Events Calendar: September - December 2016

Thursday 15th & Friday 16th September
Wellbeing Coaching Programme, Wigan, UK
This 2 day ILM Endorsed programme will help you to empower clients with the knowledge, skills and confidence needed to make necessary lifestyle and behavioural changes to improve their health and quality of life.

Saturday 17th September
Coaching Network, The Mount, Orrell, UK
In these informal sessions we lead a seminar on a crucial area of coaching, followed by a chance to mix with like-minded professional coaches and share your learning. The seminar will be on Action Learning and Group Coaching.

Monday 19th, Tuesday 20th & Wednesday 21st September (plus 3 days at a later date)
Level 7 Executive Coaching and Mentoring Programme, DW Stadium, Wigan, UK
This programme will develop your capability to act as a coach/mentor at the highest level. It takes around a year to complete. The extensive practical and theory-based work will enable you to work with any client to develop their leadership skills and support their career development.

Monday 19th, Tuesday 20th & Wednesday 21st September (plus 2 days at a later date)
Level 7 Coaching Supervision Programme, DW Stadium, Wigan, UK
This programme is for highly experienced coaches who are looking to become a competent coach supervisor. Ideal for those who lead coaching in an organisation.

Wednesday 5th, Thursday 6th & Friday 7th October (plus 2 days at a later date)
Level 5 Coaching and Mentoring Programme, DW Stadium, Wigan, UK
This is an undergraduate level qualification, designed for mid-level managers and organisational coaches to develop the knowledge and ability to coach effectively at organisational level.

Wednesday 5th, Thursday 6th & Friday 7th October (plus 1 day at a later date)
Level 3 Coaching Programme, DW Stadium, Wigan, UK
This programme is ideal for those who are new to coaching, it will develop your capability to act as a coach and develop those around you. It takes 6-9 months to complete this qualification.

Wednesday 12th & Thursday 13th October
Career Coaching Programme, Dubai, UAE
This is a 2 day ILM Endorsed programme that aims to enhance executive coaching skills in the context of careers issues. The programme is for coaches and will build on their existing coaching skills and techniques to provide effective career coaching and counselling.

Saturday 15th October
Coaching Network, Dubai, UAE
In these informal sessions we lead a seminar on a crucial area of coaching, followed by a chance to mix with like-minded professional coaches and share your learning. The seminar will be on Team and Group Coaching Techniques.

Sunday 16th, Monday 17th & Tuesday 18th October (plus 6 days at a later date)
Level 7 Executive Coaching and Mentoring Programme, Dubai, UAE
This programme will develop your capability to act as a coach/mentor at the highest level. It takes around a year to complete. The extensive practical and theory-based work will enable you to work with any client to develop their leadership skills and support their career development.

Monday 17th, Tuesday 18th & Wednesday 19th October (plus 2 days at a later date)
Level 7 Coaching Supervision Programme, Dubai, UAE
This programme is for highly experienced coaches who are looking to become a competent coach supervisor. Ideal for those who lead coaching in an organisation.

Thursday 3rd & Friday 4th November
Career Coaching Programme, London, UK
This is a 2 day ILM Endorsed programme that aims to enhance executive coaching skills in the context of careers issues. The programme is for coaches and will build on their existing coaching skills and techniques to provide effective career coaching and counselling.

Saturday 19th November
Coaching Network, The Mount, Orrell, UK
In these informal sessions we lead a seminar on a crucial area of coaching, followed by a chance to mix with like-minded professional coaches and share your learning.

Thursday 24th & Friday 25th November
Career Coaching Programme, Wigan, UK
This is a 2 day ILM Endorsed programme that aims to enhance executive coaching skills in the context of careers issues. The programme is for coaches and will build on their existing coaching skills and techniques to provide effective career coaching and counselling.

Tuesday 13th December
Planning & Pricing Your Coaching Services, Wigan, UK
1 day masterclass with Judith Barton that will give you the knowledge, tools and motivation to work on your business plan and pricing strategy.

Operating Within Your Strengths Zone

Charlotte Randall

How many of us grew up under the premise that we could be anything we wanted to be, if we just applied ourselves hard enough? I certainly have recollections of my mother regularly imparting this message on me, mostly when I was refuting doing my homework. A mother now myself, I have had to work hard to manage the aspirations and expectations of my children within the realms of reality. Keeping their dreams for the future alive is a constant challenge and I can certainly understand how easy it is to revert to ‘you can be anything you want to be’ when they look at you with such hope in their faces. My daughter, at the tender age of 13, has recently had to form an opinion on her career path that will shape her impending subject choices. Whilst my son believes that we are thwarting his chances of being a Formula One driver because we are refusing to sell our house to fund this. Both may succeed in the paths they wish to travel down (although, I can categorically say we are not selling our house), but the indicators in their behaviour points heavily towards this being a goal not firmly underpinned by their evolving strengths, but one based upon an impending time constraint, current trends in media advertising and extrinsic motivators (money, reward, title, benefits).

