Coaching relationships start organically March 22, 2007
Posted by laurenklein07 in Uncategorized.add a comment
One of the key themes we have seen in our research thus far is that coachees often stumble upon their coaches in their worklife and because they are often in pursuit of knowledge, learning and growth. In our interviews thus far, we haven’t found coachees taking on a formal vendor search in order to identify a coach, rather they meet a mentor/coach during either within their day job. In a few cases, we found that a coaching relationship started out as a consulting relationship for another type of business deliverable and evolves.
We found that a relationship starts and trust is established over time, which allows a coach and coachee to structure often extensions of their previous relationships into one on one coaching sessions that are more formal outside of the initial engagement structure. In a different case, we found that coach identified a high potential employee/coachee through their own participation within a community. In other words, the coach senses an individuals passion and can see their future leader potential and works to help them see themselves in that role through informal coaching.
Defining a coaching relationship March 7, 2007
Posted by John David Smith in Research.add a comment
Yesterday I was talking with a graduate student who’s studying e-coaching — a subject that seemed broad enough that I wanted to define more precisely what kind of coaching we’re studying in this project:
Coaching a community leader happens through a sustained conversation that is focused on the ongoing leadership practice of one partner (the coachee), drawing upon the experience and background of the other (the coach).
There are several reasons that the definition matters and several points follow from it:
- The “sustained conversation” part is necessary because all of the
community leader’s practice isn’t visible at once, much less at the beginning. Neither is the context within which
that practice takes place, partly because leadership always changes the context. - Ideally, community leaders are expert in the domain of the community they are leading, not in community leadership as such. In fact it’s rare that they want to become expert in the subtleties of community development. So at the beginning of the coaching relationship the most important contribution that a coach can make is to help with “noise reduction” — suggesting which of a myriad of issues can be ignored for the time being. A sense of “the practice of community leadership” may emerge gradually and only over time.
- The topic (or the curriculum) of the conversation is concrete and time-bound — the issues that the coachee is facing at that moment. Therefore coaching needs to be focused on a “live practice” — where the community leader is working with a community that responds to leadership moves, leading to further learning and development.
- Technology comes into the coaching conversation for two reasons. First, because technology plays a part in how we collaborate and have conversations; from that perspective technology is part of the practice. Second, because most communities use technology in one way or another and all of us are learning how to make technology serve our communities rather than allowing technology to swamp or hobble them; from that perspective technology is part of the domain.
