Summer 2008

Focus Now

We are pleased to announce the launch of the Focus Leadership Blog - a place where leaders and coaches can come together, get real about the challenges they face, and share ideas on the best ways forward. You’ll find a FEBI forum where FEBI users can communicate on their experiences with the patterns, share best practices, lessons learned, or seek advice from us or fellow colleagues. You’ll also find a Whole Leader forum where leaders and coaches can share stories of their journey using the patterns, or how they’re navigating the increased demands on leaders today. Developing whole leaders and developing as a whole leader are easier said than done. We hope to create a community where, learning from one another, we can accelerate future successes. To find out the latest buzz check out the Focus Blog!

Focus Retrospective

Dr. Ginny Whitelaw had hundreds of coaches on their feet in four different energies, during her keynote address to the ICF European Coaching Conference (ECC) in Geneva, Switzerland. Visit our Focus Leadership Blog to read Dr. Whitelaw’s reflections on the conference. 

The theme of the conference was Connecting Worlds. One of our coaches, Bob Caron, who also attended the conference, had these observations about how the patterns connect our world cross-culturally.

In the conversations I had at the conference with countless coaches from numerous countries it was clear that different patterns are valued more highly in different cultures. As humans, we have all four patterns; however we have preferences. I believe, and my conversations at the ECC supported, that those preferences can be influenced by a cultural context. For example, a culture that values autonomy, independence and individual achievement may cultivate the Driver pattern more than does a culture that values service to the group, social contribution and cooperation. A culture that is more traditional, conservative and reserved might value the Organizer pattern more than does a culture that celebrates exuberance, creativity and spontaneity. When we are conditioned to value certain patterns above others, even our home patterns could be suppressed or discouraged, and our greatness not fully realized.  'Win on your strengths and cultivate enough of your weak energy patterns to stay out of trouble', we often say in our work with clients.  Similarly, I think every person in the context of their culture does well to know their strengths and win on those...and encourage, enable and allow the non-dominant patterns to take an active role so we can reserve judgment, embrace diversity, and rise to a world-wide greatness. The ECC 2008 was a perfect place to run that experiment and my sense of it was that it was an astounding success.
  
As for highlights of the conference, the connections, conversations and potential collaborations were the most valuable gifts I brought home. It was quite an awakening to listen to people from numerous countries and cultures talk about their approach to coaching, the business of leadership development, or even international politics, economics and culture. It was unfortunate (though not surprising) to hear the negative perceptions many European citizens have about the United States and its people, but also hopeful that coaches are the perfect community to establish ties, seek common ground and collaborate toward a better world. It was clear that the coaches we met are working toward that lofty end...a better world for all of us - regardless of culture or country. These often visionary, certainly collaborative and all together good and decent people we call coaches are clearly a group that are helping to heal the world. It was great to form connections with so many of them from so many places.

Focus Forward: 

Questions You've Asked Us... 

Q: How do you use the Visionary in coaching when you don’t have much time, as in doing 2 or 3 mini-coaching sessions as part of a leadership program?

A: Mini coaching sessions are a great part of high-touch leadership programs, as a time to help leaders make sense of their assessments and 360 data, and craft a plan going forward. Yet, time is at a premium in these sessions, and it’s easy to fall into a Driver-Organizer frame of mind (especially if it’s your preference already), jumping right to the point or trying to dutifully “solve” whatever problem the leader is struggling with. Generally this does not bring the other’s mind along and create the learning that good coaching is about. Instead, I’ve learned to consciously invite the Visionary’s spaciousness to open up the leader’s mind. When they tell me of a problem, for example, rather than suggesting a solution, I might ask them to vision a year from now, and paint me the picture of this problem resolving successfully. The Visionary is also great for making connections and simply holding a large space for the leader to fill. “What wants to happen here?” I might ask. “If this were meant to be, how would you use it?”

   The Visionary is especially useful in short-cycle, multi-session coaching for planting seeds. I briefly plant seeds in one session and trust the process that the most important seeds will sprout in the mind of the leader before the next session. For example, I might ask them to think about where they want to be a year from now. Or consider their sources of renewal and next time, tell me which one they’d like to re-invigorate. Or think about the people who report to them, and jot down the most important step forward for each of them. I’ve learned from this process that seeds sprout just fine in the dark (i.e., between sessions), that not all seeds have to sprout, and that those that do are more likely to get watering even after I’m out of the picture. Plus, you can plant a number of seeds in a short amount of time!

    Having said that, I have to own that being at home in the Organizer, I call on the Visionary’s bigness to open up the magic of coaching, and it rarely gets away from me. For those of you who are naturally at home in the Visionary, you might need to watch your time and get to the point now and then. J

– Dr. Ginny Whitelaw

Share your coaching tips and read those of your colleagues by visiting the Focus Leadership Blog. 

My Journey to Greatness

This journey starts when I first learned about the patterns. Things got really interesting when I learned my home pattern and what to do with that information. No one seemed all to surprised to find out that I was an Organizer, especially my Collaborator wife, Jennifer. Nothing was better than a good plan, I liked everything in a very certain order and any mention of change would definitely make me completely anxious. I would like to start off by saying I love my wife more than anything in the world; that said, there are some Collaborator tendencies that drive us Organizers bananas. I used to think, for example, that Jennifer would put the DVD’s in the “wrong place” just to mess with me.

But as I said, this is where my journey begins. In starting to do the movement work I found myself loving the Organizer and Driver movements but felt so weird dancing in the Collaborator or experiencing the chaos of the Visionary. I was the stiff guy in the room that just couldn’t let my arms swing freely. I was certainly happy to hear that there was hope for me, that I actually had all four patterns within me and could learn to pull them out. As an Organizer/Driver, it wasn’t too difficult entering those patterns. With the Visionary and Collaborator, on the other hand, the movements were so important to get me into those weak patterns.