Praxis: Personal Impact and Development
Coaching below the surface – a systems psychodynamic approach to working with teams and individuals
For experienced coaches who want to enhance their skills and knowledge to effectively coach high performing teams and individuals.
The most powerful levers in any organisation often operate below the surface and are driven by emotions. Organisations are often regarded as rational systems which means that managers are rarely trained to work with the more irrational emotions that run alongside these systems. Effective coaching requires the coach to recognise, understand and be capable of working with these emotional undercurrents and this is what this programme addresses.
This programme is practical in its focus whilst also being robustly underpinned by psychological theory and an educational philosophy about how groups and organizations work: systems psychodynamics. It will improve your ability as a coach to help individuals or teams to acquire different perspectives and insights into their situation and how they can achieve their desired outcomes. You will learn how to help the individual or team to recognise how these underlying dynamics are constraining or enabling them in moving forward with a challenge or dealing with a threat.
This programme has been designed and will be delivered in partnership with the Tavistock Consultancy Service. The Tavistock tradition has been used with individuals, teams and organisations using systems psychodynamic understanding for three quarters of a century.
What will I get out of the programme?
You will gain enhanced coaching skills and tools for working with teams and individuals, enabling you to:
- Understand the undercurrents or dynamics operating in the team or organisation
- Become clearer about when a client’s actions are influenced unhelpfully by what is going below the surface
- Enhance your awareness of the place of the individual or team within the system at work
- Help your client to use this understanding so that they can begin to operate in a more effective way
- Link the organisational dynamics to the interventions one needs to make in a coaching activity
- Develop sensitivity to the different stages of a coaching intervention and the associated emotional dynamics.
Your organisation will gain:
- More effective coaches who are better equipped to help teams and individuals in the organisation
- Teams and individuals getting the most from coaching interventions and maximising their real potential
- Coaches who are able to understand more about the underlying emotional currents driving aspects of their life at work
- Improved performance of coaches and those coached.
What is the programme about?
The programme is aimed at giving experienced coaches the knowledge and tools to further enhance their coaching. It will give participants a new perspective on what is going on in the coaching intervention, allowing their work to be deeper and more powerful.
The programme is spread over three modules. Each module is themed and will be for 2.5 days to allow for travel and two evenings of work. There will be some inter-modular work.
The modules follow the developmental process of the coaching intervention, through contracting and engaging to endings and transitions. Each module is designed to be practical, skill based and experiential. There will be a mixture of theory seminars, skills syndicates, co-consultancy groups and experiential learning.
The programme gives time for the examination of live issues brought by participants using a systems psychodynamic perspective, as well as learning about current business stories from this perspective. It is firmly rooted in the world of coaching work, but uses systems psychodynamic theory and experiential work to throw light on the underlying emotional drivers which operate below the surface.
The coaching of individuals and teams will be examined throughout to facilitate understanding of the impact of the individual on the team and the wider system on the individual at work.
Who is the programme for?
The programme is designed for experienced coaches who work with individuals or teams. Examples include:
• Experienced coaches working within an organisation
• External coaches
• OD consultants
• Change programme consultants.
Directors
Kim Turnbull James , BSc PhD CPsychol CSci AFBPsS FHEA
Sarah Miller Bmus, MBA, MA, Sarah is a Principal Consultant with TCS.
Alison Temperley BA MA ACA