Coaching: To be…or not to be.. coached, that is the question

A friend of mine (let’s call him Peter) is “acting up” at a senior level in an organisation so he has just employed a coach.. Good idea – so how come it took Peter 6 months to get around to it?

Maybe he was new to the concept of coaching?
No – Peter had used a coach in a previous post and found it a useful space to reflect and focus on his own agenda.

Was the funding an issue?
No - he’s in an organisational position where he can access and authorise large amounts.

Then it must have been organisational policy?
No – his HR department seemed supportive when he finally got around to asking them to do some research on options.

Obviously, there may well be some factors that are internal to Peter and contributing to “the block”… and that could be an interesting dynamic for Peter to explore in a coaching session!

What other factors might have contributed to the block?
The two organisations were very different. The previous organisation was a “start up” and coaching was arranged for the whole team of directors, and their coaches were allocated so there was no need to choose. In contrast, coaching was not visible in the current organisation and seemed not to be “on the agenda”.

So there are two important organisational factors:

Firstly, the potentially remedial view of coaching; Peter may well have had concerns about his colleagues’ perceptions of the use of a coach? Would they perceive it as “remedial” – signifying a need for support in a bigger job?

And secondly, how to choose a coach?
Peter had many demands on his time. There was enormous choice and real difficulty in differentiating between the companies, let alone individual coaches. Add to this the sense of embarking on a fairly personal relationship based on only paper or electronic information - a bit like an internet date?

The solution was that Peter used a company I recommended and let the company chose the coach.

The experience of seeing a very rational and decisive person get blocked like this has stimulated my curiosity on the dynamics of choosing a coach. I’m starting to gather and analyse descriptions and I’d be really interested to hear about your experience – especially on any factors that supported or impeded your choices.

Leadership - Ahead of your class?

If developing leadership is important to you, then we recommend ordering yourself the film "Ahead of the Class". It's great drama, it's based on a true story (try also the book of the same name) and it's full of rich pickings about leadership. It's set in a school in London and, of course, it's therefore a different context from your own, whether you are in another school, a large corporate organisation, a small business, the public sector or a charity. The challenge of leading people however remains the same across each of these organisations.

So what is at the heart of good leadership? We call it Functional Fluency and we think it's about being able to channel energy between three fundamental categories of human functioning in a way that is most appropriate to the given situation.

The first category is social responsibility which is about using energy on behalf of others and involves being in charge and carrying authority. It seems obvious that this would be a critical component of good leadership but there are, of course, helpful and less helpful ways of being in charge and carrying authority! For example a helpful mode of behaviour would be structuring. A less helpful mode of behaviour would be dominating.

The second category is using energy to assess the reality of a situation, moment by moment. Take the metaphor of driving your car. It is a blessing to be able to get into one's car, get onto the motorway, put on the music, put one's mind into 'auto-pilot' and relax. We unconciously take this energy saving approach to much of our journey through our day and through our life - very useful too. But there are times when the journey we make is more risky or takes us and others we are responsible for into unchartered or uncertain territory (and this is what leaders do) and as leaders we then need to be able to weigh up what is going on around us and respond to the stimuli instant by instant in the most realistic and appropriate way possible. At the heart of this category of behaviour is fundamentally an issue of our survival. Our survival may be affected by hazardous weather on the motorway or by a toxic envrionment in which we live or work.

Finally, good leadership also relies on the third category of human functioning which we describe as 'self actualisation'. Are leaders more open to learning? Possibly! Learning certainly pushes our boundaries and is often richest when we are out of our comfort zone. And leaders are the ones most likely to be pushing the boundaries. Rather than comply or resist, we think good leaders invest energy in learning how to relate to and get along with other people. They also put energy into expressing who they are and into doing their own unique thing in a way that is appropriate to their age (take Mandela for example)...which tends to make them conspicuous in a crowd.

Marc Braddock runs a workshop with a colleague using the film "Ahead of the Class" to explore Functionally Fluent Leadership. He is a licensed provider of the TIFF psychometric tool which supports the developent of Functional Fluency and offers one-to-one coaching and action learning set facilitation. Contact marc.braddock@prdpartnership.com. For more information on Functional Fluency visit http://www.functionalfluency.com/