Executive Coach Summit IV
October 20 – 22, 2002, Atlanta Georgia

Click here to read the Final Report



 

Coordination Team: Elizabeth Guilday, Michael Sanson, Bob Johnson, David Martin, Jane Creswell and Mike Jay

Recording Team: Manya Arond-Thomas, Marywayne Bush, Christina Marshall, Johan Tandberg

Selection Team: David Utts, Suzi Pomerantz

“Special Thanks to International Coach Federation and Kathy Schramek and Guy Stickney for their support.”

Executive Summary

Mike R. Jay, Coordinator

The following is a brief summary of the events that occurred and my comments regarding the leadership of that summit.

The recording team led by Michael Sanson and supported by Elizabeth Guilday are preparing an encompassing review of the data generated from that event. My hope is that they will act quickly and produce the white paper by Spring 2003. In lieu of the paper being presented at this time, we are forwarding the link where you can view the data recorded for this event, along with earlier white papers.

http://www.executivecoachsummit.com/rawdata

The White Paper for ECS IV will be posted as soon as it is ready.

The Team for ECS V is in place:

Co-chairs: Wendy Haywood, Laura Green
Other committee members: Linda Miller, Wendy Capland, Susan Pomerantz, Pete Walsh, Elizabeth Guilday and Bob Johnson who will chair next year’s Executive Coaching SIG for ICF.

Our thanks to Jane Creswell for her work as this year’s Executive Coaching SIG and her vision of coordinating the interchanges between the summit and ICF.


 

Executive Coaching
“Necessary Dialogue”

Approximately 80 people were in attendance at various times during the summit. In prior years the group was much smaller and more intimate. However, from feedback occurring in the coaching industry and from previous coaching conferences, a real effort was made to accommodate more people at the summit.

The coordination team met diligently throughout 2001-2 to frame the dialogue for ECS IV. However, as coordinator I continually forced my team into less rather than more in the planning, preparation and delivery of the facilitation for ECS IV.  This was not easy on anyone, least of all, those looking to attend and hoping to see a list of take-aways and objectives.

We began ECS IV in consideration of the following questions:

• What do we need to talk about?
• What are the questions we need to ask?
• What answers do you want to walk out with?

The ECS IV process was designed to accomplish two things:

• Get people talking to each other
• Generate Dialogue

Everything else would emerge.

Executive Coach Summit IV DAY 1:

And emerge it did, from the early rumblings of “we’ve already discussed this for three years, to people are getting restless, to we don’t have the right people here, to who let some of these people in, to we have to do something now, to me calming people and asking them (rather forcing them<G>) to hold their water and let things take shape.

And take shape they did.

From the gathering of data from the first group activity where people were divided up into table groups and then brought together into four basic groups and then further funneled into a whole, the following issues among others were noted for discussion.

Summary of groups gathered together:

1. Is coaching a profession or an approach?
2. What are the business trends and how does it impact executive coaching?
3. How do we leverage the resources in the executive coaching community?
4. How to measure benefits, results, and effectiveness of coaching?
5. What are the chief competencies and roles of an executive coach?
6. What are the tools, models, structures, assessments for executive coaching?
7. Show us real time demos of great executive coaching.
8. What are the key issues the executives we coach are facing?
9. How do we educate the marketplace?
10. What is the leadership agenda for executive coaching?
11. Where are the big guns and why aren’t they here?


Table topics – 2 assignments:

1. Clarify and define the focus
2. What are the actions, thinking 3 years out (force us to talk about systems and what can last)?

Table 1: Profession

How do we create it into a profession or is it? Core values? Best practices? Certification needed? How to differentiate it? What needs to be sustained? How to share results with peers? How invite academics into group?


Table 2: ROI – Return on investment/impact

How to leverage our connection to it? What do we mean by it?


Table 3: Personal Development

How do we develop selves, develop network, learn tools from each other...?

Table 4: Business Development

How want to develop our businesses? Marketing, full-practice, business trends, competitive threats


Table 5: Issues

What are the issues of execs we coach now and in future?


Table 6: Bigger Game

How to grow bigger alliances, how to use resources in room?


Table 7: Vision

Looking at the vision of this community? What’s it really up to? Looking into the future – the role of this community in stewardship in EC?


Table 8: Credibility

What are underpinnings of credibility for us? What are the theories we’re operating with? How are we getting measured? What are the important credentials?


Table 9: Commitment/Strategic Planning

With individual or organizational clients


Table 10: Tools/Models/demos

To close the day, several individuals contributed ideas, comments and requests from the group regarding ongoing research, action and future action.

Laura Whitworth: http://www.thebiggergame.org 

 

Leslie ICF Executive Coaching SIG announcements: leslie@successpartner.com 

Bill Berquist: International Journal of Coaching: WBergQ@aol.com 

Michael Sanson’s research project on exploring background of executive coaches: msanson@unlimited.com 

Jeff Auerbach’s research project on the core competencies of executive coaching: training@executivecoachingcollege.com 


Executive Coaching Summit IV DAY 2:

The second day began where the second day left off, with two exceptions.

1. Speed Alliances were created by the Coordinating Team led by MaryWayne Bush where people coming into the morning sessions realized an opportunity to connect with people from various areas of the country and particular specialities.

