The Facilitative Coach Workshop

Who Should Attend
We've designed this workshop for facilitators, consultants, trainers and coaches who have experience working with groups and individuals and who want to expand into one-on-one coaching or deepen the impact of their coaching work. This would be an ideal experience for you if you are a Human Resources and Organizational Development professional who either coaches peers, subordinates and leaders in your organization, or if you coach external clients. Being familiar with The Skilled Facilitator approach is helpful, but not necessary to get value from the class.

Workshop Outcomes:
At the Facilitative Coach Workshop, you'll learn to:

• Create contracts for coaching work that make positive outcomes much more likely
• Increase your clients' commitment to change by jointly designing the process with them
• Help clients make the changes they want by designing and using a variety of interventions, including art, writing and real life experiments.
• Give and receive motivating feedback on coaching skills and the coaching process
• Help yourself and others change thinking in order to sustain behavior change
• Determine whether or not other coaching activities and methods are consistent with your core values

We believe effective coaching demands a comprehensive understanding of the complex coaching process. You'll learn our nine-part model for coaching and we'll explore how the parts interrelate to generate purposeful, creative results for your clients. These are the nine parts of our coaching model, and what each makes possible:

• Coaching Purpose – Helping people identify and attain their goals by clarifying and deepening the purpose of the coaching relationship.
• Inner Work of the Coach – Examining the values you bring to coaching; developing awareness of your gifts and where you get stuck; expanding your capacity for compassion and attending fully to yourself and others.
• Inner Work of the Client – Guiding your client to success and fulfillment through interventions that encourage self-awareness, knowledge of gifts and stuck places, and changing thinking to change behaviors.
• Coaching Relationship – Co-creating clear roles, boundaries, guidelines and goals with your clients, both at the outset and during the coaching engagement, as a strong foundation for your work together.
• Guiding Principles – Articulating broad principles such as integrity, compassion and joint design that explain the purpose and intent of a coaching relationship.
• Ground Rules – Applying the principles of the Skilled Facilitator approach to improve your coaching dialogues and help your clients act consistently with core values.
• Process Steps – Following a logical set of steps to help you and your client move effectively through each coaching session and the entire coaching relationship.
• Diagnosis and Intervention – Identifying critical issues with your coaching clients and jointly designing ways to address them. We introduce a variety of expressive techniques that help you and your client access both effective and ineffective thinking and behavior patterns.
• Foundation Theories – Understanding the fundamental concepts that guide facilitative coaching, including distinctions between espoused theory and theory-in-use, Mutual Learning and Unilateral Control, the creative and survival cycles and the roles of the drama triangle. We will demonstrate how these theories support and enhance one another, allowing you to more successfully diagnose client dilemmas and design interventions to address them.

Workshop Design
This is a highly experiential three-day workshop. It combines short instructor introductions for each facet of The Facilitative Coach with exercises, guided skill practice, and feedback from us and your peers. You will be invited to conduct art, writing and dialogue activities in pairs and small groups and to share your insights with the full group. Personal reflection and self-assessment are important components of each activity. We will provide guidelines to help you adapt our exercises for work with your future coaching clients, but you will learn initially by experimenting with activities yourself and using them for your own learning. The exercises are structured enough to address key coaching issues and flexible enough to allow you to individualize them to your own practice. No previous art or writing experience is needed or expected. You will also be asked to bring and use examples from your own experiences to practice your skills.

As with other Skilled Facilitator workshops, you will be asked to complete a few hours of preparation before attending. Short readings or practice activities will also be assigned for each of the first two evenings of the workshop.

If you are interested in learning more about the Facilitative Coach Workshop, or exploring whether and how it might be right for you and your organization, please contact us.