Executive Coaching

Course

In Berkhamsted

Price on request

Description

  • Type

    Course

  • Location

    Berkhamsted

Develop and broaden your coaching and mentoring skills. Benchmark your approaches as a coach. Understand and be informed by theoretical frameworks that support effective coaching. Practise both familiar and new coaching skills and interventions. Acquire a personal vision on the outcome of executive coaching and, more particularly, of your own coaching work. Suitable for: A consultant or executive coach working with a number of client organisations or an internal management/organisation development advisor or change consultant. Anyone already working as a coach (not just as part of your management role), and have an opportunity for coaching practice in between modules. Anyone working within and alongside complex and sensitive social and political environments that require the use of a rare combination of skills, knowledge, personal qualities and concern for professional ethics.

Facilities

Location

Start date

Berkhamsted (Hertfordshire)
See map
Ashridge, HP4 1NS

Start date

On request

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Reviews

Subjects

  • Executive

Teachers and trainers (5)

Andrew Day

Andrew Day

Trainer

Bill Critchley

Bill Critchley

Programme Director

Charlotte Sills

Charlotte Sills

Trainer

Erik de Haan

Erik de Haan

Programme Director

Jensigne Molbeck-Blyth

Jensigne Molbeck-Blyth

Programme Coordinator

Course programme

Become a professional executive coach, fully accredited and equipped with the latest knowledge in the field. Review and re-launch your practice, employ the best of your natural skills, learn about yourself as a coach through supervision and co-coaching, and meet some of the most experienced practitioners in the field.

Develop your coaching and mentoring skills, either to integrate into your existing consultancy work or to create a solid foundation on which to build a coaching and consulting practice.

The programme takes a psychological perspective, which will deepen your and your clients’ awareness of self and the web of key relationships within the organisational context. The aim is to develop your ability to respond to, initiate and enable change through the coaching process.

The programme is designed around five modules:

  • Module 1: Taught component, five x 2 days
  • Module 2: Reflective learning journey
  • Module 3: Ashridge accreditation process
  • Module 4: Facilitated inquiry, four x 3 days
  • Module 5: Personal inquiry with thesis

Modules 1 and 4 are both taught modules and residential at Ashridge.

The Ashridge Masters has been validated by Ashridge Business School and Middlesex University's Centre for Work-Based Learning. Modules 1 and 3 have also been Quality Awarded by the European Mentoring & Coaching Council (EMCC).

Module 1 - Relational consulting in practice

This module is the same as our shorter coaching programme Coaching for Organisation Consultants. It consists of five taught workshops:

Workshop 1 – Developing coaching strategies

  • The nature and purpose of coaching
  • The power of inquiry
  • Choosing a focus for coaching
  • Building the working alliance
  • Coaching interventions: expanding the repertoire.

Workshop 2 – Psychological theories of personality: working in the relationship

  • Psychological theories and models
  • Coaching as a relational process
  • Raising self awareness.

Workshop 3 – Repetition and change: working with patterns

  • The emergence of pattern
  • Addressing repetition and stuckness
  • Experimentation and creative interventions.

Workshop 4 – The coaching context

  • Thinking about organisations
  • Perspectives on organisational change
  • Organisational patterns and dynamics.

Workshop 5 – Professionalism in the coaching relationship

  • Articulating your coaching proposition
  • Assessing the value of coaching relationships
  • Differences and diversity in coaching
  • Ethics and professional practice: issues and considerations
  • Ending the coaching relationship.
Module 2 - Reflective learning journey

At the start of the programme you receive a copy of the Personal Reflection Log, which helps you to prepare for and reflect upon each of the workshops in Module 1. The Personal Reflection Log is an exercise in reflecting on practice and integrating the relevant theory. The Personal Reflection Log comprises:

  • Ten tasks to be completed during Module 2, intended to make the learnings of every workshop more pertinent to you as an individual, and to help you transfer any new approaches, ways of working and theoretical input to your own coaching practice.
  • Ten recommended articles or book chapters to read during the course of the programme, equivalent to two per workshop. Each article poses at least two questions for you to answer: one question about the article itself and the particular perspective or innovative thinking that it brings; and one question to help you relate the article to your own coaching practice.
The Log will be assessed by specially selected members of Faculty. Module 3 - Ashridge accreditation process

After completing Module 2, you begin to prepare for Ashridge Accreditation, a process to assess coaching capability that has been in place since 2002.

