On 22nd and 23rd of February, we held the modules Practicalities of Coaching and Corporate Coaching of Professional Coaching Diploma Programme. The main message that stayed with our participants from these two days was as the title suggests: Be a Coach Now – you can be a walking coaching ambassador and be a coach in all the situations, environments and in your organizations. It is about your trust in people’s potential, your presence, your curiosity for the way the other person thinks and feels and how they grow in the moment and create their future self.
Practicalities of Coaching
We started the Practicalities of Coaching module with the path to becoming a credentialed coach. In the International Coach Federation (ICF) world, there are three main credentials: ACC, PCC, and MCC. These credentials differentiate themselves based on the coaching experience you have. You need to have 100 hours of coaching experience to be able to apply for ACC, 500 hours for PCC and 2500 hours for MCC. Each credential requires a different amount of coach-specific training and our students, having graduated from the Professional Coaching Diploma Programme, fulfill the training requirements for PCC credential.
Before you become a credentialed coach, you can already become an ICF member, when you enrolled in an accredited coach training or you have completed one. The main benefit we see of being an ICF member and credentialed coach is the quality and ethical standards you are keeping yourself and your work up to. You are also a member of a great family of wonderful coaches. You can learn from each other via communities of practice, peer coaching, ICF Conferences (ICF Converge) and local chapter evenings (the evenings of our partner ICF Germany).
As coaches, continuously investing our growth is a must. If you want to be an ICF member or credentialed coach, you are agreeing to your continuous growth officially with signing the code of ethics and abiding by the professional standards. You commit to coaching excellence. What is your definition of coaching excellence and what is your next step to reach your next level of coaching excellence? We had a peer coaching time during our module dedicated to defining the next steps and committing to it.
If you know you want to become a coach and do coaching as your profession, there are three main ways you can do it. You can do it individually, find your own clients, you can do it in-house, you can be an internal coach in the company you are working or you can partner with organizations that offer coaching to companies.
If you’d like to work individually as coaches, you will allow your clients to find you, to see you, to trust you. What are some ways you can do that? First of all, you can let people in your network know that you are a coach. They might want to work with you or they might know someone who wants to work with you. Second, you might want to be present in events and occasions where people you want to support with coaching are at. Third, you might want to have an online presence so people, who have seen you or heard of you can find more information about who you are and how you work. We suggest you have a website and a social media presence (LinkedIn) to enable conversations with your potential clients.
We see working with clients as a two-fold process. The first part is someone being interested in coaching, becoming interested in partnering with you. And the second part is turning interested people to your clients. And your intake session can play a huge part in this.
The intake session is your first session with your coachee where you clarify the coaching process, the agreement, terms, the way you want to work together. In our module, our participants took their time and practiced running an intake session. They also got feedback from their practice coachees. After this exercise, they reported how valuable it was to have done this practice which gave them the framework to establish stronger coaching partnerships.
Corporate Coaching
On Sunday we held the Corporate Coaching module. We discussed in which ways one can practice coaching in the corporate environment and what was important to be aware of. There are different pros and cons of being an internal coach or an external coach in a corporation. One of the most important things to always ensure is the trust between the coach and the coachee, holding confidentiality plays a huge part in establishing and maintaining trust. When you are hired as an external coach, there are more parties involved in the process: the sponsor and the client. Your coachee is the person you coach but your “client” who hired you might be their manager or the HR. The sponsor who paid for the coaching program might be another party. How do you interact with all these parties, establish successful agreements and still hold confidentiality? We have discussed possible pitfalls and ways to work with them in our webinar.
What our participants found really valuable was practicing a conversation with a potential corporate client/ sponsor. How do you find about the real need of our client? How do you communicate who you are as a coach? How do you find out how you can be of best help to them? After having practiced the conversation and getting feedback from their peer coaches, our participants found out how important it was to ask inquiring questions, to coach the clients, to have a confident “pitch” of themselves as a coach and they set goals for themselves to have their pitches and practice it.
Our students left our Corporate Coaching webinar with an understanding of how they can be the ambassadors of coaching in their organizations and lead by doing. They all could imagine how a great leader would be like and was in their lives and the leaders were always coaches in their interactions, they trusted the potential of their team, supported their members uncover and use more of their potential, celebrated their successes and were open for and asking for feedback. We all can be this person, the leader in our environments and organizations.
This module was the last module for some of our students and the first module for some others. We ended the day by sharing learnings and promising to grow together with the future- exchanges in our community and with this beautiful photo.
If you’d like to know more about our programme, please check our Courses page. If you’d like to learn more about how to support people to become better leaders and to work on your leadership skills, have a look at our Leadership Coaching Programme.
If you want to come and practice a new coaching tool with the BeCoach Community, we would love to see you in one of our upcoming events.