You get what you give – the interactive coaching style inventory
Nancy Langton of New Level Partners was in touch a few months back asking if she could use our coaching style inventory as part of a supervisory skills training workshop. Now, requests to use our inventory come along every few months or so, mostly from the USA, and each time the deal is basically “no problem – please send us a summary of people’s scores so we can update our norm base”, to which the reply is “thanks very much, of course we’ll send them over”. This is usually the end of the conversation.
Not only did Nancy get back in touch with results – she also moved us on a step from a paper questionnaire. We now have the interactive coaching style inventory – or iCSI – you can complete it onscreen with the option to print the completed inventory and you no longer have to withstand that irritating phase of flicking backwards and forwards to transfer your replies for each question to the scoring page. There is even a norm form you can fill in onscreen and email back to us, which, in terms of online questionnaires, probably brings us bang up to date – assuming of course we are still in 2003.
Change »
Management, leadership and cargo cult science
The late Richard Feynman coined the phrase “cargo cult science” by way of an attack on the way research in the soft sciences was – and arguably still is – carried out. His argument being that research in these areas took on the appearance of scientific rigour but was missing “a kind of scientific integrity, [...]
Innovation »
Resilience and robustness
Chris Bolton, via Euan Semple and Peter Fryer, has recently introduced me to the notion of trojan mice – the idea that multiple, small, inconspicuous, safe-to-fail projects are more likely to succeed than the big launch, beer mats and key rings, single idea, easy to spot coming over the horizon, trojan horse. The video below, from Dave Snowden of [...]
Performance »
The Korean War, reincarnation and team learning
Whether this is a sign that the coaching bandwagon has finally ground to a halt I’m not sure, and I know this is resurrecting an old joke, but it does seem as if team learning – like reincarnation – is making a big comeback at the moment. The plane above is the American F-86 Sabre, [...]
Coaching »
You get what you give – the interactive coaching style inventory
Nancy Langton of New Level Partners was in touch a few months back asking if she could use our coaching style inventory as part of a supervisory skills training workshop. Now, requests to use our inventory come along every few months or so, mostly from the USA, and each time the deal is basically “no [...]
Teams »
Assessing team performance
A lot of work these days is done via project teams – more often than not team members are drawn from different departments, different business units and different organisations and often there is no formal leader. How does the team get a sense of how it is performing in such circumstances? Here is a method [...]