In order to support their thinking my current conversations with them do not focus on something that they may or may not be in 10 years’ time, but more poignantly, what it is they have done recently that excited them, that they have really cared about doing or achieving. I ask questions that will fix the moment to a feeling and provoke thinking in a forward’s direction. For example, one of them recently came home very excited that they would be moving up to top set PE. I asked the question - what do you think your teacher saw in you to move you up? The response ‘I always work hard and show good sportsmanship’. I followed this with curiosity by asking the question - what does good sportsmanship look like? ‘I work as a team member and when someone on my team has done something good I let him or her know’. How does it make you feel that your teacher is pleased with your performance? ‘I feel proud and happy’. I wanted to then challenge the thinking by asking - what have you learnt about yourself because of this? ‘I always wanted to move up into top set and now I have because I worked hard so my teacher would notice me. Anything else? ‘I work as part of a team’. Anything else? ‘I encourage others to do well’. Anything else? ‘It makes me feel good when I support my team mates’.  Moving forwards I then ask - how can you feel like this more often? ‘I could keep helping out my mates and working hard.’ Where else could you use these skills? ‘Maybe at breaks or in a different subject’. What would that look like? As you can see themes of strengths start to develop from this platform of enquiry based and solutions focused questioning, becoming even more powerful when you revisit the topic a few weeks later to continue to support and embed the transference of skills. By scaffolding the conversation they are becoming more self-aware of whether they will get the best from themselves, the influence this will have on others and how these strengths can be transferred within and between situations making their future choices more informed.

Similarly, within my professional capacity I have also had interactions with colleagues where career decisions are based upon extrinsic or company led factors. As a result, personal fulfillment and achievement has not been attained because of consistent failure to work from and within identified personal strengths. Entering a profession or taking on promotion that has not been supported by a transition conversation, based on strength finding and transference questions, can be a costly exercise for all involved. Out of this circumstance a shift in focus can be created that relies on operating persistently within the realms of personal limitations and can eventually become a barrier to success. An expectation gap between the individual and organisation establishes itself and is played out through increased negative behaviours and relationships, a decrease in productivity and stifled creativity. So, how can we work towards making the right choices and increasing the gratification and achievements we get out of our professional lives? As with my children, it starts with a conversation that sets in motion a thought process around identifying or re-engaging with what it is we are good at, what we need to do more of. The language may change in its complexity, but the essence of the conversation remains the same. Take a moment to ask yourself the following questions. Then, reflect upon your answers to inform your thinking and increase self-awareness of when you are operating at your optimum.

• What have I done or achieved that excites and motivates me? What am I good at?
• What is my performance output like when operating within my strengths zone?
•  How does operating within this area make me feel? 
•  How often do I operate within this capacity? How can I function here more?
•  How will working here help me to aspire towards my future goals?
• How can I transfer these skills into different areas of my life?
• How much bigger is my sphere of influence as a result of operating in this zone?
• How often do I revisit my strengths to re-energise and move forwards?
• What do I not yet know I am good at? How can I find this out?

Of course in life circumstance and opportunity also play a role, but once you can align a situation with your strengths you have the baseline from which to move forwards, to make informed and potentially positive and life-changing decisions that exhibit more chance of sustainable output. There will always be occasions and situations in life that play to our limitations, but these are much easier to face head-on if we can identify and engage with our strength zone the majority of the time.

Coaches need to be coached – Oh and supervised!

Judith Barton, Director of Coaching and Mentoring

To me, running a coaching practice is similar to being in a legal or medical practice.  As a professional coach I am going on a journey with my clients enabling them to delve into their own resources so that they can develop a sense of their own potential and are supported to realise that potential through listening, questioning and challenging.  But in the end it is their own decision – as a coach it is not my place to provide guidance or advice but to draw out from clients their own understanding and enable them to make choices to develop their own careers and futures. 

Professional coaches are also practicing – practicing our skills, reviewing and reflecting on how each coaching session progressed and the interactions which took place.  Finally, a coach must create an accurate an accurate baseline. This sets out their strengths and areas for improvement and leads to a personal development plan to be actioned.  Once implemented, this plan is subject to review, reflection and further planning for improvement.  As part of this process, the coach must also recognise and celebrate their strengths and achievements. This leads me to four central tenets of running a coaching practice – which are: self-review supported by supervision, maintaining their skills base; keeping up to date with research and thinking about coaching practice; and ensuring that purchasers of coaching understand the concept of ‘coaching practice’. 

