| COOL FRIENDS |
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| Alain Cardon, Master Certified Coach,
International Coach Federation |
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How did you start practicing coaching?
Alain Cardon
If by "practice" you mean my behavior and skills in coaching, these were naturally developed over years of personal consulting, research and development. I have long been interested in developing learning environments for teams to develop by themselves in a delegated approach where I would stay very peripheral, as a consultant or facilitator. I have always liked to accompany systems while they develop as they want to, in the direction that suits them best, at their rhythm, to deploy potentials they never dreamed they had. I didn’t know it then, but it was team coaching.
At the time, people who knew coaching said I was a natural team coach, but I never used the term of coaching to describe my work. I said I did team development and positioned myself as an OD or Organizational Development specialist.
In 2002, I met the International Coach Federation and coaching community in a European Conference at Sitges in Spain. I then decided that I wanted to become a coach so I passed ICF certification. After that, I positioned my professional "practice" within the coaching frame of reference, officially claimed to be a coach and gradually gained international recognition for my original work. That is also when I wrote my first book on team coaching, which is now translated into Romanian language at the CODECS Publishing House.
What does systemic coaching stand for, and how can it help organizations become more performing?
Alain Cardon Some people think that "systemic" means that you work with larger systems such as teams and organizations. Systemic is not synonymous to organizational. Having a systemic approach could mean that you perceive and work with an individual but that you work with that person mainly by focusing on patterns and processes as they appear the interfaces between that person and his whole pertinent environment. To do that, you may even want to spend a whole day with the person in their real workplace and coach them in situ, on improving all his pertinent interfaces.
So being a systemic coach, or therapist or consultant means that you work with individuals, teams or organizations, or families, but with a very particular frame of reference. In some ways, this approach would be similar to a biologist who would focus his study on the whole surrounding ecological system of a plant to understand the plant and how it grows. A non systemic approach is to take the plant into a lab, or out of its natural environment to understand it. If you take anything out of its environment, you loose all the meaning which resides in the plant’s interfaces with the environment.
A systemic approach to organizations also focuses on interfaces. Interfaces are not relationships in the human sense of the word, but professional and operational connections. If you have a systemic approach, you know that it is the quality of connections which make a organization performing, much more than the individual quality of its members.
If you hire an excellent expert and put him in a non-collaborative environment, you loose potential. If you hire a normal person, and put her in an environment which has performance oriented interfaces, that person will help the whole system succeed.
To take another metaphor, if you have eleven divas in a football team, you may have a loosing team. You also need a mega-diva as captain to keep the others in their place while they each try to become the probable successor. If your team is made up of eleven reasonably humble good players who want to work together, you have much higher chances of developing a winning team, and you may not need to name a captain, except for the public. Winning teams automatically have good relationships. Teams with divas rarely get along.
A systemic approach is therefore focused on increasing the system’s performance through its operational connections and interfaces focused on achieving the team goals. When individual performance is secondary to team results, then these can develop all the way to success. So when we say in a systemic approach that the "whole" is more than the sum of the parts, it is because the results of the parts are not at all the issue.
What are the particular needs for leadership development you see in Romania?
Alain Cardon
This is related to the last question and answer. Leadership development in Romania needs to be much less focused on individual development of people who want to be divas, and who come back from leadership training with their heads full of illusions about their individual role as leaders. In Romania people are trained to think that a good leader makes the team win when in reality, it is always the good team that makes the leader appear like a winner.
Leadership development for the future of Romania should be more focused on teaching leaders some humility and on how to get out of the way and simply support their teams to let their teams win. The real leadership questions are: how to work more with a systemic view of their teams rather than with just a one-on-one technocratic or relational approach, how to ask more questions and listen rather than give answers, how to leave influence and political strategies aside to focus on achieving team objectives and double or triple their results, how to develop collaborative skills rather than focus on their bosses to look good or strategize to get a higher position, etc. The list is long and the need is getting more and more urgent.
Employee turnover in organizations, job dissatisfaction, de-motivation, etc. is directly linked to the leader’s lack of real team management skills. The work force in Romania is generally motivated and dedicated. The people want to work and do a good job. They are generally just very poorly managed. Employees notice that their personal contribution is wasted through poor teamwork, that their leaders are focused on their own careers and immediate personal returns. So numerous employees naturally try and find a better place to work, or just wait for better days.
The good side of the picture is that in spite of poor leadership, there is still very strong growth in the country and in most companies. There is still some time to change the state of affairs, but we should get started now.
Already 4 trainers from Human Invest participated at your Coaching Fundamentals program. How has been your experience of working with them?
I have worked with some Human Invest individuals who have excellent individual skills. Human Invest is an excellent growth and development environment. I also have the feeling that Human Invest has a huge future potential as a system, and that it is gradually developing it. I have not yet worked with the system or the team as a whole, however, but that day may come.
And generally how has your experience been working with Romanians?
As I said above, Romanians are individualists, and highly motivated and dedicated to their own growth and development. If that energy is transformed into a systemic approach or if Romanians start understanding the power of team effort, they will all individually gain tenfold.
That is the challenge, but it rests on a fundamental shift of frame of reference.
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Human Invest is a Premier League company in the arena of training and
organizational development consultancy services, present on the Romanian market since 1998.
We are recognized for conceiving and implementing programs which offer managers an authentic experience towards improving their leadership
performances, and thus we support companies in becoming more and more engaged in delivering excellent services for their clients.
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