Coaching & Leadership

Coaching Heroes/Heroines and Perfectionists: Psychological Dimensions of Executive Coaching
Friday, Nov. 14 - 11 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. / 11:00 - 12:30
Diane Menendez, MCC (USA) - View Bio
Dorothy Siminovitch, MCC (USA) - View Bio 
CCEU: .75 CC/ .75 PD
Session handout
Session presentation

Executive coaches can increase their coaching mastery by holding a larger ground of understanding of shadow personality dynamics and how they, as coaches, can support themselves to face the shadow phenomena in constructive and adaptive exchanges. The evolution and practice of executive coaching needs to integrate psychological theory into the map of  coaching while keeping the practice restricted to coaching.

Executive coaching is an intensely personal relationship between a coach and a leader who commonly holds an exceptionally powerful position in an organization. Leaders who strive for success may wrestle with psychological traits that become more disturbing and more pronounced under stress. In the interpersonal relationship between leader and coach, there is an opportunity to interact “safely”, with the personality styles of the leader if the coach can recognize the opportunities for heightening awareness of the leader’s mindset, behavior and impact.  This  delicate dance requires skill, awareness and compassion on the part of the executive coach—and an ability to quickly assess personality dynamics that may derail the coaching engagement.

This session is designed for coaches who wish to strengthen their understanding of how individual personality and knowledge of  core personality patterns apply to coaching leaders.  

In this session, we will identify what executive coaches can learn from psychological research that will strengthen their understanding should they encounter “shadow syndromes” in their clients; particularly the self-centered Hero and the Perfectionist. Executive coaches can use  this psychological sensibility to assist their clients in having a safe place to confront these phenomena in service of the proactive goals they are striving toward. Session participants will leave with a larger understanding of how psychological theory assists them in working to strengthen executive functioning in moving with them toward desired goals—while avoiding the work of therapy.

Coaching Leaders in Developing Countries: Lessons Learned in Challenging Contexts!
Saturday, Nov. 15 - 2 - 3:30 p.m. / 14:00 - 15:30  
Anita Schamber (USA) - View Bio
Session Cancelled
CCEU:  1.0 CC / .50 PD

As coaches begin to work more globally and partner with emerging leaders in developing countries, their mindsets and skills will be challenged by their clients' stories of cultural traditions and contextual barriers. Leaders who have sustained themselves, their staff and communities following the tsunami in Southeast Asia or new leaders emerging from areas of poverty or conflicts across Africa bring different life experiences to the coaching relationship. These leaders will require coaches to be totally present and open to engaging with and learning from their dramatically different mindsets, life experiences, and contrasting traditions from those of the Western coach.

This interactive workshop will engage participants in dynamic discussion, sharing best practices and lessons learned, and introduce them to a "Listen to Your Life" story mapping tool as a process to coach emerging leaders and to understand the challenges and opportunities in their developing contexts.

Come to engage and enter into new and challenging coaching terrains!

Coaching The Tribe
John King (USA) - View Bio

Part 1 - Thursday, Nov. 13 - 2 - 3:30 p.m. / 14:00 - 15:30
CCEU:  1.0 CC / .50 PDs

Session handout (PDF)

Part 2 - Thursday, Nov. 13 - 3:45 - 5:15 p.m. / 15:45 - 17:15
CCEU:  1.0 CC / .50 PD

Most coaching and mentoring seeks to build capacity, usually one person at a time.  In a landmark study published in 2008 as Tribal Leadership (HarperCollins), coaches Dave Logan, John King, and Halee Fischer-Wright discuss the findings from a 24,000-person study that all leadership is “tribal” (happening in a group between 20 and 150 people). In this framework, the most important factor in determining whether your clients are leaders is the interactions within their tribes. 

At the heart of tribal coaching is the model that there are five types of tribal culture, ranging from alienated to extraordinary. A tribal leader is a person who advances the tribal culture from one stage to the next.

The Heart and Soul of the Leader: A Global Advantage
Saturday, Nov. 15 - 2:00 - 3:45 p.m. / 14:00 - 15:45
Cheryl Esposito (USA) - View Bio
CCEU:  .50 CC / 1.0 PD
Session handout

The powerful presence of a coach can take a client to the core of the self. The critical success factor in this is your consciousness. It impacts every decision, every conversation, every leadership moment.  As a coach, you partner with leaders to be their mirror, to shine their best self back to them so they can capture and build upon their strengths. You support leaders to try new behaviors, shift their thinking, stretch their limits. It requires knowing yourself and showing up authentically, taking business actions that align with your heart. Getting there is not always easy. Are you ready to take your coaching to the next level?

In this session, you will learn how to: 

• coach yourself in order to coach others;
• listen deeply to others and expand your understanding of the global conversation; 
• connect to the natural world to tap your inner nature;
• access heart and meaning in yourself, and with clients and colleagues.

The session will invite participants into a dialogue where we engage powerful questions, about leadership, ourselves and our world. By going deep, addressing the consciousness of the leader, Essence Coaching produces the fastest, most effective transformation available: the transformation of the self.

It’s our job to listen for the essence of the leader. While leadership tools can be important to development, it’s not all about technique. The most important leadership tool you have is your own leadership presence.

You know you want to make a difference. In our highly complex, global business environment, leaders must expand their capacity to listen, influence, and respond – to increase their reach and understanding of vastly more information, more relationships, greater challenges and competing needs. As a coach, you guide leaders to lead themselves first…so that others may follow. In this session we will take a journey to the heart of what matters, to the heart and spirit of leadership.

You can be a presence that transforms business as usual into business that matters.

Post-Conventional Coaching and Leading: Do Coaches Have What it Takes?
Thursday, Nov. 13 - 11 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. / 11:00 - 12:30
Joel Rothaizer, MCC (USA) - View Bio
CCEU:  .75 CC / .75 PD
Session handout (PDF)

Leading ourselves and our clients boldly into the future during times of rapidly increasing complexity and change requires post-conventional thinking which is integrative (yes/and rather than either/or) and highly systemic, along with other qualities we will discuss.

However, just as 90 percent of all people think they’re above-average drivers, most coaches probably think they’re post-conventional thinkers. Yet most of us aren’t, and more importantly, apparently we don’t know it. 

The coaching community as a whole likely sees itself as being further developed than it actually is. Part of the problem is that we’ve become quite facile with using post-conventional terms, without actually knowing what they are, fully understanding them, or embodying and applying them ourselves. It is time to address post-conventional thinking head-on and move beyond conventional ways of thinking and coaching. 

This will be an intentionally provocative and highly interactive session. In the first 50-minutes we’ll explore the essence of conventional to post-conventional adult developmental thinking levels (drawing on the work of Torbert, Cook-Greuter, Kegan, Joiner, Josephs and others), then we’ll move into a World Café structure that tends to evoke and support catalytic, co-creative, and alchemist thinking – all post-conventional. We’ll explore:

• Personal implications: What are the implications for our lives? 
• Professional implications: How can integrating adult developmental thinking skills into our coaching help us more effectively work with leaders?
• Systemic implications: What are the implications of this developmental approach, and the new possibilities for the “us” of the coaching community? For the ICF? For our profession?

Together, let’s take this discussion to profoundly new levels. Let’s explore the individual and collective gap together, and like the alchemist, create new possibilities that will contribute to the growth of coaches, leaders, and the coaching community.

The Wind from the East:  What Japan Can Bring to the Coaching and Leadership World
Saturday, Nov. 15 - 11 a.m. - 12:30 p.m. / 11:00 - 12:30
Takeshi Shimamura (Japan) - View Bio
Nao Konishi (Japan)  - View Bio
CCEU:  .75 CC / .75 PD

(This session will be presented in Japanese with live English interpretation)

The world is getting more complex and thus more difficult. Globalization requires a deeper level of cross cultural contact. What kind of leadership is required in this world?

There could be various kinds of leadership. In this session we would like to share some concepts for coaching and leadership from the East, which may be quite different from traditional concepts elsewhere. We believe that these concepts will be able to expand the thought processes and give more options to coaches and leaders working in Western cultures.

We will not give answers; however, we hope this session will be a stimulus for leaders to start thinking of trying different approaches of leading communities with various values/beliefs.

Specific concepts we'll explore include: respect and acceptance (絆 kizuna); firm will/aspiration (志kokorozashi); and harmony and space (場“ba” & 間 "ma”). These fundamentally underlying concepts have led companies in Japan for a long time in a sustainable way. These concepts are very powerful not only for coaches, but also for leaders. Join us as we look at these concepts and share specific examples in this session.