_.png)
Across the 9th and 10th March 2022, Xenonex ran the ICN conference: ‘Internal Coaches: New Horizons’.
Across the 9th and 10th March 2022, Xenonex ran the ICN conference: ‘Internal Coaches: New Horizons’. The event was live online and designed for internal coaches to come together, learn new skills and techniques, and share best practices. We had a range of brilliant guest speakers join us to share their practical insights and experience with our Internal Coach Network.
Thank you to everybody who joined us at the conference. We’ve captured some of the high-level content for you as a reminder. For those who did not join us at the conference, feel free to take a look at this snapshot of what was learnt. Good luck with your next steps in developing and embedding a coaching culture!
DAY ONE
On the first day, delegates were inspired by Professor Damien Hughes, Stephen Lock, Scott Hardie, and Georgina Wood. These fantastic speakers walked us through their personal experiences and internal coaching case studies, providing a unique learning opportunity. The delegation also discussed what positive changes they made to develop coaching cultures within their organisations, the impact, and how they can continue to make improvements going forward.
ABOUT YOU
We offered our Internal Coach Network members the chance to feedback via Mentimeter Polls. We posed 4 key questions to set the context for our conference. Here’s what they said!
Some interesting themes are coming out of the responses. Here are three practical takeaways from us:-
Our instinct is that building empathy and listening effectively will continue to be very important skill sets to draw upon. We will build these skills into the ICN coach practice events to give you more chances to practise.
We have worked with our members over the past few months to create a coaching culture tool you can use that is a very practical way of developing awareness and engagement in organisations. If you’re interested in thinking about how you build engagement with coaching we can take you through this tool to see if it could be of help.
Goal-setting skills in coaching are the standout the group would like to develop.
COACHING HIGH PERFORMANCE: PROFESSOR DAMIEN HUGHES
We were delighted to welcome our keynote speaker, Damien Hughes. Author of 8 best-selling books and an extremely successful podcaster. His latest book, “High Performance: Lessons from the Best on Becoming Your Best”, is number 1 on the Sunday Times bestsellers list and mixes brilliant insight from the worlds of business, politics, arts and sport to create practical insight for us to put into day-to-day work.
Damien took us through his model which highlights the behaviours and attitudes that drive high performance and shared stories from a wide range of successful people. These included Billy Monger, Jonny Wilkinson and Mary Portas to name a few. Damien probed ideas within the mindset, behaviour, and culture of an organisation, and the key points within them that will optimise performance.
UPDATE ON WORKING PARTIES: STEPHEN LOCK, HEAD OF BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE & INTERNAL COACH AT NIHR
Stephen Lock gave an update on the background of the current working group on Equity, Diversity and Inclusion and the reasons this was important to his organisation. The aim is to design and run a 6-8 month development programme ‘Understand your identity, find your voice, go on to inspire others. The plan is to have 5 modules with pre and post-programme use of the Engage impact assessment and to understand how individuals have progressed. There will be a 1:1 coaching session at the start and end and a coach on call throughout the programme.
NATWEST – A CASE STUDY: SCOTT HARDIE, INTERNAL OPERATIONS TEAM COACH, NATWEST GROUP
Scott Hardie explained how NatWest is ‘reframing the narrative around coaching’. The term has been used in a variety of ways, linked to different internal initiatives covering 1-1, team and career interventions and the reskilling of colleagues at risk of redundancy. ‘Performance consultants’ have used much more of a directive, task-focused mentoring style. The aim now is to productise, professionalise, personalise and prioritise the coaching within the organisation, building in performance metrics to report on the impact and ROI. Training 25 internal full-time coaches for ICF accreditation is part of the strategy and the numbers suggest significant savings to the organisation compared with buying external coaching at the market rate.
TEAM COACHING: GEORGINA WOOD, ORGANISATIONAL DEVELOPMENT ADVISOR, LEEDS BECKETT UNIVERSITY
Georgina Wood provided a valuable exploration of team coaching, talking through the trials of coaching in a group setting. Georgina introduced us to some definitions of team coaching and shared some of her “light bulb moments” with us. She also opened up the opportunity to explore the potential barriers to team coaching, and the differences between team coaching and team facilitation.
“Coaching a team to achieve a common goal, paying attention to both individual performances and to group collaboration and performance” Christine Thornton
Through our session with Georgina, we discovered that only 7 of the 26 participants currently deliver team coaching sessions. Overall confidence in the ability to deliver team coaching is low – with only 4 participants feeling confident or very confident.
In breakouts we worked on the similarities and differences between team coaching and facilitation with the concluding slide below:
DAY TWO
Day Two provided delegates with a day to ‘tool up’, with guest speakers Dr Jodi O’Dell and Jess Dooley, alongside ICN co-founder Catherine Boddington, laying out some of the latest coaching tools available to internal coaches. This was a great opportunity for coaches to come together and practice the necessary skills for developing coaching cultures within organisations.
POST PANDEMIC COACHING HACK – GET READY TO COACH CHANGE, WITH IMPACT?: DR JODI O’DELL, PHD IN COACHING & OCCUPATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY
One of the challenges as a coach is to get to the heart of the issue. Reliable data on identifying areas to coach give you a framework to ask the right questions that deliver the best change impact. Jodi introduced us to her ‘scientifically validated’ Engage tool which measures mindset and change readiness. It helps coachees to heighten their self-awareness, identify drivers and barriers to change, beliefs that support growth and beliefs that hold them back.
The tool measures the three areas of Confidence, Openness and Impact.
DELOITTE BUSINESS CHEMISTRY TOOL: JESS DOOLEY, CHIEF CHEMIST, DELOITTE Jess introduced the Business Chemistry tool which has been developed to help internal team members and clients gain a better understanding of working preferences and improve relationships. The four styles of Driver, Pioneer, Guardian and Integrator have different ‘loves’ and ‘bugs’ which help us tailor our approaches.
Jess kindly shared some slides which summarise the styles and approaches.
RAPID TOOL UP – YOUR BOARDROOM: CATHERINE BODDINGTON, XENONEX This tool was provided to all delegates pre-event and we used it in break-out groups to coach each other on ‘Who’s on your Personal Board’. The following graph shows you the balance of roles within an organisation, and how to create
the relationships you need to generate collaboration and achieve your goals.
With the ICN membership site, there is now the opportunity to create your profile and search for other members whose profile is of interest to you to grow your professional network. This is also an effective tool to use in your practice as a coach when exploring careers and networks.
CONCLUSION
‘Internal Coaches: New Horizons’ provided a brilliant opportunity for internal coaches to come together, learn new tools, and explore best practices from a range of experienced coaches. If you’re interested in joining the Internal Coach Network as a way to connect with other coaches and access fantastic tools, then you can find out more information here.