Creating powerful synergies through a global alliance

J.A.: One of our secrets of success is our approach to selecting strategic partnerships, as we realised that in order to have credibility we needed to carefully select those we partner with.  That led us to select New Ventures West, one of the oldest and most credible American coach training schools as the source of our theoretical approach. Our public programmes are all run under the auspices of NVW and they are all accredited with the International Coach Federation, the largest coach accreditation body in the world. We also realised that many people in Africa don’t know or care that much about American brand names, and coaching was a totally new concept to South Africa back in 2001.  And so the Centre for Coaching approached the Graduate School of Business and formed a vibrant and successful partnership with them over the last 16 years.

We continually seek to expand our activities and our reach with a combination of partnerships and networking.  Our partnership with Versus, for example, has been extraordinarily useful, as their approach and their reports have allowed us to offer new types of leadership development programmes to our existing and new clients. We are also training our many Associate Coaches, in both Africa and Europe, in the usage of this tool and we anticipate that more and more coaches will start to use this report as a support and catalyst to their coaching processes.

Our primary means of deploying our activities is through referrals from past clients, word of mouth, and also through people attending our public programmes and then asking us to come and design an intervention for them using the same or similar philosophy.

D.A.: Our core business falls into two broad categories:

• our educational work – teaching people how to coach others – and
• our commercial work – finding innovative, custom-designed ways aligned with our integral philosophy in which to develop leaders within organisations, support cultures, enable change, encourage innovation and generate business success.

Our target customers are primarily blue-chip corporates, in particular multinationals. We have over the past 16 years successfully taken our work onto 6 different continents and covered a multitude of industries including the FMCG sector, financial services, mining, petroleum, educational institutions, the health/medical world, and not-for-profit sectors.  We find that our clients appreciate the fact that we have a deep understanding of what it means to operate and work in emergent economies as well as in the more stable developed world.

D.A.: PersProfile provides a view of behaviour that often gives a clear picture of the interpersonal relationship challenges you’re going to have, and gives both the coach and coachee something concrete to work with, so the coachee can clearly say this behaviour isn’t working for me – and then we can work with this to shift behaviours.

e.g. if my coachee has assertive behaviour and can see the impact it has on others (which the report will show) they are then open to changing it.  When one uses an assessment tool that places somebody in a box, then they can use this as an excuse to say ‘well I’m like this, it’s my personality’ and not be so open to changing it.

What is often misunderstood and not explained well in other tools is that there are various instincts at play. But every instinct has behaviour associated with it. PersProfile allows us to avoid the challenge of trying to work on the instinctual level – which is very deep and very difficult – by allowing us to see which instinct is driving which behaviours.

PersProfile also opens up the opportunity to give very constructive feedback at work. It helps people to understand interpersonal conflict and how to relate to different socio-types, as well as the level of awareness of their impact, and how effective their behaviour is towards their tasks.

The mixture of Jung and Marsden allows one to interpret a person’s decision-making style, and you can ask rich questions around assumptions and limiting beliefs. We encourage our associate coaches not to just treat it as a report, but as a coaching dialogue between the coach and coachee, i.e. something to enrich the conversation.

PersProfile allows us to work within our integral framework – we work with behavioural patterns and the language that goes with this, and so does PersProfile. Our experience with many other assessments is that one has a label, but then so what? With PersProfile one always has a mixture, a blend. One is not put into a box. It is thus a very good tool to help individuals and teams develop and become more coherent and successful.