The Association for Coaching is ready to take on the world – and key members Katherine Tulpa and Alex Szabo are rather excited. Liz Hall finds out why.
The excitement of Katherine Tulpa and Alex Szabo about the latest developments at the Association for Coaching (AC) is contagious. After 18 months of planning and years of dreaming, the professional coach body has gone global – and they’re thrilled.
“We’ve always wanted to be international but we stepped back to get the model right,” says Tulpa, chief executive officer of the Association for Coaching Global.
The AC has ambitious targets: to grow from more than 2,800 to 10,000 members in the next five years and to set up in eight countries over the next two. Their initial focus will be on Europe.
“Coaching is no longer local but global. There has been a growth in the number of corporates bringing in coaching, the market has grown and research has indicated that coaching now touches different parts of the world,” says Tulpa.
“Whether it’s the AC or in collaboration, we don’t see coaching advancing without it being a global initiative,” she notes.
The AC’s new framework will be a “global-local” one and will continue to be volunteer-led: the AC has 300 volunteers and council members. Already 17 countries have expressed an interest in setting up local ACs although there will need to be energy, alignment with values and the right infrastructure.
Alex Szabo, chief operating officer in the new structure, says: “Coaching has expanded and matured in many countries so it’s about what people are looking for in their regions and localities, about giving them guidance and support but not imposing. We want to continue to build a culture that is completely empowering, working with people who have strengths and integrity.”
Tulpa says: “It’s about quality not quantity; it’s really important for us to grow at the right pace for members. There is a high levelof growth in terms of specific initiatives, however.”
These include the AC’s new tiered executive coach accreditation scheme due to launch in January. This autumn, the AC is launching an advanced technology platform, a global online emotional intelligence tool and the first of a number of global partnerships, a deal with global CEO network, Criticaleye. Members will receive white papers and research around global leadership – a package that would normally cost 500 euros.
The tale begins
The story of the AC and of the relationship between Tulpa and Szabo began eight years ago. Attending their first coaching course at the Centre for Coaching, Szabo and Tulpa “really hit it off” and the seeds were sown for an ongoing friendship and working partnership.
The course was full of questions about where coaching was going and if it should be a profession. Tulpa says: “It was a great course and there was some great dialogue about these questions. At that point there wasn’t a local presence. If I was going to make the choice to go into coaching, I wanted to make sure it was reputable, credible and making a difference.”
An entrepreneur at heart, Tulpa spotted a gap: “I thought, why don’t we create something? It was new and I wanted to learn and the best way to learn is with other people and to create a community.”
Aside from Szabo, other early members of the AC were Gladeana McMahon and Stephen Palmer. They surveyed existing coaches about what they wanted from a professional body. Three months after the coaching course, in July 2002 at the Royal Society of Arts, London, some 25-30 people came to the AC’s pre-launch party.
Many of the AC’s founding principles still hold strong, such as being “around excellence”, an emphasis on CPD, co-coaching, appreciating diversity and catering for different needs. “We’re not insular or inward-looking. Some would describe us as being bottom-up. We didn’t want a body that pushes out best practice and standards. Of course, we need to pool that expertise but we want to be progressive and evolving.
‘We’ not ‘I’
“There is an element of not being too fixed at the AC’s heart. We’re a ‘we’ not an ‘I’ organisation, very collaborative and coach-like. As an organisation, we need to role-model a coaching approach. I hope that comes through,” says Tulpa. Szabo points out, however, that while the AC is “very dynamic and proactive”, it’s also “very considered, right from the very beginning” when they sent out a questionnaire, to how they’ve approached accreditation.
The AC wanted to ensure any new framework didn’t kill off its entrepreneurial spirit. “If someone has an idea, we say run with it. With growth, you can slow down into bureaucracy hence the global-local model,” says Tulpa.
Value-led
This model will allow the AC to “have the best of both worlds”, she continues. “We want to keep the autonomy and local cultural agility and build a common thread that keeps the AC intention and spirit.”
Tulpa and Szabo are very different – Tulpa’s MBTI preference is ENTP while Szabo’s is ISTJ – but they work very well as a team.Szabo says: “We’re great friends and have got total trust. We respect our differences, and our strengths complement one another. Our own objectives are aligned with the key objectives of the AC so we’re always on the same page – a value-led unit, looking at how we can stretch ourselves and what the AC does.”
Szabo says they challenge one another and adopt a coaching approach within the relationship: “We’re both comfortable with giving each other feedback.”
Although it sometimes falls on Szabo to keep them grounded, both come at the world from this position of “possibility”, which Szab\o attributes in part to her upbringing: “My family are quite achievement-orientated, with a strong sense of ethics and supporting people. This was the culture I grew up in,” she says. Both, too, are committed to change, explains Tulpa.
“At a values level, something for both of us is not accepting the status quo and making things better. We have a thirst for that.”
Tulpa recalls one mentor who nurtured her energy for challenging the status quo. “I was a highly successful salesperson in a biotech firm. Tony said I’d make an even better manager/leader. He really believed in me – you can’t underestimate the impact of that.
“He taught me to be bold, to be mindful of others but just go for it if you’ve got passion. If you’re held back, be creative to find a way to make it work.” Tulpa has worked in many global organisations in professional services, in marketing and strategy roles, for example.
She hails from a family of entrepreneurs in the Mid-West of the US. “I’m good at energising people around a vision and growing things. Working with people in a way that means others can gain gives me more satisfaction.”
Szabo’s background was in psychology then merchant banking. She was soon drawn to organisational training for the long-term unemployed in London. “It sounded fascinating”, so Szabo took a “massive pay cut” to join as director of training.
“I loved seeing how people had progressed and transformed themselves. The individuals had six to eight reviews which, looking back, were coaching sessions.”
Szabo went on to form London City Training and worked with the government and the Prince’s Trust. She ran the company with a coaching ethos, training some 1,000 individuals each year.
Making a difference
What Szabo loves about coaching is the “transformational element from knowledge and ideas to how, having opportunities to explore the world and situations in different ways, to make a difference to themselves, to organisations and on a larger scale.”
Part of the AC’s vision is to “make a lasting difference to the world”, says Tulpa. “This is why I believe coaches go into coaching. We make that difference by being bold, which is energising, collaborative, which is the ‘we’ versus ‘I’, and purposeful, which is what we want it to be.”
Tulpa, who works with CEOs, executives and cross-cultural top teams has been told she is “quite a challenging coach”. She co-founded consultancy Wisdom8 with Georgina Woudstra. “I help clients think differently. I do that authentically – if you don’t have authenticity, it doesn’t work.”
Tulpa is informed by the systemic coaching approach and also by cognitive behavioural coaching and other approaches which help people examine their belief systems, “helping individuals and teams look at the beliefs that aren’t serving them any more – the old ‘files’ they need to get rid of.”
Tulpa is also informed by philosophy, which she studied for three years. She views Tim Gallwey’s Inner Game (www.theinnergame.com) as philosophical. “It’s about reflecting and sitting back and being an observer, which are components I learnt through my philosophical studies.”
Szabo has just signed up for the University of Pennsylvania LPS’s Foundations of Positive Psychology course, which Tulpa completed recently and recommended to her. “It’s an area I am dipping my toes into but I use a very integrated approach. I like working with strategic leadership, transition coaching, motivating, performance potential and development,” Szabo says.
Tulpa and Szabo remain committed to coaching and the AC. “It’s such as interesting area and it’s moving so fast, and we’re playing a part in shaping it,” says Szabo.