A Window into Coaching in Central America: Are you a Spanish-Speaking Coach or Consultant?

Latin America needs coaches. Let’s look at a vehicle that allows us to make a big difference.

Most coaching conferences you have attended in the US or developed countries have been replete with coaches, and only featured a smattering of organizational representatives. But in most of Latin America, there is more corporate need and curiosity about coaching that there are coaches to fulfill the need, so educational events there have a very different ratio of participant groups. Coaches, educators, researchers are needed.

The International Consortium for Coaching in Organizations (ICCO) seeks to bring together HR, OD and learning managers responsible for coaching programs in organizations, with executive coaches, coach educators and coaching firms, in ‚Äúconversations that don’t happen anywhere else”(our motto).

One of the formats most conducive to creating such a climate and a safe, stimulating container, have been the Symposia ICCO launched in 2005 across the US, Central America and northern Europe. Imagine a group of no more than 35 people, working on cases – or more plainly said, helping organizations whose representatives are in the room to explore, re-think and sometimes resolve coaching challenges their firms face.

In Central America, the ICCO Symposia had to activate lots of personal connections to bring together enough experienced coaches with the numerous companies who wanted to join us for a limited-attendance event. Once we met, though, the level of engagement, passion, eagerness to learn and experiment rewarded us each time in spades.

All symposia are based on live case-work, which in Mexico, at ICCO’s first symposium south of the US border, meant helping executives from Bayer Crop science, Exxon Mobil and Banco Santander (the host) reflect on how they can introduce and leverage the use of coaching against their leadership development challenges.

Look at the industries that raised their hands to get help working on their issues: they are among the most successful but also pressured and controversial in the world. Their leaders need fresh thinking approaches, fresh ways to collaborate laterally, new methods of working through influence vs. directives.

In Guatemala, about a year later, other Human Resource and business line executives proposed their cases, always with this same objective: to understand coaching better and to learn how to infuse their leadership with this developmental approach.

In Costa Rica (October 1-2, 2009) we are helping companies understand coaching as a change (and crisis) management tool.

During the symposia, we first, need to present a whirl-wind introduction to how organizational coaching works. While most Latin American HR managers and executives have a sense of the promise of coaching, few know what the coaching conversation is like, and they have little idea of how programs can be implemented on a broader scale.

While in developed coaching markets, symposia attract very senior leaders and executive coaches, who work on the tough issues that the implementation of organizational coaching pose, in Central America we are building from the ground up:

- What does a truly effective coaching conversation and coaching process look and sound like?
- How do you design a coaching program that links into the performance management and the existing deployment initiatives of the company?
- How do you align it with the strategy that’s on the mind of senior executives, so that it becomes a more compelling ‚Äúsell” to them?
- What sort of preparation do the managers need who will run such programs?
- How do you source coaches? Is it worth building a parallel approach of using external coaches as well as building internal capacity – often using those same coaches?
- How do you introduce coaching differently in large global corporations vs. a medium-sized local business?
- How do you sustain momentum and patience? – The culture won’t absorb this overnight.
- What measurement and evaluation systems work and don’t work?
…And much more.

ICCO has a sense of mission that envisions many countries ‚Äúleapfrogging” the expensive trials and errors so many excellent companies have learned from in their coaching programs. We envision Eastern Europe and Latin America (you may like to work with us on connections with Asia!) establishing coaching programs that are even more economical, more strategic, and more efficient‚Ķ sort of going straight to cell-phones without laying first laborious phone lines across the region.

There is a need not only for personal coach training programs but for programs that teach consultants, former business people and other graduate professionals how to help companies large and small leverage coaching in their cultures.

There is a need for internal coach training programs that don’t just teach coaching skills and the business of coaching for the solo practitioner, but that teach the management of coaching programs: A lot of unsuspecting, often young HR people are thirsting for guidance, having found themselves saddled with creating and implementing something they know little about. There is a huge need for better disseminated research literature, newsletters, hands-on educational conferences produced by consortia, vs. by individual vendors.

And last but most important, there is a need for a major adjustment in the coach approach to the cultures involved. We have worked with executives and teams of managers in the US and in LatAm, and have experienced the temptation of imposing the western corporate cultural values and modus operandi on organizational systems (i.e. communities of people) that have a totally different set of concepts of hierarchy, expectations of leadership, sense of identity and life priorities. Regionally home-grown practitioners need to be thoughtful, original, and intentional about re-creating coaching in their clients’ worlds, not just based on imported models‚Ķ and that’s hard when you have been trained in and look up to US coach training models.

What ICCO envisions is an unprecedented enrichment that will start flowing both ways, when coaching finds its voice in the companies that are the life blood of countries outside North America and Western Europe. Join us in this exploration at www.coachingconsortium.org.

WHERE in the developing world do you think we should gather next with these different stakeholder groups and work on live cases that teach everyone what they need to learn?