Invitation to apply for membership in the International Consortia

Dear Business Coach:

For the past 12 years I have been actively involved in coaching business systems and the people in them, sometimes consulting, sometimes teaching, often executing business tasks beside and in support of these people.

With that being said, I am having a hard time find a "coaching home" so to speak. Perhaps if you feel the same way you would consider joining me in something that will take a lot of work but will certainly be worth it in the end.

For the past five years I have been watching and listening, writing and coaching about business. I have found many friends and people interested in business and organizational systems and even some who believe like I do, that you can coach people and you can coach people in systems and you can coach the system itself--as a complex adaptive system, no less complex than humankind and sometimes more so.

My suspicions are being confirmed in that we have a lot of folks calling themselves business and corporate coaches.  In the long run it probably will shake out, but in the meantime, we are going to have all kinds of folks vying for the "business wallet" and most of which have never had a business course, nor been an executive or really even made a payroll and downsized a division, you get my meaning.  In fact recently, I heard a nationally known career coach talking about corporate coaching and when someone in the audience used the phrase ROI, she politely asked "what is that?"

The complexity of the business environment is no less complex and I believe more complex than the people in it. Coaching people is the "right thing to do" and so will be coaching systems. In order to coach a system you have to have some knowledge and experience of how business works.  And in order to coach business you need to walk and talk the language.  While you may be able to get away with things speaking English in a Spanish Speaking Country, it is very hard to do business!

Many people will argue with this premise--that you don't need business knowledge to coach business systems.  But, while it may not be necessary for some, it will be necessary for most.  The kinds of coaches that "FAST business" needs are the kinds of coaches with experience and an understanding of business and organizational systems. This does not mean that because you have business knowledge and experience you will be a good coach, but that is a point of leverage and value we bring to the client.

This is no less relevant than understanding human systems in order to coach people, but somehow many coaches believe you can just walk into an executives office without ever having stood in their shoes or called the shots, or even know what a debit or credit is and still be just as effective as someone who has participated in those issues.

In their recent book, EXECUTIVE COACHING, Berquist, et al states: "There is only one credible source for executives who seek coaching: other men and women who have also served executive roles."

Whether they are right or wrong, the case is made for business coaches to have business knowledge and experience. In the coming years, global competitiveness will create huge gaps in performance, change and transformation for business and organizational systems.

I believe that there will be a place for a network of business coaches that can draw upon the expertise of one another to learn and grow with their business and organizational challenges.

The current agenda for most coaching reflects the lack of consideration for business and organizational coaching.  In fact, when I speak to people about a systems perspective they don't know what I'm talking about. 

For the most part, the coaching community is made up of the helping professions and while there are a great many of us that are members and will stay members, but there needs to be a group that is directly advancing the agenda of business coaches.

In that regard, I founded the International Consortia of Business Coaches. I believe it will take time to move this group forward and it will certainly require leadership, but the benefits of building an organization that collaborates on business and organizational coaching project teams globally using learning networks is unlimited over time.

There will be many organizations that build their own groups of coaches, but I believe that we are coaches in order to express our individuality and independence. Forming "Just in Time" virtual project teams and becoming a community of interest moving towards a community of practice makes a lot of sense.

The coaching fraternity has been for the most part a one-way dialogue with "protected" membership as all communities of interest are in the beginning. However, their concentration has been to build size rather then quality and brand.  In many cases you need no formal coach training to become a member of these organizations! 

I believe that we will have to network much more closely in order to create coaching opportunities in the future and the other issue is credentialing, a huge issue. I believe brand management is more important and frankly I am hesitant to align with an organization that permits anyone to join without any form of qualification.

I am not here to talk about my expertise because I have been very careful to coach in protected scenarios many times risking my own resources to become a better coach before practicing on a business or organization unknowingly. However, there is no protection against that for any of us and we stand to lose what we have built if things continue to move in the same direction as the coaching mills turn out more and more "trained" coaches into the business environment as people flock to join the "band wagon." I believe we have more coaches coaching new coaches than practicing coaches making a living off their coaching!

I guess the bottom line after all of this is that I founded I-CBC in order to pre-qualify members and to filter membership in such a way as not to be exclusive (although that is the case) but to attain a level of knowledge and experience from which to advance business and organizational coaching practices--while maintaining professional standards.

I see that we will have a great deal of opportunity to coach large business and organizational systems and no one can do that alone, so in order to create opportunity for coaches that want to continue to practice independently, we have to create a set of standards through certification and promote continuous training to maintain certification so that the group at large can be called upon to muster resources for large and complex projects.

Even in small projects, it requires often 3-10 coaches to properly address a SME (small and medium sized enterprise). I know that John Tessier can provide you with experience in trying to get small business people coached in-mass. There just aren't enough of us out there yet and even then, our experiences and practices are so varied that the approach has no central theme.

I also realize that this is the thing that makes us all love coaching, is that we can do it our own way, but the time is coming that these individual approaches will be more limiting than leveraging, so some form of standards are going to have to bind the independent business coach either through credentialing or through brand, so we are faced with those dilemmas.

At this time, there is not a coaching brand other than the small training companies that are turning out business and organizational system coaches. A gap exists. 

I believe it requires an investment of about 6-10,000 hours of business and coaching training to become effective in a complex environment. I am not talking about coaching in small business or people who themselves know less than you do about business. The global environment is becoming a rich landscape for coaching and a complex one at that.

It is the prerequisite of most business management and executive positions to hire someone with business training and experience, yet some say we don't need it to coach those same people? Yet anyone can enter and claim to be a professional coach by purchasing their right to belong in most organizations. I am not knocking these forms of training, they have their place and are well thought out for what they provide. Yet, if business wants business people to run and develop it, why wouldn't they want coaches trained in business as well as coaching?

The conclusion is that I believe they do. We need ALL forms of coaching and I believe that there is a real niche developing for the experienced business coach trained and experienced in business and organizational systems. Towards that end, I offer you for consideration the International Consortia of Business Coaches as a vehicle to recruit, develop and continuous improve yourself and this type of coach.

I envision the organization as a marketing as well as a coaching organization. I believe that we can create opportunities for coaches that are far beyond the broad thrust of the ICF and other organizations. 

I hope you will consider checking out the website and watch for the launch of the I-CBC at ICF in October. 

Thank you for your interest in business coaching! 

For more info: mailto:memberinfo@i-cbc.com  

or contact me personally at coach@leadwise.com.

Sincerely,

Mike Jay, Founding Member

800.823.1251