Susan Wright

Reading the International Coach Federation (ICF) research study entitled Building a Coaching Culture*, I am naturally inclined to reflect on the past 17 years of growing The Coaching Project Inc. We began in 1998 to work with organizations who were interested in building coaching cultures in order to develop their leaders and improve performance and engagement in their employees. We had very little to go on in terms of precedent but coming from our organizational development backgrounds, it seemed clear that a variety of elements were required.

First, we needed to have some support for our initiatives in terms of business need and available resources. This led us to marketing and sales organizations and financial service firms, both of which were in highly competitive environments and already had histories of supporting leadership development. We coached individual executives and executive teams, providing coach training so that Leader Coaches, as we called them, not only got coaching on their own leadership development but also coached their team members for performance and development as well.

As part of our training programs, we paired participants up so that after the workshops, they would have a ‘buddy’ to reinforce the learning and sustain the new skills over time. We tried to train at least 2 to 3 levels in the organization’s leadership population in addition to the internal coach practitioners, most from Human Resources, who would support them once we had left the scene. And we offered an online program for new leaders entering the organization or those wanting a refresher or to dig into some aspect of coaching in which they felt they needed additional practice.

All of these initiatives were necessary in our experience to create a culture of coaching in an organization. This new research report confirms our experience with data from 544 organizations across all sectors of the economy and around the world. 65% of employees from companies with strong coaching cultures rated themselves as highly engaged. 60% of respondents from organizations with strong coaching cultures report their 2013 revenue to be above average, compared to their peer group. And coaching is now an intrinsic part of progressive organizations everywhere.

“Once a luxury strictly for executives, coaching is now being extended to employees at all levels of the organization for developmental purposes. In fact, 43% of organizations report employing internal coaches to work with all employees, and 60% say coaching is available to their high-potential employees.” This internal coaching is often provided by Human Resources professionals in the role of business partners to their line leaders.
The challenge for managers is often getting the training necessary to feel comfortable taking on the coaching role. For many managers, becoming leader coaches requires not only new skills but a new frame of mind. The report states, “Managers’ training requirements now have shifted to include a coaching skills component that was not required in the past. Now, there is a stronger emphasis on managers using soft skills such as empathy to develop an employee as an individual, focusing on building employee strengths through a collaborative, problem-solving style of leadership. Organizations now see coaching as a way to transform the top-down management approach into a more interactive, team-based mentality.”

The companies in the study report they will increase the scope and offerings of their coaching programs in the next five years to increase engagement, teamwork, on-boarding and employee retention.
These studies provide a good punctuation point to assess how your organization is doing. Here are some questions to consider:

• How does your coaching program shape up?
• Do your leader coaches need a refresher?
• Do new leaders need training to catch up?
• Are your internal coaches trained to support leaders in their coaching?

If you have a need, read on to see how City University in Vancouver is planning to integrate coaching into their leadership development programming.

*Building a Coaching Culture, ICF Research Report, 2014

Wisdom 2.0 tells us there is a revolution occurring in how we view and relate to work.

This new movement is questioning all our assumptions about what it means to develop and operate a business. Elements like mindfulness, wisdom, and compassion are no longer seen as superfluous or useless, but as integral qualities to include in any for- or non-profit endeavor. People are increasingly seeking work that is meaningful, engaged, and where their deeper life purpose is aligned.

Read what Daniel Goleman has to say about mindfulness – what it is and isn’t – in this Huffington Post blog.

Mindfulness seems to have emerged out of nowhere to become the latest buzzword in organizational and leadership development. What is going on? Why has this idea gained so much power so quickly? Companies like Google, Twitter, PayPal, LinkedIn, Cisco, and Ford are training managers and executives in mindfulness and meditation techniques. Wisdom 2.0, a gathering where the technology and contemplative communities hash out the best ways to integrate these tools into our lives, had 1700 people attend last year’s conference, many from executive levels of well-known corporations. Cover articles have appeared in Time, Newsweek, Wired and  HBR over the past year, all extolling the virtues of mindfulness.

Is this just an extension of the emotional intelligence fad or is something fundamentally new happening here? Well to begin, mindfulness is certainly not new, although perhaps new to modern corporate life. It’s at least 2500 years old and has been practiced in most traditions and cultures throughout history. The growth in our scientific worldview has diminished the value of contemplation – if you’re not doing something, you’re not efficient. This has begun to change over the past few years as we recognize that efficiency in the short term is not always effective over the long haul.

More recently, researchers have pointed to the increasing levels of stress in the workplace and the health costs of employees suffering from depression, anxiety, anger and other stress-related emotional responses related to the pace of change and the expectations of more with less. Along with these findings, brain research now shows us what is happening inside our heads and how we can enhance our brain functioning through turning down the volume on our monkey minds. It turns out that mindfulness produces buoyancy, optimism, and confidence. It creates a stronger immune system, more focused attention to tasks, better working relationships and faster learning.

This quote appeared in the March edition of Harvard Business Review:  “At the very highest levels of any field – Fortune 50 CEOs, the most impressive artists and musicians, the top athletes, the best teachers and mechanics – you’ll find mindful people, because that’s the only way to get there.”

So it seems we must come back home to ourselves in this latest evolutionary phase, to know ourselves, to spend time with ourselves, to be at home with ourselves. We are required to develop a new level of consciousness, a new sense of being at home, to adapt to the turbulence and chaos of the world around us.

If we look back at this evolutionary development, we can easily see that when work is machine-driven, humans are expected to be mindless automatons on the assembly line. As service industries grow and become more interconnected, employees need to be service-oriented, reacting to the demands of customers. In the high-tech sector, where innovation is the key to success, young minds create new toys. And in the global workplace where the pace of change and its impact shape our lives, many of us find we are stretched (and stressed) to adapt.

When work and home become intermeshed with our very selves, we must increase our awareness of the present moment and dwell in that, lest we be swept up in the whirlwind of constant change. Mindfulness provides this opportunity for present-moment awareness. And although the discipline can be challenging, the process is quite simple. Being aware of breath, repeating a phrase or counting, listening to guided meditations, emptying the mind of its chatter, these are all easy techniques for entering stillness, calm and quiet.

There are many supports for mindfulness. Books by Richard Moss, Peter Senge and Michael Brown are examples. If you’re more into the science, many books now detail brain functioning and plasticity, such as Rita Carter and Norman Dodge. John Kabat-Zin and  Eckhart Tolle offer CD series of guided meditations. Just 15 minutes a couple of times a day will bring you home to yourself with new strength and resilience. I highly recommend it.

The invitation to live mindfully sounds great…and then sounds hard!!! How do we live mindfully? While weeding, while shopping, while doing the dishes? How do we invite a sense of the sacred into the everyday moments of our lives? Here are a few things I’ve found helpful, and I’d love to hear from you about what you find helpful.

WHEN I’M DRIVING: at red lights, I breathe deeply, close my eyes for a few seconds, and check in with where I am, what I am, who I am…and breathe out gratitude for all that I am.

WHEN I’M INSOMNIAC: I breathe deeply, count backwards in French from 100, and find at least five things I am truly grateful for, in the day that has passed.

WHEN I’M STUCK, in work, in play, in relationship: I try to remind myself that I am truly NOT stuck…that this is an opportunity for growth (a FOG, if you will)… and try to find the growth edge that terrifies me…and step off it. I have an image of standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon…and then stepping off…my foot sinks slightly as it adjusts to a new reality, and then I quite easily and calmly walk across the Grand Canyon…which I think is more than a mile wide! So STUCK becomes a new starting place, a place to reassess where I am, and where I want to go.

WHEN I’M IN A BORING MEETING: I really try to figure out how I can shift the energy, how I can contribute in a way that means I’m not bored, and perhaps some others aren’t bored. SO I might ask if we can all BOUNCE for three minutes, to stir up our blood and adrenalin, or can we SING a round that’s a bit tricky, so we have to concentrate on THAT, and not on whatever is on our agenda… and then, because I’m a bit of an agenda fanatic, I try to figure out how to help make the agenda dance, how to make all our contributions valid and helpful… and if not, I try to help make the meeting end as quickly as possible! :-}

Here’s a beautiful reminder from Hafiz, the Persian poet of the fourteenth century,…so I guess these concerns for living a mindful life have been around for awhile!!

Now is the time
Now is the time to know
That all that you do is sacred.
Now, why not consider
A lasting truce with yourself and God?
Now is the time to understand
That all your ideas of right and wrong
Were just a child’s training wheels
To be laid aside
When you can finally live
with veracity and love.
Now is the time for the world to know
That every thought and action is sacred.
That this is the time
For you to compute the impossibility
That there is anything
But Grace.
Now is the season to know
That everything you do
Is Sacred.

Contributed by Carol MacKinnon, TCP Associate

Evolutionary perspectives are all the rage at the moment. Carter Phipps in The Evolutionaries says “we are moving” – we can connect the dots from our prehistory through to our present and know that every certainty is about to change. I have been thinking about this evolutionary perspective in relation to work and home. I have a renewed interest in home these days, as I work at home more and combine work life with home life. I have been wondering how work and home have evolved over the past century or two. I see three themes: globalization, miniaturization and isolation.

Looking back several hundred years, communities were smaller and work and home life were interconnected. The store was at the front of the house, the blacksmith’s shop was adjacent, and the barn was in the yard. As industrialization grew, company towns became a feature of mines, mills and factories, separating men from their families during long workdays. The company provided the homes, schools, stores and recreation for their employees, using a portion of the men’s wages to pay off their expenses and frequently creating an indebtedness that bound them to the work and to the local community.

Fast forward to the last century where we see the rapid growth of urban centres and service industries. Employees now become harder to attract and organizations must create effective supports for both men and women in the workforce. Large corporations create campuses, often designed with multiple buildings to simulate collegial settings where services such as a cafeteria, drugstore, gym, cleaners, sundry shop and day care centre encourage commuters to leave the suburbs early and return home late. Many workers now have computers on their desks and many organizations now have a multi-national presence. Homes, however, have become isolated from work as a place to relax on weekends.

The next stage of evolution comes from the hi-tech sector where young innovative techies are enticed to bring their home to work, to team up in creative incubators for novel designs. Tech savvy companies foster a family environment at work, providing home cooked meals, gathering places, basketball courts and even cots or tents for sleeping between idea sessions. The workplace is now home – this is where your friends are, where you spend your time, where you get to create games and programs for fun. Often, these organizations are catering to a global audience of software users looking for games, puzzles and simulations. It is a young innovative playground, isolated from many of the realities of the adult world outside.

While we marveled at these evolutionary advances a few years ago, we now find ourselves carrying our work with us wherever we go. Work is the person, not the place. We are in constant communication with others through text and email and with the world through satellite programs, internet calling and online access to anything anywhere. Fewer of us are working inside organizations and many more are independent consultants, advisors and coaches. We are not geographically bound – we work around the world in global teams across borders and cultures. However, we may feel isolated from the physical community of colleagues of yesteryear as we sit in our homes and hotels alone.

And because we are moving, we know not long from now we will have our communications technology embedded in us, tiny and powerful – we will be the technology, allowing us access to continuous information, advice and direction for our lives. The challenge will not be hardware or software but the capacity to interpret it to our advantage – the work of the future. As Jason de Silva says, “We are already cyborgs.” Of course, these are just examples, all of which still exist in some parts of the globe and none of this forecasting is certain. The benefit of evolution is that we get to participate in setting our future course with our every thought and action. It’s a grave responsibility and a lofty freedom.

So it seems we have come full circle – home and work becoming one again. This time, though, they center within the person. We are becoming globalized, miniaturized and isolated. We are developing a planetary consciousness rather than a local geographic one. We will soon have embedded technology that we carry everywhere rather than having to live and work where the technology is housed. And we will no longer need each other to create products and services; we will be able to do it on our own but may find we have lost something of our true selves as a result.

I would be very interested in how you see home and work as connected – you can leave your comments on our blog at www.integralathome.com. If you’re interested in contributing to my research, I would appreciate you completing the brief 10-question survey to participate in understanding this complex relationship better in the future.