This time I’m sharing a guest post I wrote not long ago concerning how we can build supportive coach communities with Twitter, based on my experience of being involved in the #coachingHE Tweetchat – an initiative organised by a dynamic group of coaches working in Higher Education settings, backed by the Staff Development Forum (SDF) here in the UK. As a vehicle to bring together and preserve the ‘wisdom’ of a widely geographically-dispersed cohort of coaches it has been highly successful. I hope this post encourages you to look into this form of community building as well, in order to promote CPD opportunities for coaches in different settings and an additional sense of coach well-being.
The guest post first appeared in Coaching World in April 2018, published by the International Coach Federation (ICF). You can see the original publication here, and I’d like to point out that copyright is held by the ICF (meaning it should not be reproduced or reblogged without gaining permission from the ICF first).
Building Supportive Coach Communities with Twitter
Coaches work in different contexts; some in relative isolation, which can lead to negative impacts on professional well-being and development. But, with the use of social media, we can create a supportive culture of “community” among coaches.
So let’s briefly explore some wider ‘background issues’ currently affecting UK universities to gain deeper insight into a ‘context’. We’ll then be able to suggest ways these issues might affect employee experience in the sector, as well as understand how insight into them might help coaches in their professional work.
The 5 questions we asked last time were aimed at information gathering about the organisation. This time we’re looking at the coach him- or herself. Could there be potential shortcomings or blind spots in a coach’s approach to what he or she knows about a coachee’s context? What could be the results? And most importantly, how can we as coaches strategise to avoid these deficiencies, minimising the drawbacks to having wider insight into coachee context whilst maximising the benefits?
That depends on the type of coaching. It’s possible, particularly in 1:1 life coaching, to work quite successfully with an individual coachee without much reference to wider context. Indeed, some would argue that concentrating solely on the coachee and his or her experience is the coach’s role. However, I’d say in organisational contexts such an approach is insufficient. Somewhere down the line evidence of barriers to change will emerge which might have been foreseen and possibly avoided if the coach had even a little prior knowledge of coachee context.