CLIENT SUCCESS STORY
Janine Ahlers, CfC Academic Director & Managing Partner & Daniel Ahlers, Managing Partner of CfC (CH) and CfC Consulting (Europe), Centre for Coaching
The Centre for Coaching (CfC) is an accredited Integral Coach® Training Institution with renowned certifications from New Ventures West (USA), the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business, and the International Coaching Federation. The Centre offers:
- high quality, accredited coach certification courses for individuals and organisations
- the provision of One-on-One Coaching, Team Coaching, Group Coaching
- training & consulting (Leading with a Coaching Style, Mentoring skills training)
All materials & methodologies are informed by both academic rigour and coaching practice.
Janine, would you tell us about yourself?
As a Certified Professional Integral Coach®, as well as an ICF Master Certified Coach, I approach coaching primarily in the business context. Based at the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business, I am a Senior Lecturer, Academic Director, and a Managing Partner of the Centre for Coaching in South Africa, since 2002. I am co-owner and Managing Partner of the Swiss Centre for Coaching since 2014. I primarily coach and run team interventions for senior executives who are often working on strategic, leadership and relationship challenges. Prior to that, I held several senior executive positions in the corporate world.
I love to share my passion through executive coaching, lectures or by facilitating public courses run by the Centre for Coaching and UCT, as well as running in-house coaching workshops and leadership development interventions for blue-chip clients all over the world.
Daniel, would you tell us about yourself?
What is Integral Coaching® ?
Integral Coaching® is about coaching from the inside, out. It relates to inclusivity; it integrates culture and all aspects of someone’s life and personality. Integral Coaching® is developmental; it increases self-awareness, it helps with answering questions like: Who do I see myself to be, and how is that serving me right now? … How do I see and relate to others, and how does this help or hinder me … What is it that is stopping me/others from moving forward?
Integral Coaching® helps individuals bring their skills and talents to a group; it leads to being fulfilled and finding meaning in life.
“INTEGRAL COACHING ® is a powerful intervention because it does not reduce people to titles and job descriptions, but rather understands that they are multi-faceted beings with unique needs.”
Integral Coaching ® is different
Integral Coaching® looks at human beings holistically, growing not only a persons’ work competence but their personal skills as well, helping them to reinvent the way they interact with their world.
PersProfile is particularly useful to us because it focuses on behaviours in a particular context (usually professional) and helps people understand the behavioural patterns they adopt and those they avoid.
PersProfile provides clear observations of behaviours and interpersonal relationships, thus providing concrete elements to work with. If, for example, the coachee has very sociable behaviour and can see the impact on others – e.g., they never want to discipline others (as shown in the report), they will be more likely to change it.
We encourage our Associate Coaches to consider the PersProfile report as an opportunity for dialogue, enriching the insights a coachee receives when they read it, and to go deeper into self-awareness.
One thing that we have been very impressed by is that we have used PersProfile with people from many different races, cultures, religious backgrounds, genders, job descriptions, industries, levels of education and professions and all of them have found this report to be of great value. This assures us of the reliability and validity of this report.
We have learned, so far, that PersProfile helps to improve relationships. It helps to create a constructive platform to transmit feedback, to make more effective requests so that the people we interact with understand and positively react to those requests since they are formulated in “their own language”.
The person can better conceive the use of the language of “others” and not only his/her own, which promotes a deeper understanding between each other and positive outcomes.
We have used it widely, and successfully, both during individual coaching sessions to work on behaviours, and during group sessions to facilitate better understanding between team members.
The Centre for Coaching in South Africa
We find PersProfile to be extremely helpful in several long-term Emerging Leader Programmes (ELP) that we are running. The environments that these individuals work in are tough, rough, and quite harsh. What PersProfile allows for, is a way for people to see themselves without feeling boxed into a personality type. Instead, we are able to tell them to receive the report like a mirror to their current behavioural patterns and current motivations. This allows them to discuss and engage with their behaviour patterns in a curious, non-blaming way, where they could look at their interactions with self and others through a neutral lens. This allows the participants to discuss themselves in a deeper, more honest way with each other, thus giving great insights into their impact in the workplace. In particular, PersProfile allows people to look into why some elements of their leadership style are working, and some not working so well.
