Integrated Experiential Coaching

Becoming an Executive Coach

Lloyd Chapman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Topic: Business
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429915000
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Business

'Coaching is growing across the globe as a viable and useful intervention to help executives deal with the complexity they face day-to-day. In response to this increased demand, many coaches have presented their "model" of coaching to the world of business, and a number of these have made it into print. Few are based on a rigorous development process or have provided the reader with an insight into their development. The Author wanted to offer to the readers of our professional coaching series the opportunity to engage with a practitioner who had been through a journey of learning built on their experience, the literature and research. This book meets the need identified for a clear and rigorous account by an experienced coach of the development of their model within the scientist-practitioner framework.

CHAPTER ONE

Reflections on my personal journey

Introduction

Given that the scientist-practitioner model is a dynamic process, I believe that it is important to start this book with a brief overview of how I stumbled into the field of coaching. I never planned to become an executive coach. I think that, like so many other coaches, I developed into a coach through a process of unfolding experiences. This is my story. But why share my story, and what relevance does it have for you as a coach? As scientist-practitioners our practice is grounded in our work and in our experience. We ply our trade in Mouton’s (2001) “World 1”, the world of ordinary social and physical reality. It is here in the world that we encounter practical problems that require interventions, action and programmes. In an attempt to find practical solutions to those problems, we tend to draw on our own experience, reflect, do research and look for theories that can help us to make sense of the reality we are confronted with. When we find theories that help throw some light on the issue, we tend to experiment with them to see if they work for us. In so doing we move into “World 3”, in which we reflect on the reasons and justifications for certain actions. More importantly it is the world of critical reflection, deciding which theory, indicators, measurement and actions we need to choose.

One way to make sense of this entire process is to reflect on our own lives, through telling our story. As we tell our story, we are forced to reflect on our own experience and the events that shape that experience. We reflect on how we responded to those events, the people and the theories that helped us to make sense of those experiences. We do not become coaches in a vacuum, or overnight; it is an unfolding evolutionary process.

As you read the story of my journey I would encourage you to be aware of your responses and reactions to what you read. For it is not uncommon that as we listen or read another person’s story, certain memories and connections can be triggered that will help you remember aspects of your own journey. Take note of them, journal about them, or write them down. Reflect on your own experience as thoughts and memories are triggered. Remember the connections, people, theories and experiences that contributed to your own journey as a coach. Use my story as an example to remember your own. Use it as an example of how to reflect on your own experience. In the end it is not my story that is important but your own. For in your own experience and story you will discover the Purpose, whereby clear boundaries can also be established for your work as a coach. That will help you to define with whom you will and will not work, and when it will be important or necessary to refer the client to another professional. You will discover the Perspective that underpins your work. This will include all the models, values, beliefs, knowledge and philosophies that have influenced you, as well as a sense of their limitations. This will ultimately help you to define and structure a process to undertake the work you do. In other words, what method or tools can be used to help achieve the desired purpose within the constraints of the specified perspective?

My coaching journey

I started my working career as a minister of religion after completing my Theological studies in 1984. During my probation year I decided to leave the ministry and enter into the world of business. My interest in business arose through my interaction with executives during that probation year. I had the fortunate privilege of working with executives in a number of settings. The interactions from which I learnt the most, however, occurred when I ministered to executives dying of cancer or having had double or triple heart bypass operations. It gave me a perspective on life that has never left me. It also developed a strong empathy within me for these leaders of industry. Most people only see executive’s successful sides; I got to know them when they were at their most vulnerable. Despite their outward success and enormous wealth, in the end it actually meant nothing. The awareness that life is more important than our work has never left me.

On completing my National Service I worked in a bank for three months and then joined the Investments Division of a large life assurance company. Initially I provided administration support to the portfolio managers, and later I worked in marketing. Here my function was to analyze unit trust performance, and write all the marketing material. The five years in the Investments Division taught me a great deal about financial markets and their complexities. I gained a good working knowledge of economics and the impact it has on various industries and the financial markets. It taught me to look at business in a more holistic way, and I gained a working knowledge of macro- and microeconomics.

