Visioning the future together
It is happening—the Global Convention on Coaching is beginning! The working group topics have been formed with feedback from coaches and other stakeholders around the world. On July 15-16, 2007 the chairs and facilitators of the working groups will be trained to facilitate the year long dialogue that will culminate in a global gathering in July 2008 in Dublin.
Background and Importance for You
Coaching has moved well beyond a management fad—it has been a growing area of personal, professional and organisational development since the early 1990’s. It is now one of the largest areas of Leadership Development and Organization Development spending in today’s organisations. Both practitioners and consumers are expressing a clear need and desire for the professionalization of the coaching industry—to give some measure of certainty to individuals and businesses around standards and training, and to ensure that coaching will continue to meet their needs into the future.
There have been, and are, many good initiatives in the coaching world that have attempted to build the foundations of a profession. Various coaching organisations have developed/are developing definitions of coaching, codes of ethics, competency models, training guidelines etc. While many are moving in similar directions, the lack of dialogue between us means that much of the benefit of this effort may be lost. The worst case scenario is that coaching industry itself will fragment into a multitude of disparate directions.
The GCC is a year long process in which all the key stakeholders in coaching (major coaching consumers, practitioners, educators and industry bodies) will be gathering together to discuss the difficult issues facing us in professionalizing coaching. It is a world-wide collaborative dialogue that seeks to understand the needs of coaching consumers, practitioners and educators in order to develop commonly agreed understandings, guidelines and frameworks for the practice of coaching and the training of coaches. We are not seeking to develop a single rigid code under which all must follow. Rather we are seeking to begin a dialogue that articulates the sort of future we want for coaching. (A full description of the process, can be found on the GCC website www.coachingconvention.org)
Your participation and support gives you a voice in this dialogue.
How to Get Involved
Be a part of the dialogue! Participation is free. The only criteria you need to meet are that you are a stakeholder in the future of coaching, and are willing to contribute your voice and listen to the voices of the other stakeholders. The GCC will be as successful as it representative. We are also encouraging organizations and individuals to give financial resources to help underwrite the face to face meetings and the year long online efforts of the working groups.
There are two levels of active participation
The topics of the working groups and descriptions of the roles of working group and consultation group members appear at the end of this letter.
Please join us in this exciting venture! We look forward to working with you.
Yours sincerely,
Michael Cavanagh, David Lane, Dianne Stober, & John L. Bennett
Next Steps
If you wish to participate further, please download the linked document GCC Participant Invite and complete the short application form, where you can indicate how you wish to participate.
If you wish to participate as a sponsor, please download the linked document GCC Sponsorship Opportunities
Once you have completed the application form, please print it off and return it to admin@coachingconvention.org
If you wish to complete and email
it as a Microsoft Word form, please download the linked document: GCC
Application Form
Brief descriptions of the
roles of working group and consultation group members for the Global Convention
on Coaching
Working Group Member
The Working Group Member is the heart of the process. The role of the working
group is the “think together” so as to understand and address
the complex issues involved in working group topic. By thinking together,
we mean something quite different to the voicing of previously established
positions and opinions that so often characterises debates and workplace discussions.
Thinking together entails seeking to view the issues under consideration in
the light of the different perspectives represented in the group and outside
the group - and to genuinely allow ourselves to engage with those different
perspectives “from the inside” as it were. Hence the first movement
of this dialogue is respectful understanding. From this position it becomes
possible to stand back from our own individual perspectives to see the range
of possibilities that may emerge to address the subject matter of the group.
From this new perspective, new collective solutions and understanding are
able to emerge.
The group’s role then moves to identifying the possibilities for collective
action (and inaction) with respect to their topic area, and to explore the
possible futures created by these actions and articulating these in scenarios.
As much a possible throughout the process, working group members will also
seek to consult with and understand the multiple perspectives existing in
the community of coaching stakeholders. Following distribution of the scenarios
to the wider coaching community for comment, the working groups will reflect
on the feedback received in order to further build and refine scenarios, and
produce White papers that reflect the range of voices in the wider coaching
community. These will form the basis for discussion at the GCC in July 2008.
Consultation Group Members
The wider consultation groups form an integral and important part of the dialogue
process. It is through their participation that the GCC becomes truly representative
of the coaching world. Aside from following the dialogue as it appears on
the web platform, and providing ad hoc feedback along the way, wider consultation
group members will be asked to provide assistance and formal considered feedback
and comment on the draft scenarios and white papers developed by the working
groups at a number of points throughout the process.
The
planned Working Groups are:
Knowledge
Base for Coaching – Core and Specialist Areas
Code of Ethics
Core Competencies–General
and Specialties
Training Guidelines
for Graduate Programmes
Research Agenda
for the Development of the Field
Professional Status
for Coaching
Mapping the Field–What
is the Field and Its Related Areas
Selection of Coaches
and Management of Coaching Engagement
Evaluation of Coaching
Engagements
Background