International Coach Federation: Challenges in the New Year

http://icfheadquarters.blogspot.com/2010/01/challenges-in-new-year.html#more

In the ICF blog posting, Giovanna discusses the challenges for ICF in 2010 and refers to the subjects that will be discussed at next week’s Board strategic planning meeting. She invites both ICF credentialed and non-credentialed coaches to be part of the dialogue on calls scheduled for January 26 and 27, and February 9 and 10. Giovanna also notes that on Thursday, January 28, she will be sharing another message on the ICF blog about the outcomes of the Board’s discussions and how the Board envisions moving forward. I encourage everyone interested in ICF’s future to read Giovanna’s posting.

Ed Modell, PCC, ICF President-Elect

It’s my impression that there is a persistent theme of concern about the ICF leadership’s internal processes that brought us all to the point of

- a proposal being put forward that generated so many questions and so much disagreement, even among former ICF leaders, assessor, etc.

- a perceived, at least partial, entrenchment by at least some ICF leaders in the ideas originally put forward.

Where does the Einstein quote fit in? I believe that until there is explicit evidence that the ICF leadership (and not just one or two members of the leadership) realizes that internal decision-making processes need to be evaluated and improved, and perhaps until there are explicit demonstrations of the new processes, there will be continued dissatisfaction and concern among some ICF members.

There are moves in this direction. Soliciting more feedback, in more ways, and more publicly is a good first step.

However, I think it makes sense that people would still wonder what will happen in the Boardroom and behind the scenes that will be significantly different from what has happened leading up to the current events – that people would wonder, “what has the ICF leadership learned about itself over the past several months?” There may have been brilliant, private observations about internal process and the functioning of the board and its advisers – or perhaps not. How would we know?

As Jeffrey Jones recently wrote, this is not about questioning the intentions of the leadership, but about ability. I’ll add that it isn’t about the potential of the leadership, but about the previous (and, potentially, current) level of ability as explicitly demonstrated and communicated.

As we know, even high-potential leaders at the most senior levels of leadership can have blind-spots and risk derailment. If this weren’t the case, there would be many fewer executive coaches.

Perhaps we need to wait to see what happens in the next Board meeting and how the outcomes are communicated, but I think many of us are waiting for clear evidence that internal processes are being evaluated and improved.

Check out the new Coaching Commons post at http://coachingcommons.org/featured/update-from-icf-coaches-take-a-stand/ to view some options identified with regard to ICF credentialing and governance.

Please include your comments, ideas and options for the future.

Vikki Brock
Participant
http://www.icfcoachestakeastand.org

Another interesting point – I was just listening again to the recordings of the Assessor meetings on September 15th. I was confused about the purpose of the call and asked, “I don’t quite understand the whole purpose, because if the decision has been made already, is the purpose of this discussion and further discussions only in crafting the message of how an already – a fait accompli will be executed?”
To which Pat Matthews, Credentialing Chair, responded, “The Board has made the decision based on all of the, you know, the studies and the role delineation study, the test specification task force, the research that’s been done etc. to move to the single credential. So that decision has been made by the Board. The details of, you know, how it gets rolled out, whether there’s an additional credential, the training hours, you know, some of the details of it are up for review and comment. The decision, as I understand it from the Board, is not. You know, that’s done. I mean that’s been made.”

It sounds a lot like the quote from Karen Tweedie’s email to Barbara Luther quoted in Mark Joyella’s article. Talking with a Board member shortly after the call, I learned that s/he was on the call. That Board member said nothing to contradict what Pat said – in fact, that Board member said nothing at all on the call. So none of us knew at the time that a Board member was present – perhaps there was more than one Board member there.

Thank you so much for providing such detailed additional context.

I don’t remember the details, but it was my impression that at least once I heard or read from someone involved in the credentialing decision that the ISO solution was supported by ACTO. It was my impression that ACTO’s “support” was used to bolster the case for the proposal as it stood.

If I am remembering this correctly, it sounds like any implication of full support, without reservation, by ACTO would have been misleading and inaccurate.

It’s possible that I misinterpreted something I heard, but did anyone else have the impression that ACTO stood fully behind the credentialing proposal and, if so, do you remember how you came to this conclusion?

