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May
you and your family...and your team at work...find joy and
peace in this season. Reflect and be grateful for the abundance
you enjoy...and come back refreshed in 2005 for your best
year ever!
What
Makes “The Heart of Coaching” Distinctive?
1. An explicit
(vs. assumed) coaching relationship is created to
form the basis for ongoing coaching conversations. This is
possible between any two people who interact frequently, and
a high quality of feedback flowing between them will enhance
results as they collaborate on their various work roles and
projects.
2. We support the development of interpersonal
skills required to establish a high level of rapport and respect
to be fully engaged with one another. This
enables the coaching relationship to mature and serve the
dual performance agenda of both the important tasks and relationship
needs. Without this rapport, the feedback people exchange
is more likely just “noise.”
3. We frame
coaching as “applied leadership” and show how it
brings forth the best of what we consider best practices of
contemporary leadership, and the best of our humanity. It
is almost impossible to separate leadership from coaching.
4. The Transformational
Coaching methodology is a powerful process guide
for the coach to organize the coaching conversation. The coach
and the coachee add all content to the conversation. It is
best understood as a template, a conversation guide, a protocol
– NOT a checklist. Its power is derived because this process
is easily adapted to ALL coaching situations between co-workers
– coaching UP, DOWN, and LATERALLY – and covers performance
and development.
5. The Heart of Coaching
workshop fully equips people with the dialogue-based approach
(Transformational Coaching), plus 6 other variations on coaching
interactions. This creates a powerful and versatile
“tool kit” of 7 coaching and/or feedback delivery methodologies
that fit ANY scenario – from coaching one’s Boss
or one’s Peer, to efficient Coaching Shorthand, to Team Coaching,
to Problem-Solving Coaching, to only delivering Feedback without
coaching.
6. The workshops always
explore the Best Practices of coaching as
we address the biggest coaching challenges faced by the group
in the workshop. This assures that the learning experience
is “coachee centered” – which is consistent with one of the
primary ways we encourage coaches to approach the individuals
or teams they coach.
7. We stress the critical
importance of leaders and managers demonstrating their commitment
to enhancing their coaching skills by getting their
egos out of the way and actively solicit feedback
from their coachees on how they can improve their coaching.
Coachees are clearly the best source of this type of developmental
feedback. We believe that the leaders’ coachability becomes
critical if the process is to be viewed as something other
than the “flavor of the month.”
8. We work with our own powerful coaching
competencies instrument – The 7
C’s of Transformational Coaching – and offer it
either as a self-assessment or a full 360 ° feedback report.
We work with participants to shape this information into a
developmental plan that is ultimately articulated as a Coaching
Contract. This includes one’s unique vision for themselves
as a coach/leader and up to three specific coaching behaviors
that will most powerfully enhance their coaching effectiveness.
9. The workshop activities include
a planning session where participants set personal specific
coaching goals on a Coaching Scorecard. This
focuses each person on where and with whom they will incorporate
their learnings from the workshop. These goals are easily
tracked and monitored for the individual, thus increasing
accountability with their respective manager for application
and results. This goal-setting process can also be applied
to an entire leadership team and enable the tracking of team
or project-specific results. This builds the internal "business
case" for coaching.
10. This approach to coaching recognizes
the linkage between performance and development.
It stresses the importance of regular performance feedback
as a way to build immediately usable competencies and skills…and
the use of developmental feedback to support the longer term
development of capacities for the sustainability of the organization.
One of the first jobs of leaders is to build more leaders.
So performance and development become a “both/and”
proposition.
11. So that desired
behavioral change can be made permanent, we encourage the
exploration of the coachee’s beliefs that drive their behaviors.
We present this phenomenon in a framework called “The
Results Cycle.” This demonstrates the connection
between Beliefs, Behaviors, Relationships, and Results and
serves as the organizing structure for the information on
which the feedback is based.
12. The Transformational Coaching
methodology becomes a common framework for leaders and their
teams. It represents a new paradigm of working relationships,
encouraging people to move away from a Boss/Subordinate/Competitor
relationship toward a Coach/Coachee/Collaborator partnership.
This coaching process focuses on the creation of egalitarian
working relationships between people and builds the necessary
mind-sets and skill-sets necessary for a “high-performance
coaching culture” to emerge.
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