During this time, my ability to do quantitative research and my analytical skills grew exponentially. I therefore decided to do my MBA dissertation on “The viability of index funds for the Republic of South Africa”. With hindsight I can now see that my MBA dissertation was the first piece of concrete experiential learning I had ever undertaken. Unfortunately, as with most Masters degrees the abstract conceptualization was limited to learning existing theories and applying them to a new context.

In 1992, having just completed my MBA, I joined another life assurance company. The late-1990s were a very interesting time in South Africa. The African National Congress (ANC) had been unbanned in 1990, the first democratic elections in the history of the country had taken place in 1994, and the country was a political miracle. The same could not be said of the business environment. Prior to the 1994 elections many industries had grown and survived in a protected environment. This was especially true in the case of the financial services industry. The most protected of all were the life assurance companies, which had grown and thrived in an environment of exchange controls, high inflation, with effectively no competition, and they controlled the unit trust industry.

The net result was too many life assurance companies in the market. Given that they effectively had no competition, they were running very expensive operations. The overarching strategy for the industry was “new business at all costs”. Quality service did not exist. These institutions were at the mercy of the intermediaries. The intermediary was king, not the client.

Given the changes that were occurring in the country, there was a realization that the company had to be transformed or it would not survive. It was in this environment that the General Manager of Administration invited me to come and work for him. At the time, Peter Senge’s (1990) concept of the “learning organization”, and Michael Hammer and James Champy’s (1993) theory of “business process re-enginering”, were the topics of discussion in the boardrooms of South Africa.

The General Manager of Operations knew that the company was running an expensive operation, and he wanted to re-engineer the administration processes. I had introduced him to a systems dynamic computer simulation package called iThink^®, and suggested that we use the package to simulate our business processes before we make any changes to the business.

As a result, we opted to first build the processes in a computer simulation environment and do all our what-if analysis in that environment. I was given responsibility for this project, to do the analysis, involve everybody and build the model. For the first time in the company’s history there was an actual understanding as to how complex the new business process within a life company was.

Until we had built this model, one of the assumptions was that if we implemented an electronic workflow system we could get rid of all our regional underwriters and save the company a great deal of money. What we learnt was that our assumptions were incorrect, and that we would have a huge bottleneck in the process if we kept only our head office underwriters. It was impossible for them to cope with the new workload. As a result, a number of regional underwriters were relocated to head office. Once they were in place we started to implement the re-engineered process.

Due to the success of the project, I was placed in charge of the workflow project. Strategically this was a critical project, in that workflow could improve our cost ratios substantially. There were only two life companies in South Africa at the time that had decided to implement workflow on a national basis. All the remaining companies had opted to implement workflow in a centralized head office environment. Due to the postal service in South Africa being very ineffective and unreliable, workflow was seen as being critical to improving customer service. Needless to say, a technology project of this magnitude would be very complex.

The first thing I did was to attend a project management course. The second thing I did was to model the complexity of the project in iThink^®. Once again I had to work with all levels and functions within the organization. This was one of the steepest learning curves in my life. The thing about workflow is that it cuts across the entire business. This was really the point in my life where I started to think in terms of processes instead of functions. Workflow breaks down all functional boundaries. The other thing about workflow is that it is a very complex environment, in that it interacts with every single computer system within the company. This is where my analytical and synthesizing abilities grew in leaps and bounds. I had to analyze which systems were involved, how they worked, and the inter-dependencies between them. Finally, all this had to be synthesized into a workable model. It was during this process that I learnt to apply systems thinking to solve a practical business problem.

When I had completed the model we realized that our current network was not going to cope with the demands the workflow system would place on it. We did a number of tests and then realized we had to replace our entire network. A new network was implemented.

My team then set about building the workflow system. Within 18 months the first phase of the workflow project was implemented. This was my first experience of managing a large, complex project which was of strategic importance to the company.

I was then given the responsibility for developing an Internet strategy for the company, which my team and I did. We were the first life assurance company in South Africa to give our clients and brokers access to their information via the Internet. In fact, when Bill Gates visited South Africa he used the company website as an example of what was possible using the Microsoft^® environment.

