In the past
I gained fourteen years' experience in IT, before becoming a business consultant and coach, which I have been for nineteen years.
Having graduated with an honours degree in mathematics from the University of Kent, I spent four years with BT in the seventies, working on huge billing systems and gaining a jolly good training in systems analysis.
Ten years with Marks and Spencer followed. Seven of these were in IT, in team- and project-leading and management roles. The high spot was as one of the two project leaders on M&S's first (pre-EPOS) instore IT system. I learnt then, if I hadn't already grasped it, that having the system do what the client needs is paramount. Having exhausted the possibilities within the IT division, I moved to Finance and became an IT auditor which was a hugely beneficial preparatory experience for my subsequent consultancy work.
I joined Catalyst Systems in 1989, a small IT consultancy SME founded by one of my managers in M&S. I worked with an extraordinary lineup of bluechip clients, including the BBC, Harrods, Littlewoods, a number of utilities including Scottish Power, not forgetting Normans Superwarehouses.
In that time I worked with an iterative prototyping methodology which was designed to enable clients to move from a position of knowing what they wanted to knowing what their business needed. I still believe that getting that right, at the start of a project, is essential if the final system is going to meet the client's needs. Plenty of contemporary high visibility system implementations appear to attest to that.
Catalyst turned out not to be able to weather the storm of the early nineties' recession and I moved to Admiral Management Services where I had a number of very varied consultancy assignments (with Rothmans, HP, Boots, the MoD, EWS Railways, GCHQ, more utilities, and so on). Eventually AMS was taken over by CMG, itself to be swallowed shortly after by Logica.
By this time I felt I had had enough of consultancy, but was still interested in working with businesses. When the opportunity came in 2003 to join Shirlaws, an international coaching firm working in the SME sector, I readily took it. A year later, I set up my own coaching business and, more recently, the emotionalintelligenceatwork brand with Kay McMahon.
Training
BT taught me all I needed to know about IT systems development. M&S taught me a huge amount about business: its principles and good practice. Catalyst Systems gave me an essential experience of life inside an SME—both good and bad—as well as enabling me to develop what I now recognise as a coaching approach to consultancy, in the use of an iterative prototyping method of defining system requirements.
Catalyst, AMS, and latterly CMG, provided a highly varied procession of clients from each of whom I learnt more about what clients need from external specialists - and also what they don't need. Both the formal training I received from these businesses, and the extensive practical experience of working within them and for their clients, have given me an extensive practical knowledge and understanding of business techniques and processes.
Shirlaws gave me a thorough formal training in business coaching—both how to do it and how to be it.
Importantly, for my abilities as a coach, I am a certified NLP master practitioner. I trained with John Seymour who offers one of the best, most rigorous trainings in the UK. I have also completed a twelve day course in cognitive behavioural therapy with Peter Hadwin of UWE.
I believe that relationships and leadership are the key to a successful business. My ability to coach successfully in these areas would not exist without my training with Psychology of Vision. Chuck Spezzano and Jeff Allen, to name but two, have been essential role models. I have attended over 100 days of PoV workshops and completed the Steps to Leadership programme. I am an accredited facilitator of PoV's programme for business, Fundamentals of success.
Finally, my own personal study of psychology since a teenager—particularly in the areas of transactional analysis and cognitive therapy—has added depth and understanding to the business world.
Influences
Coaching is primarily an activity which addresses now and the future. This is often all that is needed. Many times, though, the client's issues derive from earlier experiences which must be resolved if the client, and therefore his or her business, is to move forward. NLP offers some timeline techniques which manage to be both clunky and a danger in the hands of someone unsure of what they are doing.
One alternative approach avenue is to explore Psychology of Vision. This is a personal development philosophy, developed by Chuck Spezzano, firmly grounded in post-Freudian psychology, with a good deal of NLP thrown in, plus A course in miracles for those inclined that way, and bits of everything else from Jung to gestalt therapy to transactional analysis to... (I even thought I saw some Heidegger in it the other day.) Far from being a dog's dinner, it is extraordinarily powerful.
I have also been influenced by Carl Rogers whose book Client centered therapy is superb for its focus on the need for the therapist (read coach) to enter the client's reality. That it was written in 1951 beggars belief—it comes up fresh as a daisy, the occasional self-effacing remarks that 'more research needs to be done' being the only aspect that reminds the reader of its age.
For myself, I see one of the coach's tasks is to provide a facilitating environment in which the client feels safe to explore the issues which are holding him or her back from true success—and, consequently, the business from success. The inventor of this concept was DW Winnicott. As a paediatric psychiatrist, he used it to refer to the context in which a mother nurtures her young baby. Winnicott also invented the phrase good enough—originally to describe what baby needed form its mother, but a damn good project management principle.
Cognitive therapy—preferably not cognitive behaviour therapy—offers many insights for the coach. As with Psychology of Vision it routinely addresses issues which are too 'strong' for business coaching—but the use of what, in our world, are extreme examples does enable us to understand the dynamics in play when they are present in diluted, harder-to-detect form in the business coaching context. Aaron Beck is a primary influence, but I have been recently impressed by Christine Padesky’s interview techniques.
Games people play by Eric Berne has been essential for interpreting the interactions between people in client businesses.
My coaching is often most successful when it is telling stories. Stories allow the client to think about difficult situations in believable third party environments, thereby enabling them to think through their own issues which they had previously fought against. Bruno Bettelheim's The uses of enchantment is about fairy stories (though Bettelheim rails against this term)—again, this is 'stronger' than a coach needs, but the insights provided are considerable.
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