This involves:

  • Joining an optional half-day preparation workshop
  • Participating in a one-day practicum
  • Submitting a written paper.

Full details of the accreditation process and Ashridge coaching standards are available on request.

The dates for Module 3 are arranged regularly (almost every month) throughout the year.

Module 4 - Inquiry into the coaching profession

This is a common explorative journey of four 3-day workshops, facilitated by Ashridge executive coaches, where you meet and work with selected accomplished coaches in the field, most of whom have published widely and teach on other coaching programmes.

Workshop 1: The coach and their perceptual framework

  • Effectiveness: outcomes, what works for whom, adherence, allegiance
  • Common factors in effectiveness: which ones have been proposed
  • Common factors residing with the coach: personality and a-specific factors
  • Human perception, including thresholds, distortions, illusions, selective attention
  • The importance of ‘the perception of the coach’: their perceptual apparatus and how they are perceived
  • Inquiry: how am I perceived as effective by my clients?

Workshop 2: The coachee and limits of coaching

  • Human self-regulation, including emotions, thoughts, actions
  • Emotions and their relation to change and to defences
  • From feelings to thinking and how to facilitate this
  • Domains of coaching and life stages
  • The importance of boundaries: with therapy/ of our own professional competence/ between different coaching domains (mediation, counselling, career)
  • Inquiry: how can I learn from my ‘critical moments’ with clients?

Workshop 3: The coaching relationship and transference

  • The co-created relationship; co-creativity
  • Unconscious processes in relationships
  • Critical moments in the coaching relationship (‘moments of meeting’)
  • Integrative approach to critical moments
  • The role of power in relationship
  • Inquiry: how can I learn from my ‘critical moments’ with clients?

Workshop 4: Working with the organisation through coaching

  • The 'business' of coaching: markets, unique selling points, setting up your practice
  • ‘My coaching proposition’
  • Coaching in business: the organisation in the mind
  • Coaching as an organisational intervention
  • Dynamics of organisational entry
  • Participative inquiry into the coaching market.
Module 5 - Inquiry into coaching in action

This is a written assignment in which you are required to undertake an inquiry both into yourself as a professional coach and your work with a specific client over the course of the second year of the programme.

You are required to place yourself at the centre of the process of reflective inquiry into your work.

You will be assisted in this process with coaching support from another member of the participant community and by being a regular participant in a coaching supervision group.

The resulting thesis from this inquiry will be assessed by specially selected members of Faculty.

Our philosophy of relational coaching

Relational coaching means understanding that the relationship between coach and client is at the heart of effective coaching and will be a central vehicle for learning and change. A key understanding that informs all our coaching contracts is that each relationship is specific to a particular organisational context.

The coaching relationship is at the heart of effective coaching for two reasons. Firstly: as the client’s agenda will be defined by their organisational context, so, at a more indirect and subtle level, will our relationship with the client. Our way of coaching is to pay attention to what goes on between us and to make our relationship with our client explicit; because it is likely that such an exploration will cast new light on the client’s relationship with his or her organisation.

Secondly, the client will inevitably bring his own individual patterns of relating into the coaching arena, replaying his core beliefs and attitudes about himself and his abilities. The coaching relationship therefore becomes a forum for understanding stale patterns and for experimenting with new ways of being in relationship.

The theoretical approach is integrative, drawing on a range of sound psychological theories and principles from the fields of coaching, psychological therapies and organisation development. Our coaches, working on a relational basis with their clients are likely to explore on a number of levels. These levels are primarily:

  • their relationships with and assumptions about the organisation within which they operate
  • the relationships that they have with the people within the organisation
  • what they themselves bring to these relationships.

The relationship between coach and coachee is entered into and agreed in an explicit way from the outset, with an initial contract and boundaries, articulating the intentions and goals for the relationship. However, relationships are dynamic and so must be the contract. Our view is that change takes place through the process of relating, and this is the whole point of a responsive coaching contract. Hence what seemed figural and important at the first meeting may have shifted to a new way of seeing the situation by the third or fourth meeting.

We see this process of change emerging in relationship as a crucial way of understanding not only what goes on in an effective coaching relationship, but also how change takes place in organisations.

Executive Coaching

Price on request