2. Two people brought us the World Café methodology - http://www.theworldcafe.com/ - to help us structure the morning of day 2. They eventually became the leaders of Executive Coach Summit V, Wendy Haywood and Laura Green from Canada.

The World Café is an easy-to-use method for creating a living network of collaborative dialogue around questions that matter to the real-life situations of your organizations or community.

World Café Questions that mattered:

1. What must exec coaches be, do, have to be successful?
2. How do you market, sell coaching to clients?
3. What’s next for the exec coaching profession?
4. Why bother with credentialing?
5. What makes up an exec coaching business now and in the future?
6. What are the hot or most prevalent topics of your coaching sessions with executives?
7. What will keep you coming back to this summit?
8. What do you do with your long-term clients
9. What are the competencies required of leaders in the next five years?

The White Paper team will capture and summarize the data created during the World Café at a later date.

EXPERT Sessions

After lunch, we set up expert break-outs featuring many of the methodologies and models resident in the attending summit community. The ability to adapt the process on the fly was essential in being able to take advantage of this expertise and provide opportunities to summit participants to learn about and from each other during this time.

Expert Panel

An additional set of experts sat on a panel who addressed the summit on several issues surrounding the summit and the state of the industry in executive coaching. All were asked to share their comments from their point of view.

In closing the Executive Summit, we conducted an after-action review and offered/mandated summit participants to provide feedback on the summit activities and their experience. This was facilitated by Elizabeth Guilday and was viewed as an appropriate way to lean out of this year’s event and next years 5th event in Denver.

The members of the team each closed with remarks on their experience with the summit and my special thanks to Jane Creswell, Elizabeth Guilday, Michael Sanson, David Martin and Bob Johnson; along with special thanks to our recording team of Manya Arond-Thomas, Marywayne Bush, Christina Marshall and Johan Tandberg.

Again, thanks to the ICF and others including Guy Stickney who made the event easy to coordinate.

The White Paper Team is at work.

My Comments on the Process:

As coordinator of this summit (no one else volunteered), I worked with the coordination team above.  Upon accepting the position of leading the summit in year four, I renamed the position to "coordinator."

I had a vision in large part brought about by attending the previous three summits.  This vision included an "open space" process where emergence would be allowed to be the dominant force.

In the beginning, being a dominant leader, I forced my team to accept my vision.  We received pushback from people wanting more specifics, hence our capitulation (mine actually<G>) to name the summit: "Executive Coaching-Necessary Dialogue." (That's all I allowed the team to budge is to name the process.<g>)

Basically because most people are entirely too busy these days, I feel that most people just accepted the fact that things would take place, regardless of how much the coordination team/coordinator screwed it up.  Then of course, there are those that were hungry to become part of our group.

So, we arrived in Atlanta, with about 72 registered, thanks to Bob, David and Suzi for the selection and work with Kathy and Guy Stickney from ICF for on and offsite coordination work--thank you.

From the very beginning, I held to the vision of emergence.

Here are the reasons that I never shared with the team (I'm not saying this is correct, but I wanted the entire flexibility to be able to allow for emergence and therefore could not commit to a course of action beforehand without limiting the ability to respond in the moment), or the group, but I will share it now.

I wanted to model how "dominant leadership"--much of what we have left-over from the hierarchical days of running organizations--can transition to a middle position (dominant can never be un-dominant, but it can be transitioned to allow for emergence of leadership from within the organization).

I won't go into the things that I did behind the scenes, but I will say just two things:

• modeling this leadership is not easy for natural dominant leaders

• allowing leadership to emerge is very effective in my view when the leader is open to feedback (this may require higher developmental levels based on research done by Torbert/Greuter)

I will ask those of you who attended the summit to consider these questions as you coach executives through these transitional, translational and transformation opportunities:

• How many people in attendance get a chance to lead?

• How does the leadership emerge...?(without any prior knowledge of who was in the room)

• What happens as a result of that emergence?

• What kinds of things are in tension while it is happening?

and finally, what are the results and what did you learn?

I'll briefly answer the questions from my perspective about the summit, you consider them from yours and be the judge:

• My rough guess is that more than 50 out of the 75 or so in attendance got to lead, possibly more.

• Leadership came to me through solicited and unsolicited feedback, through initiative from others and by listening to others as the leader, both to my internal team and to the external "emergent" team that formed.

• We gathered more data than previously from more of a variety of practitioners, all the way from beginner to experts.  What comes from it will be up to the diligence of the white paper team to summarize in terms of our learning and results.

• There were many unhappy people at times, as frustration appeared from lack of structure or too much structure--to you name it.  All of that was considered and then I made decisions as the leader.

The results...

You'll have to be the judge on this one. 

Many people don't like this kind of make it up as you go because of what has them and some are unsure of what they come for and hence don't get those needs met. Others don't like it because they don't think it is structured enough, they are uncomfortable with filling a container--they want the container full to drink from in the beginning--this I do understand.

Yet, I ask you in closing to consider one thing:

As we move into a world where more of what we don't know we don't know is playing front and center stage, we will have to coach leaders to become emergent, trust the leadership that they have assembled and seek feedback, at the same time hold a vision and respond to that feedback with leadership adaptability, hopefully I provided an example of how dominant leaders can transition to a space of emergent leadership.

Thanks for allowing me to lead,

Mike R. Jay

Please feel free to send me comments: