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November 17, 2008
Making a significant difference
Here's another question raised at the recent coaching conference, where I ran a session entitled "Making the Most of Our Supervision" (see the previous blog entry for the background to this one)...
If you were to choose one area where you've made a significant difference for a client (who you supervised) what would it be?
What a wonderful question and doubtless prompted by the Appreciative Inquiry exercise that we worked on during the conference session. The example I'd like to share is when a client of mine (whom I was offering supervision) arrived one day in a very agitated state. He was coaching several senior executives in an organisation which was implementing significant change.
He described the organisation as heartless, insensitive and ruthless. He then explained how one of his coachees had cancelled two sessions with him at very short notice and was refusing to pay any cancellation fee. Another had been apathetic about applying any changes agreed at the coaching sessions. Yet another sought advice from the coach about how to "get rid of" a member of his team whose results were dipping.
The impact of these incidents on my client was that he was beginning to doubt his own effectiveness as a coach. He was feeling anxious about going in to the organisation and was hesitant to initiate a meeting with the HR Director, his sponsor, in case they cancelled the contract.
Once he had explained this spate of incidents, and on the basis that we explore his effectiveness as one possible ingredient, I invited my client to explore the parallels between his experience, how he had described the organisation and what was actually happening to employees. By examining the similarities between these three areas, he was able to stand back from the doubt and anxiety he was experiencing and begin to appreciate that it was not he that was "at fault" but that he was being "infected" by the system in which he was working.
With this awareness, he was able to untangle himself from the psychological process he was caught up in, distance himself from it so he no longer took it all personally or blamed himself, and was then able to plan how he could use this awareness to work most productively with each of his coachees. Equally, he was able to re-ground himself to offer a balanced appraisal of the programme. This meant he could engage with the HR Director from a place of balance, rather than fear or anxiety.
Posted by Alison at November 17, 2008 05:35 PM
