Sue Kidd and Stephen Gibb use force field analysis to help the Natural History Museum evolve its potential managers.
For 150 years the Natural History Museum has generated and preserved knowledge, exploring the fundamental question: “Who am I?” Could there be any more fertile ground for coaching?
Recently, though, the museum discovered it had been failing to make the most of its own development opportunities. Only 10 per cent of internal applicants had been promoted to management over the 18 months to June 2008. But what was preventing staff from achieving career progression as managers?
Our analysis identified the cause as ineffective management of the talents of the whole person. We therefore introduced a range of development interventions. One was the evolution of coaching to help staff form and apply ideas and approaches that would let them manage their own learning and fulfil their potential.
The museum formed a partnership with Strathclyde Business School (SBS) to provide coach development and ongoing support with CPD. The successful introduction and evolution of coaching at the museum involved working with SBS to meet and pass three key tipping points, which meant introducing coaching, building an internal resource and sustaining organisational change.
The coaching approach
Coaching began by identifying key champions and developing partnerships. Forty managers expressed an interest in training as coaches; 24 have so far completed certified training. The coaches are supervised by SBS. Best practice is developed through SBS’s ongoing CPD and via internal museum development days, forums and networks on coaching knowledge and skills practice.
An internal coaching resource continues to evolve, keeping the coaches active and supported, and encouraging their future involvement in accredited training. Our next step will be to develop a supervision qualification to build a sustainable internal coaching practice.
We now have a critical mass of ‘licensed’ internal coaches as a resource, offering fulfilling, direct and formal CPD for a mixture of staff, including senior managers, scientists, professionals and operational and support workers.
The three tipping points:
We use force field analysis to describe the development of the coaching capacity at the museum, identifying and then increasing key driving forces and lessening key restraining forces.
1. Vision and beginnings
The initial vision was that coaching could enable staff to have conversations to help them achieve their potential and raise self-awareness through responsibility for their own learning.
It is the heart of a non-directive coaching approach. In short, staff can better think, decide and act for themselves. We identified a number of areas where coaching could form a practical link with and have a positive impact on museum processes.
2. Development
Working with solutions, not problems, developing our own answers and focusing on insights are all at the heart of coaching. During training the initial challenges of understanding and developing coaching skills had to be handled sensitively to allow insights to emerge.
In the working environment a second set of challenges emerged – the perception of the coaches as cultural architects.
In an organisation with a high proportion of professionals and experts this had to mean developing the coaching confidence and commitment to inspire inspirational people and explore concerns about aspects of the organisational culture.
So our approach to coaching training focused on what can be done to professionally train coaches and achieve an accredited qualification from SBS. This is demanding, but done in a way that both fulfils learning and respects diversity in coaching practice – both the organisational and individualised approaches to coaching. In this way the organisation develops its coaches as cultural architects.
3. Internal resources
Although training can generate pockets of progress, what is done, and how, often proves immensely difficult to change, even with a well-trained coaching capability. A further level of CPD is encountered. The aim is to support the learner to question their abiding governing variables, to see what might be beyond simply altering a set of superficial behaviours temporarily.
This is CPD which engages with unconscious thinking and feeling, the lenses of a person’s self-concept and sensemaking, grounded in career, culture and sub-culture. A system for meeting all levels of CPD needed to be developed, both for individuals via development as coaches and for the organisation as a whole via the development of a coaching capacity.
Sue Kidd is head of OD at the Natural History Museum and Stephen Gibb is coaching programme director at Strathclyde Business School and provider of coach training at the museum.
Natural history
The Natural History Museum employs some 1,700 people as staff, scientific associates, interns, volunteers and work experience students. It publishes almost 1,000 scientific papers a year and cares for, develops and gives access to information on some 80 million specimens, 1 million books and half a million pictures. Around 3.7 million people visit each year.
| Coaching situations/impact | Museum process |
| Develop talents of new or promoted manager | Appraisal Induction |
| Explore organisational behaviour | Organisationaldevelopment planning |
| Strategic concerns | Business planning |
| Gives psychological safety | Psychological contract Team building |
| Helps transform ‘derailing’ behaviours | Performance management |
| Gives space for issues outside working life | Work life balance/flexibility |
| Builds cross-museum relationshipswith shared purpose | Project management teams Alignment with strategy |
| Breaks down hierarchy and replaces with peer engagement | Team building Future culture |
| Creates respect and trust | Organisational health |
| Knowledge and learning transfer | Follow-up after training courses |
Lessons in evolving an internal coaching resource to support CPD:
- Share an approach to coaching that is connected to your values.
- Develop a champion in the organisation to gain a coaching qualification so that they can lead and develop the programme.
- Partner with the right provider, in our case, a research-based higher education organisation, to ensure your coaching development fits with your own culture.
- Build the environment to support the evolution of an internal resource.
- Look for links where the evolution of coaching can have the greatest cultural impact for you, such as appraisals and performance management.
References
- K S Cameron, R E Quinn, J DeGraff and A V Thakor, Competing Values Leadership: Creating Value in Organizations, Cheltenham, UK: Edward Elgar, 2006.
- E de Haan, “A new vintage: old wine maturing in new bottles”, in Training Journal, November, pp20-24, 2005.
- M Goldsmith, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, Hyperion, 2007.
- J Pfeffer and R Sutton, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half Truths and Total Nonsense: Profiting from Evidence-Based Management, Harvard Business School Press, 2006.