December 2004  
Current Events

 

We are pleased to announce a Facilitator Certification offered January 25-27, 2005 in beautiful Marina Village in San Diego, California.

This event offers a full day participant's experience of the Coaching Workshop on day one and the Certification process on days two and three.

This limited seating even is designed to provide you with tools, materials and processes to conduct your own "The Heart of Coaching" coaching skills development workshops, as well as learn an approach to working with your organization's or client's leadership in the creation of a "Coaching Culture."

We predict that this is the future state for organizations needing to become or remain true "High Performance." You will also become part of a learning community of like-minded professionals who are doing this type of transformational work with leaders and their organizations.

Click here for the overview and registration information in Adobe Acrobat format (PDF file)

 



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.

 

© 2004 Crane Consulting. All rights reserved.