don’t know: 19.3

HOW?

• More aligned with business needs 68.4
• More as part of other initiatives 49.1
• More brief coaching 24.6
• Moving towards consultancy 17.5
• More requiring the coach to be an expert in the client’s field 15.8
• More directive 14
• Moving towards mentoring 12.3
• Moving towards therapy 8.8

OTHER RESPONSES

• More integrated, blended approach
• Linked more closely to identifiable business benefit
• More building of internal coaching expertise
• More coaches looking to differentiate their ‘brand’ by calling themselves somatic coach, or mindfulness coach, which Joe Public won’t get their head around
• More relational
• More coaching for retention, less coaching for remedial reasons
• More based on psychological concepts
• Delivered more professionally
• Resilience

What can we do to enhance resilience in our clients?

WHAT YOU SAY:

• Develop and care for ourselves “Focus on coaching the unconscious mind rather than goals and actions, using a mindfulness approach of living in the present, to support clients who are not able to change their external circumstances”
• Role model resilience strategies/self-care “Support them to maintain balance, good practices and a sense of perspective”
• Help them build self-belief “Deepen their thinking and heighten their ability to work with their emotions”
• Help them realise that they have choice “Help them see where they have been resilient in the past… then build on that”
• Help them increase their self-awareness “Show them tools they can practically apply, help them to understand how their brains work and help them to discover their default reactions and practical tools on how to interrupt these patterns”
• Hold up a mirror to them “Encourage them to look at their life holistically, and listen to their own needs, not just the needs of the organisation”
• Champion them “Bring them into relationship with who they really are – not who they think they ought to be”
• Challenge them “Help them understand the nature of resilience”
• Celebrate them “Deal with reality, not past expectations”
• Help them develop effective self-coaching strategies “Work with them diligently and patiently – don’t look for dramatic short-term changes but incremental and sustainable shifts”
• Encourage them to take on less

Words of caution

• Keep away from patronising them with advice
• Avoid being confluent with the ways in which leaders have behaved
• Know our limits
• I don’t like the word ‘resilience’ as for me it means something hard and unbending. I prefer flexibility and positive attitude
• This presupposes that this is our responsibility?
• I think we need to be really careful in what we mean by ‘resilience’ – are we merely encouraging burnout or supporting unsustainable levels of change? Real resilience is about helping individuals and organisations identify and align to their values, take a big picture perspective and recognise their own boundaries in order to make grounded and healthy decisions
• We should not be enhancing resilience

Approaches we used

• Cognitive Behavioural Coaching
• Appreciative Inquiry
• Seligman’s Positive Psychology/Strengths
• Frank Farelly’s work on Provocation Therapy
• Carol Kauffman’s ‘Four Steps to Confidence’ tool
• Mindfulness
• Stress-awareness/management
• Emotional Intelligence

Team coaching is likely to increase further in popularity and so push coaching practice over the boundary line with OD consultancy

What would it be like to earn half the money we are earning because people won’t have the money to pay? How have coaches thought about this?

Coaching at Work, Volume 7, Issue 1

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