1: Self review supported by supervision is critical.  To be effective, review of practice should be carried out soon after each session is completed.  You will need to find your own balance between being to close to the interaction to be objective; and too far to be able to remember key points.  Self-review on its own however carries risks – that you will become overly self-critical or insufficiently self-aware.  In order to ensure some degree of distance and to avoid getting too drawn into feeling that you have to sort everything out on your own, the input of a supportive, challenging and knowledgeable coaching supervisor is an equally critical element of self-development.  You should choose a supervisor who understands your approach to coaching who is willing and able to be both supportive and challenging to question your assumptions and self-evaluation and provide a platform for continuous improvement of your practice. 

2: Coaches need to Coach – this may sound obvious but coaching is not something you can do once or twice a year whilst maintaining professional standards of competence. I feel that I need to be practicing my coaching skills at least twice per month. Coaching a number of people who have different issues to resolve, different learning styles and different interpersonal skills ensures that I can maintain a variety of coaching skills and the ability to deploy these skills in working with a range in types of client 

3: Keeping up with new thinking in coaching.   As a professional coach I can only provide a ‘state of the art’ coaching experience for clients if I spend time on a regular basis reading, evaluating and, where appropriate, working out how to use new techniques in my coaching practice.  I regularly read a number of journals – Coaching At Work, Edge, Management Today, Harvard Business Review – which keeping me up-to-date with not only coaching theory and practice but also management thinking.  As well as providing some coaching articles, the latter keep me up to date with the issues which may be facing my clients in their professional roles. In addition, I attend relevant conferences and CPD events.  For example, Association for Coaching conferences, Institute of Leadership and Management events and coaching network's can provide useful insights into developing my coaching practice and ensuring that my practice is evidence-based and leading edge. 

4: Purchasers of Coaching need to understand the concept of practice.  For those who purchase coaching, for themselves or members of their leadership or management teams, it is critical that they appreciate and seek out coaches who undertake regular supervision; who maintain their coaching practice, at the appropriate level of seniority, and who can demonstrate that they are up-to-date with the latest thinking and practical skills.  Purchasers have an in-depth understanding of what they are purchasing and what they hope to achieve for both individuals and the organisation.  I will be further sharing my thoughts on ‘Selecting the Right Coach’ in future blogs.

www.britishschoolofcoaching.com

Know yourself, know your client

In order to operate professionally and within the ethical boundaries of coaching,I believe we have an obligation to our clients to undertake periods of sustained self-reflection. My personal mantra that has supported my continued development and ability to self-reflect objectively on my performance,and that of my clients, is ‘know yourself, know your client’.

When we make the decision to bring about a change involving the development of new knowledge and skills to move forwards, it is my belief that we must first be aware of the behavioural default settings from which we operate as a norm. To enable this process of self-reflection to have a purpose we must understand the values, beliefs and attitudes that we hold and that are the foundation on which we base our decisions. Understanding ourselves, and the standpoint from which we operate, we are able to communicate effectively and develop relationships based on mutuality of purpose and outcome.Similarly, through reflection you are better equipped to foresee situations when assumptions and judgements might hi-jack your session, when emotions might supersede the facilitation of a clients thoughts, learning and progression and when ego states might limit relationships. Linked to this is fully understanding the role and responsibilities we take on within our professional and personal lives; an appreciation of how our personal culture has impacted on us emotionally and spiritually, and the persona that we choose to show people in public.

Once self-aware, you become better equipped with the skills and tools to support your client through their journey of understanding and how their values, beliefs and attitudes might impact on their relationships and decisions that they make.

Charlotte Randall

Book Review: Coaching and Mentoring at Work

Coaching and Mentoring At Work (2nd Edition)  –Mary Connor and Julia Pokora (2012) Open University Press, McGraw-Hill Education

Martin Hill, Senior Tutor, BSC

 This book is relevant for experienced practitioners and also provides a great framework for new practitioners and students. I would also suggest that this is an essential read for purchasers of coaching and mentoring service, HR professionals and managers/leaders who are interested in developing their coaching and mentoring skills.

