Let’s hear from Gianluca about his coaching success story, since he learned how to coach:
How did it start?
I stumbled upon Clare’s work while discussing with colleagues about very different matters on our virtual collaboration environment. Clare drives a very interactive and lively discussion about people development with coaching approaches in everyday business life, from team supervision to client interaction.
I joined as I felt these approaches are very close to skills I found in my alliance community colleagues and in relationship selling training half a dozen years ago. These skills have significantly improved my professional life, helping me change for the better both how I work and how I feel about my work.
I am an alliances professional and have found coaching approaches intriguingly similar to how many of us in alliances work to engage people way beyond the reach of our direct authority. We ask before telling (even better: rather than telling), then listen, rephrase and comment, then ask again, as much open-ended questions as we can. This way we can help people who are very, very good at developing our business on their own to find ways to do new kinds of business with our alliance partners.
I was keen to find opportunities to practice and understand these approaches better, so I joined this “Coaching Challenge”.
The Challenge itself was exhilarating and enlightening. Picture this: working with a new, unknown professional literally worlds apart, taking each other as a valuable coach because of the very differences we have in experience, environment and needs, Cherishing and seeing valuable insight emerge from our discussion – even when our environments are so different that we choose to interact through instant messaging, a cold and limiting channel for expression – or so you would think!
Little did I know that the Challenge itself was but the start of the start. The start proper, if you will, has been the reward for those of us who completed the challenge.
Each of us won the opportunity of working for a few months with a professional coach, in one form or another. That is what has changed my perspective, literally beyond expectation: I thought I was learning to move one step forward, I found a whole bunch of new crisscrossing paths to practice and exercise.
So, what happened?
Berit and I had a few coaching conversations over a few months, got acquainted with each other, discussed a bounty of coaching approaches, learned many new things about each other’s experiences and found new insight on how each of us can work by understanding these experiences and articulating them to each other. Oh, and we had fun – and that’s good, isn’t it?
Interestingly, I felt the substance of our interaction to be very symmetric, balanced and peer to peer, even as on the key subject of coaching Berit had so much more to share, and did share so much of it. I still feel I may need years and years to practice and understand much of what she threw at me. This included some valuable documents . Some helped me clarify what I am doing now, some are pointing me to potential developments as I may have a chance to make my understanding of coaching broader and deeper.
In the end, what changed? How has this been good for me?
Well, first of all, I think I understand much better now how to practice coaching approaches in my daily life – what I was looking for the day we started.
I also have a better perception of what coaching is about, and most importantly a perspective of how deep, specialist coaching skills and methods – a profession in its own – relate to what each of us is doing and can do to become better at what we are doing anyway – indeed, as Clare has it: developing people is our business.
More significantly, I have experienced a number of “coincidences”; perhaps you know the feeling of when you notice multiple independent things happening that somehow seem to share a same meaning or pointing you the same way? I have had some bouts of this over the years, and I feel this happens to me when I am opening up to new developments, enabling me to link unrelated experiences to grasp new ideas and making a different sense of what I am living.
This time, coincidences have included: noticing a growing emphasis in our organization to sustainable ways of doing business, and how ethics and sustainability in business are related; meeting alliances practitioners who have made “spiritual” or “ethical relationship” criteria a linchpin in their way of doing business; discovering how long term perspectives and similar “spiritual” thoughts underpin Berit’s coaching approaches and insight, meeting a colleague from a very, very distant business environment who is seeking to exchange insight on how to build our own personal brand , and what may “personal brand” actually mean in such a large and structured organization… I could go on, I hope this can give a sense of how I have come to feel I am on to something here – and in fact we all may be.
In practice, I also got the benefit and privilege of exchanging ideas with Berit, who is in a business I barely imagined exists, on how each of us could do our job better by understanding and knowing a bit more of what the other knows of the company and does here. This is good for my daily work, and made for an exhilarating experience I am childishly proud of: I have been able to “coach” Berit, a master certified coach, into changing her approach to what I hope will be a valuable resource for her long term, enduring influence on the company and the world at large (personal brand in large, structured organizations, anyone?)
Want something more tangible? Well… how much would you pay for a dozen hours’ individual work with a professional coach? Personally, I believe this more than paid for the few dozen hours I spent interacting and sharing on our collaboration platform over our FY12, even if I chose to value everything else I learned there as intangible.
What is next?
As I now know is standard in coaching conversations, as a way to consolidate self-directed change in each party, I have made a couple of tangible, practical commitments that I can track and will help me keep practicing these new skills in the medium term. The one I will share here (gasp; publicly!) is to make time among my priorities for regular reading and simple contributions to Clare’s public work on people development.
I have also started to explore in practice what brought me to getting involved in this in the first place: bridging coaching and alliances, understanding how coaching may help us as an alliances team and how greater awareness of coaching in the alliances community might help improving awareness of coaching more broadly in the company – that will be meta-coaching and meta-alliances together, and just might help me impact how the company will work tomorrow – personal branding again, what a coincidence!
