A recent study* of 150 female university students provides strong evidence for the impact of same gender peer mentoring on mentees’ well-being, both during their studies and after graduation. The students involved, at the University of Amherst in Massachusetts, were in their first two years of study in engineering; the mentors, both male and female, (more…)
Many teams and organizations operate on the boundary between complexity and chaos. Managing the dance between those states can be time consuming, yet without devoting sufficient time to manage this boundary, they default – consciously or unconsciously – to the habit of multiple quick fixes. The more quick fixes they apply, the greater the propensity (more…)
Alan Turing’s famous test for machine intelligence was whether or not a conversation with the machine was indistinguishable from that with a human. I was introduced to the reverse Turing test by Kiersten Dierhof, one of the most perceptive observers of coaching that I know. It says, basically, that if a human (coach) cannot be (more…)
A Doodle survey of more than 6,500 European professionals and executives in 2019 calculated the cost of unnecessary meeting globally at $591 billion. That’s almost certainly a significant underestimate. On average, the respondents calculated that they spent 13 days a year in pointless meetings. Increased working from home will almost certainly have added to the (more…)
This fascinating question arose during a supervision group a few days ago. The stimulus was a cluster of cases, where, for one reason or another, the pause button had been pressed on the team coaching assignment. The coach(es) felt a variety of negative emotions about this, but particularly disappointment and frustration that the “good work” (more…)
Just as focusing on individual performance doesn’t necessarily lead to improved collective (team) performance, high performing teams don’t necessarily work together to deliver a high performing organization. In his book Team of Teams, retired US general Stanley McChrystal offers a number of examples of how functional silos within organisations or even within departments can undermine (more…)
There is a severe lack of both empirical research and theoretical models relating to the concept of teams of teams. Google Scholar lists just one publication – an autobiographical account of the concept at work in the theatre of war (McChrystal et al, 2015). So, it is hardly surprising that coaches struggle to know where (more…)
Teams are a special form of group, where shared purpose and interdependencies replace common purpose and individual activity. The distinction between a group and a team is often blurred. A group may exhibit some of the behaviours associated with teaming, but not all. Groups in the workplace often describe themselves as teams, because they feel (more…)
I’m hearing the word “coachability” a lot more recently in my supervision groups. For example, “I should have gone with my instinct and turned the client down – he’s not coachable.” There are two schools of thought around this. One is that no-one is uncoachable. The issue is whether this coach is the right coach (more…)
Human beings initiate change when they feel discomfort or dissatisfaction. So, in principle, a coaching or mentoring conversation that doesn’t involve some level of discomfort is likely to lead to less significant change than one that does. However, we also tend to avoid discomfort, especially if it is elevated to become pain. We also tend (more…)