I am writing these comments from my perspective as a leader of an ICF Accredited Coach Training program and the immediate past-president of the Association of Coach Training Organizations (ACTO; which has more than 44 coach training member schools). I have served on ACTO’s board for over four years and was the President for two years.

I would like to thank the elected leadership and the professional staff of ICF for tackling some of the issues related to the credentialing process. Although there are differing opinions on how to proceed, from the perspective of how the administration of the credentialing process has evolved over the years it is clear that the professional staff has made significant strides in providing information to prospective applicants, responding to applicants’ questions, and in general creating a more professional process. I would also like to thank the ICF elected leadership for listening to the feedback from the membership, keeping open minds to help come up with the best decisions for our membership and profession, and for allowing more input into this decision than any other ICF credentialing decision in the past. Finally I would like to thank the people who started the Take a Stand petition – they have facilitated the creation of a more open discussion of ICF proposed changes than has occurred ever before.

Much of the discussion on this list has been about the cons of switching to a single credential and about how the decision-making and communication process is being handled. Because much has been shared on those topics I will concentrate on two different topics – the impact on potential credentialing applicants in the pipeline and the need to seek and act on early input from major stakeholders.

Specifically, let’s look at the impact of proposed changes on:

· Individuals who are currently in training,

· Individuals who are currently contemplating beginning coach training, or

· Individuals who have completed training and are in the process of gathering hours towards certification.

These are the individuals that have made or are making decisions about obtaining training based at least in part on information provided by ICF on the linkage between training, documenting hours of experience, and ICF certification.

Related to this, I will also comment on the importance to ICF’s decision making process of implementing a formal process of obtaining and considering input from appropriate sources before voting on and adopting decisions of major importance. As I have mentioned it appears this is beginning to be done, but what is most important is how thoughtfully the input gathering process continues and how carefully and wisely final decisions will need to be made.

My overarching concern is that ICF act in a manner that is fair and ethical for these students who are “in the pipeline”. My current opinion is that the ICF leadership has not yet presented an execution plan for their proposal that meets the fair and ethical benchmark.

A fair and ethical proposal benchmark for a transition process would be one that allows individuals a significant and reasonable amount of time to complete credentialing under the conditions that ICF advertised when the decision to pursue training and to seek the ICF credential was initially made.

I was re-reading Robert Hargrove’s Masterful Coaching recently and he emphasized that the first step in a change process is providing maximum, open information. In that spirit I would like to add a little bit of history into the discussion.

In May 2008 and April 2009, the ICF professional staff leadership, over two dozen representatives of Accredited Coach Training Schools, and an ICF board member met to discuss issues related to high quality coach training and ICFs efforts to create an ISO compliant credential. At these meetings ACTO leaders and members expressed consistent concern about a number of issues: the wisdom of pursuing an ISO compliant credential because there was not history of this process being used with a similar helping profession; specific impacts to students that could be anticipated due to changes that were being discussed; and, in particular, the need for ICF to provide schools and students adequate advance notification of changes in credentialing or curriculum requirements in order to give students and schools sufficient time to adapt.

I repeatedly asked that the proposals for credentialing changes be shared with the leaders of the coaching schools before the July 2009 board meeting (where it was decided that the “proposal” would move forward for “an implementation plan and testing”) so that the board would have the benefit of the school leaders’ perspectives (who are informed by day to day contact with thousands of coaching students from around the world.) We were told that this would not be possible because such recommendations would not be crafted with enough time for input before the board meeting. I countered that this is backwards – that the ICF board needs the input of school leaders before they vote on developing an implementation plan for a major proposal, not just after. In my experience the school leaders are devoting much of their lives to doing the best job possible of training coaches and have a strong desire to be helpful to ICF decision makers. School leaders were told by the ICF leadership that the needs of the students and applicants for credentialing in the pipeline would be taken into account.

As a result of this assurance the majority of the ACTO leaders were surprised when, in an August 3, 2009 conference call, the ICF professional staff leadership and an ICF boardmember explained that the proposal (which was voted on by the ICF board in their July 2009 meeting) specified an April 2010 date to end the current credentialing application process, and a probable July 2010 start date for the new, single credential process.