By late 1996 the company had developed some very sophisticated IT systems and infrastructure. We had become very proficient in the client server environment. The problem, and the frustration, was that we had built sophisticated systems but we were finding it difficult to get people to use the systems optimally. We had changed the infrastructure and excelled, but we had totally ignored the change management side of the project. The technical side was excellent, but the social and cultural change was nonexistent. This is where I learnt that technology does not provide a company with a strategic competitive advantage. Technology is only an enabler. The strategic advantage of a company is its people; it is the ability of the people to learn faster than their competitors.

In September 1996 the Managing Director invited me to become the company strategist reporting directly to him. Eventually, the General Manager of Administration convinced me to take the job, on the grounds that it was a good platform from which to start influencing cultural change within the organization. In October 1996, at the age of 33, I was appointed company strategist and secretary to the Executive Committee.

By early 1997 the Executive realized that we did not have the skills or knowledge to manage large-scale change interventions. As a result, a consulting firm was contracted to help us transform the culture of the company. Cultural surveys had revealed a very autocratic and disempowered culture. The Executive felt that if the company was to survive in the new environment they had to start empowering their staff.

The project involved the entire company in strategy formulation and implementation. The process was basically a combination of Future Search Methodologies and Participative Redesign workshops, known as the “Transformation Process”. Future Search Methodologies were conceived during the 1960s by Emery and Trist at the Tavistock Institute, and further developed and popularized during the 1980s by Marvin Weisborg. Participative Redesign was adapted by Bob Rehm in the mid-1990s.

As company strategist I worked very closely with the consultants from the beginning. However, the ownership of the project rested with the Managing Director. The process effectively started with the Managing Director doing a personal future search and setting the direction for the company. An executive future search would continue once the strategy was co-created. This was followed by a search involving the entire management team, who further co-created the strategy. At the same time, a process began in which people within the organization elected representatives who would attend a national future search conference. In July 1997 the national conference took place, the first of its type in South Africa, in which 80 people from every level within the organization were present to co-create the company’s strategy.

Thereafter, each executive would cascade the process through his or her entire division. These workshops would then be followed up with re-design workshops where self-managed teams were introduced. By this time, it become apparent that the process was more complex than anybody had anticipated.

I began to realize that many of the executives and senior management were overwhelmed by the complexity involved with such a large-scale change initiative. I found myself spending more and more of my time coaching the executives on a one-on-one basis. It was then that I started to read the work of Ken Wilber. In Wilber I found an author that provided me with a more holistic framework for my thinking. It had slowly dawned on me that systems thinking was not as holistic as I had originally thought. Wilber introduced me to the concept of levels of consciousness, and that there is a worldview associated with each level. Subsequent to that, I stumbled upon the work of Elliott Jaques and Stephen Clement (1997) on stratified systems theory, which complemented Wilber’s work very well. Finally, I had found in these three individuals a theoretical framework which fit my experience. For the first time, I started to understand why the complexity was overwhelming many of the executives and management. They were simply out of their depth. Some did not have the cognitive power to deal with such complexity.

Future search methodologies are action-oriented and rely on experiential learning. As a result of that, I became a devotee of experiential learning. The more I facilitated future search workshops, the more I learnt about experiential learning—experientially. To this day I am impressed by how simple and yet how hard it is, by its simplicity and its complexity. I also became more and more impressed with Kaplan and Norton’s (1996) Balanced Scorecard. It is a tool, and a discipline, which takes strategy from formulation to implementation, and enables one to better manage some of the complexities involved with large-scale change interventions. A big learning curve for me during this time was the power of dialogue and narrative. As people dialogued and told their stories we were able to extract some phenomenal learning. Soon I was using dialogue and experiential learning as the basis for all these searches, especially during the history ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• LIST OF TABLES
• LIST OF FIGURES
• FOREWORD
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER ONE Reflections on my personal journey
• CHAPTER TWO The meta-philosophical framework
• CHAPTER THREE The methodological framework
• CHAPTER FOUR The business framework
• CHAPTER FIVE Applying and researching the integrated Experiential Coaching Model
• CHAPTER SIX The integrated experiential coaching model in a team context
• CHAPTER SEVEN The impact of stress on learning
• CHAPTER EIGHT Personal reflections and implications of the coaching journey
• CHAPTER NINE Conclusion
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX