I have been working away at developing a career coaching workshop. Using a group coaching format and staying true to the ICF coaching competencies is a challenge, but progress is being made. One of the topics I have been playing with is that of life purpose. It can be seen as a bit ‘fluffy’ by hard heads (myself included), but if you believe, as I do, that career aspirations have to be located in the broader context of family, community and personal wellbeing, then finding one’s own life purpose is a prerequisite. There is quite a lot of literature on life purpose which is based on religion: God’s purpose for you. This is definitely not my starting point. My hunt is purely secular. I was interested to read an on-line article by Clayton Christensen who is a professor at the Harvard business school. He says of his students that “clarity about their purpose will trump knowledge of activity-based costing, balanced scorecards, core competence, disruptive innovation, the four Ps, and the five forces. “ This is a great quote which I can use in my workshops. Meanwhile, the task goes on to successfully incorporate life purpose into a workshop format where the main focus is on career development.

Kevin Rudd has the reputation as being a control freak. Putting aside the ‘big Australia’ blunder, I thought the policy agenda he was driving was generally sensible. His apology to the stolen generations was particularly moving. So what de-railed him, when he had enjoyed so much support for the directions in which he was taking Australia? Any number of issues, especially when you offend the mining industry, whether on climate change or taxation.
I was interested to read a recent Harvard Business Review alert on controlling bosses. It seems that people who deeply value their autonomy and freedom will react negatively to even an unconscious memory of a controlling person. Known in psychological literature as ‘reactant’s, individuals who love their freedom, may “do anything to protect it.” So it may be that when his popularity fell so dramatically, the former Prime Minister was particularly exposed to Cabinet dissatisfaction with his management style. On the other hand, this may be pure fantasy on my part. However, I do think the deposing of Kevin Rudd is of great interest from a management perspective and perhaps over time we will read more about it.

EVIDENCE BASED COACHING – DEVELOPMENTAL COACHING (Pt 2)

It was a privilege and an inspiration to attend a conference workshop by Jennifer Garvey Berger at Sydney University’s Evidence Based Coaching Conference.  Her topic was developmental coaching, and having trawled around trying to find out what was distinctive about developmental coaching, I was intrigued by what she might have to say. We all know the terms ‘staff development’ or ‘personal development’, and generally understand them to mean acquiring new skills and professional insights.   Jennifer’s background and academic work is in the field of adult education and her coaching work has its theoretical foundations in the work of Robert Kegan. 

Kegan has developed a model outlining stages of development through life’s course – to quote Jennifer ‘developmentalists believe that humans grow and change over time and enter qualitatively different phases as they grow’.  Integral to Kegan’s theory is the concept of meaning, and how the way we make sense of the world is constructed through our prisms of meaning .  Transformative development  occurs when those prisms change – it occurs when an individual gains insight into how his/her ways of knowing change.  Kegan enunciates five ‘orders of mind’, each of which represents greater complexity over time in the way we construct reality, culminating in the fifth order – the ‘self transforming’ mind.  Very few adults reach this level, but when they do, Jennifer has found in her executive coaching that often the transformation is so complete that corporate life loses its appeal. 

So, now I understand developmental coaching to be a transformative journey through relatively discrete stages of self awareness.  I suspect that there are not many coaches out there with Jennifer’s knowledge and great karma.  She is certainly a gifted speaker who inspires great humility and awe for what can be.