Emma is an accredited VoicePrint practitioner with extensive experience working across global organisations predominantly in the tech sector. Previously a senior Learning and Development and HR Executive, she now runs her own successful organisational development business. She specialises in designing and delivering leadership development programmes, talent development initiatives, individual and team coaching and learning and development consultancy.
I recently attended a course to learn how to effectively facilitate Action Learning Sets. For those not familiar, the Action Learning Set methodology originates in the work of the late Reg Revans, an early and innovative management thinker, and is designed to promote the identification of specific, self-identified actions in response to real-world challenges and situations.
If our concerns and contributions are to be heard as we would wish, and if we are to understand what others are trying to say to us, we need to take care in how we speak and listen.
We have invited people development professionals, who have become VoicePrint trained and accredited, to share some of their thoughts and insights on working with the tool.
This blog comes from guest contributor, Master executive coach and accredited VoicePrint practitioner Helen Mundy of Wide Awake Leadership.
So frequently, as an Executive coach, my clients present scenarios where they have tied themselves up in knots around a particular working relationship. The relationship is taking a disproportionate percentage of their energy to deal with and has become a drama that feeds their negative emotions, keeping them stuck in a vicious cycle of judgement and reaction.
What I like about VoicePrint is that it’s so practical. The feedback I most often get when I use it with people is about how immediately useful they find it…“I can use what I have learnt about myself today straight away both at work and at home.”
We would all benefit from becoming more talk-wise, more adept and more consistently successful with our communicating, both how effectively we speak and how well we listen. But if there’s one occupation above all that needs to be outstandingly talk-wise, it’s the personal coach. Information technology skills may be the only other sphere of occupational practice that has grown as fast as coaching. It has been estimated that 83% of employers now use coaching as a means of developing their people [1], that 72% of organisations expect to increase their spend on coaching [2] and that there are now more than 53,000 executive coaches worldwide. [3]
Unquestionably desirable, yet all too often elusive in practice, teamwork is a problem. And a knotty one. Without really contradicting each other, different authorities on the subject have long found room to focus on multiple different facets of the team challenge: types, purposes, size, contributing roles, dynamics, dysfunctions and processes of development. [1]
Generating an original idea, developing that idea so that it works in practice, making it affordable, persuading people to adopt it: there’s a lot that has to happen to bring an innovation to life. Difficult, if not impossible, to do all that by yourself.