The book is written in an accessible, easy to understand style and is crammed full with practical examples and tips. The authors even reserve a chapter for one of the key characters in any coaching or mentoring relationship – the client. This is one of the few coaching and mentoring texts that address the position of the client and sets out the factors that clients should bear in mind when deciding whether to embark upon coaching or mentoring and suggests how best to prepare themselves to get the best out of that experience, as well as highlighting some of the standards and behaviours that they should be expecting from a coach or mentor- a useful chapter for the practitioner to reflect upon their own practice to ensure that they are meeting these expectations and standards.

The book considers the similarities between coaching and mentoring and one of the key arguments of the authors is that “a learning relationship is central to both coaching and mentoring, which are more than just a set of activities or skills.” It also highlights the differences between the two disciplines, albeit the majority of the book focuses on the common elements.

The structure of the book prompts reflection and learning opportunities for the reader- reinforcing the reflective learning discipline that is a prerequisite for the wise practitioner! I found the chapter on contracting to be a practical and comprehensive guide which addresses the key factors that one encounters in reality – a book that addresses the practitioner elements as well as the subject theory.

The main model that is advocated by the authors for both coaching and mentoring is Dr Gerard Egan’s Skilled Helper” model-once again the authors approach this with a winning combination of theory and practical application. Two chapters show how the model would apply to a coaching scenario and a mentoring scenario. The authors also highlight other models commonly encountered in coaching and mentoring.

The authors also provide a comprehensive guide to tools and techniques that will support the successful implementation of the model – twelve tools and techniques that are succinctly described and the pros and cons considered.

The second edition features a new chapter which deals with reflective practice, supervision and accreditation – this is outlined with the same hallmarks of clarity and practicality with useful checklists and prompts.
This book will be one of the “default” texts that I turn to in my coaching and mentoring practice, and also in my role as manager and leader. It will be one of the texts that I will recommend for my ILM Level 7 candidates as a good “foundation” text.

Martin is a Programme tutor for British School of Coaching's executive coaching courses.  Read more about our ILM qualifications and CPD courses here.

British Embassy Presentation for Dubai English Speaking School

Last week we were very proud to present Certificates to teachers from Dubai English Speaking School for completing the ILM Level 3 Award in Coaching. Very well done to everyone!

12 more teachers have just begun the qualification, as the school continue to develop a culture of coaching throughout the whole organisation.

Developing a School Leadership Coaching Team

Charlotte Randall

Through private invitation, the Dubai English Speaking School (DESS) was asked to present at the 'What Works' Leadership event on April 16^th 2013 at the Knowledge and Human Development Authority (KHDA) in Dubai.  The Headteacher, Mr David Hammond, along with myself, jointly delivered a presentation that focused on the success of introducing the ILM Level 3 Award in Coaching accreditation into the professional development programme of our senior and middle leaders.

The Knowledge and Human Development Authority (KHDA) is a regulatory authority of the Government of Dubai and is responsible for the growth, direction and quality of private education and learning in Dubai.  'What Works' was established by the KHDA, as an invitation only event, to provide a forum for collaborative learning within Dubai’s private education sector. Their vision, to bring schools together to share best practice and develop professional relationships based on underlying values that put the pupils at the heart of learning.

By taking the approach of training all members of the leadership team (teaching and non-teaching) on a rolling programme due to complete in 2014, we have started to build capacity and capability across the organisation for increasing performance at all levels. This is being achieved through individual coaching sessions, performance management conversations and the integration of the coaching dialogue into the core of the organisation.

Areas that have been developed as a result of enhancing the schools professional development opportunities with an accredited leadership coaching team are:

Leadership and Management:

• Team collegiality, motivation, challenge
• Behavioural changes at leadership level to get the best from the team
• Raising the profile of leadership roles through addressing staff performance

Career/Role Development:

• Linked to the above leadership and management points but also….
• Career progression within the organisation (long term and short term goals linked to teaching and learning)
• Understand my role within the organisation

Teaching and Learning:

• Develop teaching and learning strategies
• Developing in key areas such as formative and summative assessment

Time Management:

• Using the Time Management Matrix to support colleagues through pressure points in the term
• How to deal with stress and panic

Project Management:

• Building a rationale and action plan towards implementing a project

Change Management:

• Supporting colleagues to adapt to change within the working environment
• Transition out of the organisation and succession planning

Raising the profile of a department:

• Developing skills and practical actions to raise the profile of the department/subject area

It was a privilege to have been invited to the 'What Works' event and be able to share the good practice, commitment and hard work of my colleagues at DESS to ensure that as an organisation we are always moving forward.

During the presentation, visual harvesting or graphic recording was used to collect the content of the talk in real-time, the result of which can be seen in the photo below.

Charlotte Randall

Read more about the coaching programme the British School of Coaching are implementing at Dubai English Speaking School here