We took the decision to do a PersProfile leadership report at the start of the ELP, and then again, a year later, and this the participants absolutely love, as they see how their behaviour had shifted over time. This allows them to unpack their personal leadership journey in a new way, with rich new personal insights. It also allows them to give each other feedback on changes observed in each other’s behaviour, which also adds depth and richness to their journey and personal growth.
On one of the programmes, we decided to use the persprofile 360 report, which gave us not only the personal insights but also was able to show how differently people were experienced by others. The participants got great value from receiving this ‘outside-in’ perspective (often a surprise), and again could use it to adjust, adapt and consolidate their leadership style to be the most effective possible. One example was an executive who discovered that although he felt very participative and relaxed, some of his team experienced him completely differently. When he explored this, he realised that to those particular people he was always attending to quality-related matters, which meant that his focus was always on detail and errors, and that he had forgotten to include this group into his full leadership approach. He was then able to address this, with wonderful results.
The insights from the leadership report and the 360 were worked with in the various group processes, as well as with each person’s individual executive coach that worked with them throughout the ELP.
The Centre for Coaching in Switzerland
On one of our recent interventions here, we integrated PersProfile in a Leadership Team Journey as a way for the members of the Management Team of Penta, an IT Managed Services Company with offices in Geneva and Dubai, to better understand one another. One report was done at the start of the program, and another one was done just over a year later as a way to see what had shifted.
The initial programme kicked off in July 2021, running until March 2022, starting with a 2-day face-to-face workshop, followed by a series of 5 half-day virtual workshops. Each of the eight team members received individual coaching as part of the program from one of our professional integral coaches. An initial PersProfile Manager report was done for each member of the Management Team, and was debriefed with their coach, integrating the findings into their personal coaching journey. In addition, at the first virtual workshop, we explored as a team how each of the team members saw themselves, individually, as a leader. At the second virtual workshop, each team member was able to explore how others saw their behaviours as a leader, and we were able to get a sense of the profile of the team as a whole, by mapping the individual profiles.
The aim of the program was to integrate a coaching style of leadership across all Management Team members. While it sounds simple, it requires a significant shift in behaviour and asks of one to go against the very thing that one is often rewarded for (i.e., bringing my expertise, sharing my knowledge, taking space in conversations, etc.). This is why we agreed with Penta that we would run the program over seven months with a significant focus on the practical – we would spend a short time on theory followed by practical application of the principles. Much of the time was spent practising together.
This enabled the participants to build their skills and capabilities, to hold one another accountable, and in the process, they got to know one another at an increasingly deeper level as mutual trust and mutual respect grew over time. One thing we insist on in our workshops is that there is no role-play – the topics we work on together are real because when it’s real, we engage our emotions and our nervous system as well as our cognitive capabilities. A side effect of this is that teams get real work done while embedding the learning.
Participants found the use of PersProfile in the first seven months of the program really helpful in understanding their own behaviour, and understanding how to better relate to others, which supported improved relations within the team. All Management Team members agreed that the PersProfile reports were consistent and coherent across the board, reassuring them of the validity of the results.
In October, a year and three months after the program kicked off, we were invited to do a two-day refresher workshop with the team, again face-to-face. Here we focussed on how to integrate powerful feedback into their coaching style of leadership, similarly with a very practical, hands-on approach and a lot of time invested in applying it with one another. Before the workshop, we asked all Management Team members to redo their PersProfile report, and during the workshop, we took time to review what had changed, both individually and as a team. While everyone had a sense that things had changed since we started, the use of PersProfile to see what had changed and how each individual had evolved gave a huge boost to the team with a sense of validation of the changes that had been made.
In conclusion, PersProfile brought the necessary insight at the outset, and supported individual team members and the team as a whole, in identifying areas to work on. Redoing PersProfile over a year later was clearly very beneficial in validating the degree to which individuals, as well as the team, had shifted.
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