Hawkins: don’t ignore the future – it may bite you
The thirteenth fairy only becomes the wicked fairy because of not being invited to the party, and so it is with organisations that ignore stakeholders, such as the future, at their peril,” said Peter Hawkins, referring to the wicked fairy in the Grimms’ Fairy Tale,
Sleeping Beauty.
Speaking at the Association for Coaching’s annual conference on creating a coaching culture, Bath Consultancy Group founder, Hawkins, said every organisation has a thirteenth fairy “who will prick them in the thumb or bite them in the bum” if they are ignored.
He urged coaches and others to “think future back and outside in” and to consider how we can wake clients up to “what they are wilfully blind to…and to that which is not being attended to”.
He said many coaches are “organisational refugees”, who want to escape working in an organisation.
“We need to help them recover and love the system.”
He said the biggest challenge in organisations “doesn’t lie in the individual or team, but the connections, yet we know more about coaching the individuals than the connections”.
He said the challenges the young will face in 30 years’ time will be far greater than any faced before, and coaches need to ask themselves what they are doing as a privileged generation to help.
We all face increasing demand from a growing population. In Hawkins’ lifetime, the world’s population has trebled; expectations are increasing in a time of digital connections, “meaning the rest of the world knows what the rest of the world is getting, and wants the best”; and resources are decreasing – the current estimate is we are using 150 per cent of world’s annual resources, he said.
“Why does this make a difference? We are still talking about getting back to growth. How do we work in a world where this is our story for the next 50 years?
“Coaching culture is part of how we become resilient. We think the unit of survival is the individual, and it never is. Therefore, it’s not the unit of flourishing…
“How do we help individuals lean into the future? Co-create the future and adapt to it? So that every effort is in service of the bigger system?
“David Cameron says we’re in a global race, but where is the finishing line?
“It’s a new paradigm. We need to move away from seeing the client in front of us, as the client. Thinking needs to be in a triangulated system with the stakeholders and the future.”
AoEC joins forces with Taylor Clarke to establish programmes across Ireland
The Academy of Executive Coaching (AoEC) is expanding into Ireland in a partnership with consultancy Taylor Clarke, to create AoEC Ireland.
Taylor Clarke, a UK/Ireland consultancy, has been established for 30 years, providing global leadership development and organisation development services, in addition to coaching through 30 executive coaches. The partnership will be led by Wendy Robinson, principal consultant and head of research and development at Taylor Clarke.
“We are delighted to be offering our programmes across all of Ireland. We have had a close relationship with Ireland over the years, many of our Alumni coming from Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland,” said John Leary-Joyce, CEO of the AoEC and non executive chair of the European Mentoring and Coaching Council UK (EMCC).
Robinson said, “I am honoured to bring AoEC’s top-end coach training programmes to my home country.
I see about me in Ireland a vibrant and committed community of coaches, pushing the boundaries of their profession, collaborating with each
other and delivering results for their client organisations. I look forward to supporting the ongoing growth of this profession.”
The AoEC has been running executive coach training programmes in the UK for more than 12 years, and has already established a global presence with partnerships in China, Kenya, Croatia, Romania, Turkey, Germany, Estonia and Scotland.
l For more about AoEC Ireland, go to: www.aoecireland.com
Kline: let your clients think
The coaching profession needs to fight back against a culture that censors individual thinking, becoming the first to grasp the difference between thinking and “thinking for themselves”, said Nancy Kline.
“We live in a culture that censors individual thinking…I’m talking systemic suppression of individual thinking that begins at home…
it’s rewarded at every level of our organisations…including by our own profession of coaching, and yet it is coaching that could halt this,” said Kline, founder of Time to Think.
The quality of everything we do depends on the quality of the thinking we do first, Kline noted. She said there are two worlds of thinking: exchange thinking, which tends to be derivative and is borne typically out of input, and fully independent thinking, which is borne out of attention and is generative, but unofficially forbidden.
“Human flourishing depends on both worlds. Fully independent thinking is not what clients invite us in for and pay us for, however it is what they long for.”
Yet. as coaches, we operate almost exclusively in exchange thinking, she said. It is the coach’s attention, with a particular series of questions, which generates the client’s own fresh thinking.
She urged coaches to “build new relationships with generative attention and uncorrupted silence”, and to “discard the professional’s ego”, which includes a series of incorrect assumptions. These are: that until the coach speaks, it’s not yet coaching; that attention only serves the purpose of deciding what to say next; that professionals look stupid if they are quiet for too long; that nothing happens in silence, it’s a waste of time, and that no-one pays for attention.
New blood for AOCS The Association of Coaching Supervisors (AOCS) has made a number of new appointments.
Erik de Haan, of the Ashridge Centre for Coaching, has stepped up from the role of honorary member to chair. Jacqui Hazell and Rob Watling have been appointed as joint learning directors. James Lawley and Penny Tompkins are co-developers of Symbolic Modelling as well as co-authors
of Metaphors in Mind.
l See full story online
Women on top
Being mentored, being involved in critical job assignments and networking with senior decision makers are bigger factors in getting women promoted than HR processes, suggests research from Kenexa High Performance Institute among 1,000 employees in global businesses, presented at the Women’s Business Forum on 7-8 October in London. Mentoring and sponsorship are important factors leading to promotions for women (12 per cent). However, the research found 83 per cent of respondents don’t have mentors.
Flexed approach
More employers are adopting a flexible approach to working patterns in a bid to reduce absence levels, finds a survey by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development and Simplyhealth. The average absence level is at 7.6 days, back up to the levels observed in 2011 and 2010. Some 85 per cent of employers reported adjustments to working patterns this year, compared to just 65 per cent in last year’s Absence Management Survey.
Coaching at Work, volume 8, issue 6