We were also surprised that the new credential that was proposed to launch in July 2010 would require 180 hours of coach specific training whereas the current ICF Accredited Coach Training Programs (of which there are more than 60) have as a guideline the requirement of 125 hours of training. The practical impact of this would be that the vast majority of students applying for credentialing would need to acquire 55 more hours of training in order to apply for their credentials if they did not have their 750 hours of coaching experience completed before the new credential requirements went into effect. Since it takes the average new coach approximately four years to obtain 750 hours of experience, and because there are at least 3,000 – 4,000 prospective coach applicants in the pipeline, the impact on thousands of coaches would be the need for a considerable additional training investment that they had not planned on.

ACTO leaders immediately went into action and composed a detailed letter outlining specific concerns and recommendations to the proposal. The good news is that by the time that ICF released their “proposal” to the larger membership (after sharing it with different committees and stakeholder groups) they had gotten the message about the problem of such an aggressive transition date. I am appreciative that ICF decision makers did respond to the input from ACTO (and probably others) that if the enormous changes were going to be implemented, then more time would be needed before the current credentialing window would end. (If you want to view the letter from ACTO to ICF go to: http://www.acto1.com/LetterICF.pdf You will note that in that letter the school leaders do not dispute the idea of going to one credential – I think that is largely because it appeared to us that this decision had already been made and we were told that the proposal would go forward as is unless very significant reasons not to were uncovered in the “testing phase”, i.e. comments from the membership.)

However, the 18 months to two years that is currently being talked about as a phase-in period is still too short, because thousands of coaches would still not have had enough time to acquire their 750 coaching experience hours before the changes go into effect, so that would mean these coaches would be required to obtain fifty-five hours of additional training at their own expense.

My recommendation, and ACTO’s recommendation, is that IF the proposed changes are to be implemented then the current path to credentialing must be kept open for four years after the decision is finalized in order to allow a fair and ethical process for coaches currently on the credentialing path. This way these students will be able to earn their credential under the guidelines that were in place when they made their decision to pursue training and ICF credentialing.

Another important issue that must be addressed is the proposed increase in required hours of coach training. There is no evidence to warrant increasing the required coach training hours from the existing 125 to 180. A 44% increase in required training will be an expensive increase for coaching students already undertaking extra training. Such a cost should not be imposed unless there is overwhelmingly compelling evidence that the change is necessary. There is no evidence that the current ACTPs were not training coaches to a level of competence with the requirement of 125 hours of coach specific training.

While ICF has been promoting the idea of evidence based decision-making, this increase to 180 hours of training proposal appears arbitrary and was never discussed with ACTO in advance of the ICF board voting for this increase. It may be argued that the emerging “body of knowledge” will require the additional 55 hours of coach training. I disagree. Most of the coach training students in our program already have Master or Doctoral level degrees in Organizational Leadership, Organizational Psychology, Psychology, or Human Resources. As a result, many are already familiar with much of the body of knowledge content when they begin our training program even though they may not be familiar with, or practiced in, the eleven ICF core coaching competencies.

Again, in the spirit of evidence based decision-making, it is important that there be compelling evidence for the necessity of such a costly increase in the training requirement. That burden of evidence has not been met to my satisfaction.

My intention in sharing this background on the initial April 2010 cutoff date is that this aspect of the proposal was ill-conceived – as can be seen by logical analysis and the subsequent changes. Because ICF leaders were repeatedly told by school leaders that a much longer lead time is needed for major changes and because this advice was not heeded before the July 2009 ICF board vote it highlights the need that before the ICF board votes on decisions of major importance that a more formal, early process of input and dialogue should be implemented.

I am hopeful that the current discussion will ensure that increased input, dialogue and co-creation from multiple sources at an early date (before proposals are created), will become the standard in the future and that a much greater lead time will be provided to students and schools when major changes are considered to meet the benchmark of a fair and ethical implementation timeline.

I am also hopeful that this post is taken as helpful and constructive as that is my intention. I express my gratitude to all who have the taken the time to comment and work toward the best decision possible.

Sincerely,

Jeff Auerbach, Ph.D., MCC President, College of Executive Coaching

Billy C H Teoh
Malaysia.