‘Wait, watch, learn, engage.’ It’s a stance that has helped Maria Symeon get to the heart of the issue as coach, psychologist and OD specialist, both in her global work at PwC and now as she branches out on her own
Award-winning coach, psychologist and OD specialist Maria Symeon can first come across as timid. But the former head of global development (partner & leadership development) at PwC is just sussing out the lay of the land before contributing.
When she’s ready, informed by what the system tells her, her contributions pack a lot of punch, offering welcome insights and challenges. I’ve seen her in action many times at conferences and as a core member and founder along with Coaching at Work of the multi-stakeholder group the Future of Coaching Collaboration (FCC).
“Some people call me shy. But it’s that I hold back a bit because I’m looking at the underlying context until I get a feel for ‘how do they do things around here’ before starting to engage in a more active way. It’s stood me in good stead working in different cultures, where it’s ‘wait, watch, learn, engage’,” says Symeon.
“Coaching clients sometimes say I ask questions nobody else has dared to ask,” she says. Meanwhile, bosses throughout her career have fed back to her that she’s able to really put her “finger on issues”, “assimilating data from different sources”, identifying core issues, and sometimes holding up the mirror for people, which can “be very challenging for people’s perceptions”.
After being shortlisted in previous years, this year saw Symeon pick up the Coaching at Work 2017 Internal coaching/mentoring champion award as Joint Winner (with John Lewis Partnership’s Steve Ridgley). Judges were looking for someone who champions and innovates in both their own organisation and beyond. Symeon’s a highly deserving winner thanks to her contributions and achievements, both at PwC and externally, including within the FCC.
This summer, she left PwC after 16 years, having worked in areas including global development (partner and executive development) for just over three years, and as global coaching leader from November 2012 to July 2014.
Symeon will continue to contribute to the FCC, and work through her two new companies. Executive Edge Coaching offers professional executive coaching and leadership development coaching; coaching supervision; advisory services on the set up, procurement and management of internal coaching practices, and advisory services on coaching culture. The Futures Edge is focused on OD, and its advisory services are around leadership team level facilitation; organisational strategy and culture; people strategy; talent and development strategies, and leadership development. The names reflect Symeon’s insight and experience that her challenging approach informed by a systems approach gives her and those she works with an edge.
Her systems approach means Symeon doesn’t see herself ‘just as a coach’.
“I don’t mean that in a derogatory way. But I’ve grown up in the OD tradition. In an ideal world, I wouldn’t place coaching in L&D, but in OD. I think it’s limiting to place coaching only in an individual learning context. If you take a systems approach, it can be a development intervention for the organisation as well as the individual.”
At PwC, she was “thrown at coaching very early on, partly because of my occupational psychology and career development background” and has “never looked back”. And she recalls how even when systemic coaching was not yet “flavour of the month”, coaching at PwC was
“placed beyond the individual, in an organisational context. You were coaching the individual, but always looking at the system.”
She considers herself “really lucky” to have joined a team with that stance, fuelled by the “Coopers’ legacy”
(PwC was formed in 1998 by the merger of Coopers & Lybrand and Price Waterhouse).“Coopers was doing constellations 14-15 years ago; it’s not a new concept for us. Now it’s in fashion.”
Symeon was involved in a range of traditional development activities including facilitating on programmes, action learning sets and live team coaching. Along with other professional services firms, PwC was “pioneering team coaching in a systemic way, and did live work with teams all through the noughties. It’s been honing these skills for a long time.”
Between 2002 and 2004, PwC offered an internal OD and coaching development programme delivered by Ashridge and the Gestalt Centre, with Bill Critchley and John Leary Joyce.
With her systemic OD bent, the Gestalt approach suited Symeon well. Joyce acted as supervisor. “So there was lots of grounding in Gestalt, although not only that. The programme was a real crucible experience in terms of learning the trade for both OD and coaching.”
Background
After finishing her degree in psychology, she explored clinical psychology, specialising in neuropsychology for her dissertation, and working in a medium-secure psychiatric hospital, with people with severe personality disorders.
Although “it was a formative experience, I decided it wasn’t for me. It was very hard to create any real impact.”
She moved into occupational psychology (OP) for her Masters, working in project management. She then worked in a small consultancy in a few OP, and later career development, roles. It was at this time she had her first experience of career coaching, which she found interesting. She was also interested in the areas of talent, leadership and learning.
Symeon left to join PwC’s OD team in July 2001, drawing on her OP, assessment and development experience.
In 2010, having progressed in the organisation over the previous nine years in seniority and complexity of work in OD and coaching contexts, Symeon decided to change role and “experiment with going client-facing” in the people and organisation consulting team.
“It was fascinating and I really enjoyed it, but I missed the internal role. So in 2011, I came back to the internal team in a role in global development, as well as carrying on with my UK coaching clients. I’d never given up coaching. I became more heavily focused on L&D, but with a huge coaching element. I started to look after our key talent, and also had various L&D programmes for partners I was involved in.”
In 2012, she took on a global coaching leader role, which came about because she was looking after the coaching element of PwC’s nine-month global key talent leadership development programme.
At PwC, coaching was already part of this programme and a core resource for its L&D professionals across the
157 territories in which it operates. However there was work to do around the organisation’s coaching overarching strategy.
“There was a coach selection programme and at that time they were using external coaches to coach participants through their experience on the [global talent] programme.
So the first thing I did was to look at the criteria for selection and the following year, I made some changes which go to my coaching philosophy.”
This included adopting a more capabilities approach to coaching. She cites Bachkirova & Lawton-Smith (2015; see also Lawton-Smith, 2015) who explore potential limits of a competences approach versus capabilities in coaching.
