Coach the system, not the client

Mature coaches coach very differently to their less mature colleagues. It’s not just that they are less concerned with following process, it is that they attend very differently. At a base level of maturity, coaches see the client, the problem and the solution. It’s a very linear perspective, but it works (up to a point) with simple performance or skills issues. Gradually, they learn to pay attention to the client’s internal systems – what’s going on within them that is supporting or hindering the outcomes the want to achieve. Some coaches evolve to attend additionally to the client’s immediate systems – their family, boss, peers and direct reports etc – and the relationship between the client and each of these. This is what’s typically described as systemic coaching.

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AI versus human: the issue of memory

Yet another perspective on the differences between AI and humans, this time from Charan Ranganath, author of Why We Remember: Revealing the hidden power of memory. As the table below illustrates, “comparisons between humans and AI are misguided because they reflect different design constraints”.

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Could your next career be Professional Mentor?

As executives in organisations come up to retirement age, a recurrent question is What do I do with all that experience?  Rather than being an end to working life, retirement is increasingly the gateway to a new career that builds on their accumulated wisdom. One traditional option is consulting, where they have specific expertise. Alternatively, for those who don’t want to be confined to a narrow role, professional mentoring offers a way of tapping into a much wider spread of their expertise and experience.

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What’s the point of mentor accreditation?

Burnout is a phenomenon we usually associate with individuals. It’s typically the result of long-term stress caused by an inability to get on top of challenges, such as increasing or overwhelming workload. When everyone within a team is experiencing similar stresses, they amplify the problem. When the whole organisation is in the same situation, the stress notches up even further.

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Why mature coaches are increasingly moving towards being professional mentors

Burnout is a phenomenon we usually associate with individuals. It’s typically the result of long-term stress caused by an inability to get on top of challenges, such as increasing or overwhelming workload. When everyone within a team is experiencing similar stresses, they amplify the problem. When the whole organisation is in the same situation, the stress notches up even further.

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Coaching the Board: A challenge for executive coaches

There’s no universal model of a board – it varies from country to country and from sector to sector. It can have a single tier; or a clear distinction between the executive board and the non-executive (supervisory) board. It can be there to formulate strategy; or to assess and approve it.

When a board is made up solely of executives, it benefits from being a team. However, it lacks the external perspective that challenges their perceptions and assumptions. On the other hand, when the board is a mixture of executives and non-execs, teamwork becomes much more problematic. The NEDs are – at least in theory – there to exert collaborative independence. If they get too close into the team system, they lose that perspective. Sometimes, a half-way house is possible, when NEDs shadow executives.

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Becomingness: a critical element of coaching and mentoring

It’s called status inflation and it starts when kids are in their early teens (or before). They want to appear just that bit more mature than they are. You would think adult coaches would have grown out of this instinct. But we seem the same phenomenon in relation to executive coaching. It seems that any coach, whatever their experience or capability tags the word executive in front of their descriptor. As a result, the term executive coach has been steadily devalued in recent years.

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You’re an executive coach. Really?

It’s called status inflation and it starts when kids are in their early teens (or before). They want to appear just that bit more mature than they are. You would think adult coaches would have grown out of this instinct. But we seem the same phenomenon in relation to executive coaching. It seems that any coach, whatever their experience or capability tags the word executive in front of their descriptor. As a result, the term executive coach has been steadily devalued in recent years.

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Psychological safety and neurodivergence

The relationship between performance at work and psychological safety is well-established. High performance requires people (both as individuals and collectively) to be periodically in “flow”. That’s hard to achieve when our thoughts are distracted by fear of, for example, saying the wrong thing, or by the need to maintain a mask that protects us from...

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