“If I was in your position….” “That sounds like a good idea….” “When that happened to me, I did this…..” “I would suggest….” How often, when working to develop coaching skills, do you hear interventions like those above, closely followed by a groan and a recognition that once again, the inexperienced coach has fallen into the trap of giving opinions or relating personal experiences?   In my experience one of the hardest things to overcome in coaching is the innate desire to ‘help’ and this generally plays out in giving advice. As we develop our coaching skills we need to recognise...

I read a lot about leadership, and not just because I’m professionally interested in leadership. What people write about leadership is a great source of insight into how they are viewing business organisations, and what they are thinking about how those organisations are likely to evolve. I’m particularly drawn to well-considered writing about leadership development, because dissatisfaction with the leadership pipeline is a good indicator of how quickly organisations are changing. This past summer I came across a great article by Josh Bersin entitled “Why Leadership Development feels broken and how we’re fixing it” Bersin considers the way that traditional...

Facilitating learning is a strange kind of business, from the outside it often looks like an easy thing to do “You just watch folk doing stuff then ask a few questions”, while from the inside it can be one of the most physically and emotionally draining tasks you’ll ever undertake. So what is it about this kind of facilitation that, done well, is so effective and rewarding, but, done badly, leaves everybody feeling so raw? Last week I read a new paper which made me come back to this question, as usual as part of a RSVP Design routine in...

There are a great number of activities that a facilitator can build into an intervention with the purpose of building trust between participants. However, there’s a different, and potentially more important, interpersonal trust relationship that exists in the training room, and ought to be given priority in opening any programme of learning. This is the trust that needs to exist between the facilitator and every one of the learners, and it needs to exist on both an individual and collective level. Ignore this relationship at your peril! So why is it important? How do I establish and maintain it? How...

You don’t need to dig deeply into the literature of Leadership Development before you find advocates of ‘learning on the job’. Strong voices tell us that the best way for leaders to hone their skills is through the first-hand practice of leadership itself. I’ve got some sympathy for this viewpoint, there are some parts of leadership development that benefit from an ‘in at the deep-end approach’, it’s a great way of recognising the adaptability and resilience needed to do the job well, and it blows away the idea that you can learn leadership straight from a book. But I’d suggest...

What does it take to become an effective facilitator of learning? Over the last 25 years, RSVP Design have been involved with the development of trainer training programmes for trainers and facilitators around the world. These have included: Supporting corporate trainers to use more experiential learning methods in their in-house training programmes Helping managers to offer more immediate, on-the-spot performance improvement Developing instructional training skills for medical and technical professionals involved in international health programmes, such as the global drive to eliminate polio Developing pure facilitation skills for those working to resolve conflict, develop strategy or support innovation in their...

oday’s organisations: flatter, faster, more pressured, more accountable. This situation has created the worrying paradox that every member of the organisation carries more responsibility for ‘getting it right’ yet there is less resource for the scrutiny that protects these members from ‘getting it wrong’. In these circumstances there is ever greater pressure on the individual to exercise the thinking skills that will spot flawed reasoning in the data that they receive, and detect equally flawed reasoning in the data that they generate. Critical Thinking and Logical Thinking are, more than ever, a personal skill set that needs to be employed in relation...

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When I work with teams it is also interesting for them to get an understanding of how they communicate. Do they really listen to each other? Does everyone's voice get heard? Do they ensure that they have a common understanding? Are they assuming too much? I love using experiential tools as rather than someone telling them its more powerful for them to experience it and have an 'Aha' moment. I find ColourBlind really effective for this. It was developed in 1991 for training Air Traffic Controllers in the UK to communicate effectively. When you think of it the air traffic...