“I believe you have to have an understanding of the body of knowledge. Having great listening and questioning skills is not enough to coach leaders. At PwC, we put in place some regular touch points giving coaches the context I felt was important so they didn’t just get the participant perspective, but what the system itself was adding.”
Over the next couple of years, Symeon firmed up PwC’s coaching framework, philosophy and standards, gathering and developing materials for a modular e-learning platform which L&D from all the territories could access, doing an international launch with multiple stakeholders, management across the L&D community, networking and so on.
Supervision was key: “I’m a very strong advocate of supervision. It links back to capability. When I had the role of organisational buyer of coaching, I’d be very keen that every coach I was involved with was having supervision. It’s part of quality assurance. And I link it closely to the OD element.
“I’ve taken different things from individual and group supervision – group especially can offer a space for both individual and organisational learning, for finding out what’s going on in the system.
“Supervision can provide an important source of development. I don’t think anyone’s above it because we’re all human and get caught up in our own patterns. Supervision can help hold coaches to account.”
Symeon holds a certificate in Coaching and Consulting from the Tavistock Institute.
Underpinnings
In addition to systems and Gestalt, she’s also informed by bioenergetics (a form of body psychotherapy founded by Alexander Lowen, and in her case, through training offered by Andy Logan and Sandy Cotter at Centaur Consulting); neuroscience (Paul Brown and David Rock, for example); Davidson’s work (eg, Davidson & Begley, 2012) – “he’s the best on resilience” (a big theme for Symeon); psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s work on development, Jung’s on psychodynamics, and leadership work.
Other learning has come via a series of programmes delivered for many years internally at PwC by Cranfield University and the Praxis Centre (now delivered externally by Cranfield) on developing personal potential.
Books “I keep going back to” include Grosz (2014), Yalom (2000) and Vickers (2003).
Multicultural
Another key influence on how she works is being a ‘third culture kid’.
She was raised in London within two cultures – Greek Cypriot (her parents) and English, and speaks three languages fully – English, Italian and Greek, and some French and Japanese.
If she hadn’t done psychology, she would have been a linguist, and she’s travelled from a very young age, getting “itchy feet if I go three months without getting onto a plane”.
“There’s the issue of where do you really belong for third culture kids. I’d never leave London because I feel rootless, and for me this is my adaptability.
“I’m really clear about my core, but like many other third culture kids, I have chameleon qualities. It’s about purpose and intent, not to please others.”
She’s interested in other cultures too, including that of Japan.
“Japan is full of juxtapositions and polarities, which I am interested in anyway, from Gestalt. At one end, there’s the calm meditative ancient traditions, and at the other, neon lights and lots of noise.”
When she was travelling to Japan as part of her job, she spent lots of time reading about Japanese culture and affairs, and listening to Japan-related programmes, which she was able to feed into her work with clients.
She had to adapt her coaching approach to the cultural context.
“Coaching is a very Western concept, with roots in ancient Greece, and we don’t always translate it very well into the East. In the West, feedback, in the moment or in coaching, is a key element, but this doesn’t happen in Japan – feedback is a somewhat alien concept. You have to contract carefully.
“In Japan, I’d rarely say something directly; it has to be done in a roundabout way. I had to really
adapt that aspect to the context, challenging in a culturally appropriate way which people don’t get offended by, but which still has impact.”
Paying attention to detail and context also comes out in Symeon’s personal style. It’s also another area where her “edge comes out”, she says.
Whenever I’ve seen Symeon, she’s cut a very stylish figure. “I love clothes, shoes and handbags! It’s about having a sense of style – it doesn’t have to be my style. How you look is part of who you are… . Lots of clients talk about how they can differentiate themselves and I seek to help them find what they want to bring to the fore.”
Part of her edge, too, is around the “whole professional piece”: “I have a bugbear around the professionalisation of coaching, and lack of professionalism in coaching. It doesn’t sit very well with everyone. And I’m OK with that.”
Symeon’s role at PwC included “educating territories around procurement of professional coaches. Not everyone recognises the big and nuanced difference between professional coaches and someone who has done a weekend coaching course.”
She still holds that view. “I really think we need to drive for that, and that the FCC is really important for the professionalisation of coaching. And for innovation.
“I was helping a friend who is a jewellery designer at a trade show last weekend. She is really pushing design boundaries with modular jewellery…. It prompted me to think about where’s the innovation in coaching?”
With her eye on context and the wider system, her commitment to making a difference, her adaptability, curiosity and open-ness to influences, and her lack of shyness, Symeon is likely to continue to play a key role in ensuring both the quality and professionalism, and the creativity and innovation in our emerging profession.
References
- T Bachkirova and C Lawton-Smith, ‘From competencies to capabilities in the assessment and accreditation of coaches’, in International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching, 13(2), pp123-140, 2015 http://bit.ly/2ii7Zv4
- R J Davidson & S Begley, The Emotional Life of your Brain, Hachette UK, 2012
- S Grosz, The Examined Life, New York: W W Norton & Company, 2014
- C Lawton-Smith, ‘Research matters: are competencies enough?’, in Coaching at Work, Nov/Dec, 2015 http://bit.ly/2idm1Oz
- A Lowen, Bioenergetics: The Revolutionary Therapy That Uses the Language of the Body to Heal the Problems of the Mind, London: Penguin Compass, 1994
- S Vickers, Mr Golightly’s Holiday, London: Fourth Estate, 2003
- I D Yalom, Love’s Executioner & Other Tales of Psychotherapy, New York: HarperCollins, 2000