Let’s weigh in on a great coaching agenda debate…whose agenda is it anyway? Below is the write-up from the Coaching-At-Work e-newsletter out of the UK, which does a great job of introducing the issue. What are your thoughts? Make sure you are logged in to be able to have a comment box to reply.
“Should we as coaches be leveraging our coaching assignments to save the world?
Should we be holding our clients accountable for their actions in terms of how they impact their team, their organisation, the planet, the universe?
Some would argue that there is no greater calling than that (see Sir John Whitmore’s blog at http://www.coaching-at-work.com/2010/01/16/coaches-need-to-says-john-whitmore/ ) while others are adamant that we have no place or right whatsoever other than to serve the agenda of the client paying the bill. I sat in on a fascinating and lively debate a few weeks back at the European Mentoring & Coaching Council (EMCC) UK’s annual conference. The issue of whose and which agenda we should attend to in coaching caused quite a stir. The panel consisted of the School of Coaching’s Myles Downey, Sheffield Hallam University’s David Megginson and John Blakey, co-author of Where were all the coaches when the banks went down? For Blakey, it was about having the “bravery to confront” and putting “the system’s interests above the individual’s”. Myles Downey, on the other hand, said “I think this is really dangerous. Who the X do we think we are? We’re not here to save the banking system, to save the planet, to bring humanity into the workplace. We’re not contracted to do that” (for a full write-up of the debate and the rest of the EMCC conference, see the July/August issue). ” ~Liz Hall, editor of http://www.coaching-at-work.com/
Are you in the Sir John Whitmore camp or the Myles Downey camp, or somewhere in between?