Certification Update

We talked briefly at our last team meeting about the issue of certification and there are three threads to this that we briefly covered:

1. Do we externally certify our work?

2. Do we train our own team members?

3. Do we offer training to our clients?

As far as I can tell, the conclusions were:

1. No because a) the life coaching certifications don't apply to us, b) the EMCC/AC etc. memberships don't imply any quality standards, just payment of the joining fee and c) I'm not sure we need to worry too much about coaching per se in the bigger picture of a professional services company that has a much broader service capability

Coach certification seems to centre around supervising the behaviour of the coach which, in my mind, is contrary to the ethos of excellerate. Where we have such a diverse team, able to do anything and more to give the client what he/she needs, monitoring behaviour is irrelevant and instead we need to focus on the client. Remember that when I say client, I am thinking much bigger than the work some people are doing now. I mean a large organisation where we are working with dozens of staff, and in this scenario the client quite rightly demands consistent service delivery. That does not mean that everyone has to be an excellerate clone, it means that everyone has to live up to the same ethical and professional standards in the quality of work they deliver. Whether it's horses or mountains makes no difference to creating a consistently high perception of service.

2. Probably but we don't need to worry about it yet. We seemed to be keen to expose team members to each other's capabilities rather than formally train people. I think in the future where we take on less experienced people then I would always favour internal training over external because of the cultural implications.

3. Probably and when demand is sufficient we could take the broad, rounded approach rather than the narrow, certified approach.


But since my concern was more about maintaining standards than having certificates, we did decide that a system of self governance is a good idea. The first step in this will be the evaluation data I get back from Parker on Monday that will give us a starting point for how we define and measure our own standards. In my mind, the only meaningful standards are the ones we agree with the client at the start of the project, so essentially we are measuring ourselves not on coaching ability (whatever that means) but on client impact. I don't think happy sheets are in any way sufficient, what I would like to see is us walking the talk, i.e. if we say our coaching has impact then we should be able to measure that impact over the long term, not just because the client feels happy at the end of a session.

I propose that we have a system of measurement that starts with the client's criteria and tests against those at quarterly intervals on an ongoing basis, and that we publish those results on the website.

The future of coaching

A client asked me yesterday about training to become a coach, and she wondered if coaching would be a fad and a qualification would not be worth anything in the long term. I made a number of points in reply, including:

1. There are no certification bodies for coaching. Just because a company sets itself up to sell certificates (you know who I mean) doesn't make them a professional standards body
2. Coaching isn't a profession and is unlikely to ever be in the same way that consulting isn't because that word defines such a wide body of knowledge
3. The majority of coach training today is aimed at selling the dream to would be life coaches. They do not provide value for people wanting to coach in a business environment
4. The coach schools don't understand how to judge performance on the client's results, so they fall back on the old habit of measuring the coach's behaviour. So the presumuption is that the coach follows the process he or she has been taught, and the client will get what he or she needs from that. The process is perfect, all the coach has to do is follow it. Unfortunately, our clients demand a great deal more than that!

Within excellerate, we are currently debating the issue of standards and how they apply to us. Our current thinking is that the pseudo-standards that some coaching schools have created do not apply to the high level that we work at. They would be akin to saying the quality standard for a car is that it must have four wheels. How does that then enable you to differentiate between a Hyundai and an Aston Martin?

On the other hand, I am keen for us to be open and receptive to scrutiny. All too often, people claim they are above the standards as an excuse for not living up to the standards. Therefore our intention is to put in place sound self governance procedures to ensure that our clients get a consistently high quality of service. These procedures will be based on the client's experience, not the coaching model.

The service that we deliver is not defined by somebody listening into a coaching call and ticking off competencies on a check list. For a start, only life coaches work by telephone. For another thing, you can't reduce the client's aspirations down to a supervisor's check list.

Another thing I said to her: I meet lots of people who spend a lot of money on coach training, only to say, "I realised I have always been a coach, I just called it being a good manager/listener/consultant/parent/whatever". So this tells me that the popular coaching schools are teaching a set of skills so basic that the only way people get value from the course is by paying so much money that they convince themselves it must have been valuable. After all, no-one is stupid enough to spend £3000 on training they don't need, are they?

So, we can separate coaching into two different things; the activity of working with someone to help them achieve what they want, and the label of coaching. The former has always and always will be around. The latter is a fad. When the next big thing comes along, it will be called something else and will have fantastic new techniques and will require lots of training. Perhaps it will be called person centred consulting, or psycho-transformational performance development, or humanistic guided learning or interactive personal learning? You heard it here first.

But one thing is certain for me; the results that we are able to help clients achieve will always be valuable, and the maintenance of our own ethical and professional standards will always be more important than a certificate.

Would your colleagues save your life?

The BBC reports on a man who had a brain tumour and was saved by his colleagues raising the money for a private brain scan. Doctors say if he had waited for the NHS scan he would have died.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/bristol/5048812.stm

So, do you work in a place, a culture where your workmates would do that for you?