February 1, 2010 – China Business – Beijing, China
Lili Xu, a 30-year-old Chinese citizen from Dalian, moved to the United States when she was 18 to attend university, then spent nearly a decade working in the corporate world and Silicon Valley. Though the money was good, she felt dissatisfied with her life.
Finally she stumbled onto career coaching after a friend asked her to substitute as a translator at a career coaching course offered by Erickson Coaching International. Before, Xu had barely even heard of career or life coaching, but seeing the impact that coaching had on her translation clients Xu immediately knew she had found the answer. Her own search for the right career meant that she could empathize with others searching for direction in their own lives, and she thought she had the right skills to help them through that journey.
Just as in the West, a new market like China also has its share of practitioners who employ dubious coaching methods. Take, for example, the mysterious case of Eva Wong.
Wong was a Hong Kong-born superstar hailed in the coaching world as the woman who would open China up to coaching, according to a series of articles by Mark Joyella in Coaching Commons, a website for coaching professionals. She was the first Chinese-credentialed ICF Master Certified Coach and in 1995 founded her own coaching company in Canada, called Top Human. In 1997, Top Human entered the Chinese market and grew to be one of the largest coaching companies in the world. Wong announced that she would try to take the company public by 2008, but long before then the company collapsed in uncertain surroundings. In November 2007, the Shanghai Labor Arbitration Committee finally accepted a case put forward by 37 former staff at Top Human.
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Why keep putting Eva Wong down with innuendo? Facts? No facts? ha.
Coaching is big in China in terms of exec 1:1 training, and having somebody available to a small group, in turns or 1:1. On-job coaching and Western programmed coaching are small games still.
Oil people in Daqing in the North to BYD car people outside Shenzhen, next to HK, get Westerners for ESL, coaching, culture, manners. Just covering the ground makes it holistic.
Asian, Chinese, naturally look about more. Less focus while focusing. They notice more of a picture/drawing or what’s happening in a room. This enables one to grow their preliminary lookabout links into strong webs of awareness. Awareness of oneself in one’s environment touches taoist/daoist roots in Chinese culture. They find great joy in “finding themselves” and their culture in the heightened self-other awareness. If a person or group relaxes into the development/exploration then they can go. If the person or group adopts more confucian/someone-father-of-the-family then the process stops, into a form of Confucian family model.
One sees the same patterns in an entrepreneurial team or an agile software development team.
I attended a free REN Coaching Model program on invitation of TopHuman International and met Eva and Lawrence then.
As with many coaching models, some work for certain people and some don’t.
Much of the REN coaching Model is grounded on eastern philosophies which may not be receptive to everyone.
The methodologies of achieving coaching outcomes again is so dependent on the individual coachee that success to some, may be failure to some also.
So what is the real measurement of coaching success?
Billy C H Teoh
Malaysia.