Using a Practice Framework

I have written previously about developing my Practice Framework - a personal model of excellence for my coaching practice.

Having worked with it for a few years now, it seemed a good time to share it with others. So I introduced the concept into a training programme for experienced coaches wishing to become supervisors that I was running with Grant Thornton, and have just trialled it for the EMCC's suite of programmes with the Bank of England's coaches, who kindly volunteered to evaluate it for the EMCC.

The feedback has been very positive in both cases. 

For the Grant Thornton supervisors-in-training, I encouraged them to develop their own supervision practice frameworks, as a way of pulling together all the things they had learned as we went through the programme, and as an aid to continued reflective practice.

I did similar with the Bank of England coaches - encouraging them to discover, articulate and capture their implicit practice frameworks. They then discussed these with each other - fascinated to see how each had approached the task slightly differently, which promoted a lot of learning. And again, they saw the benefits of these as an aid to reflective practice going forward.  As one said, 'I had been expecting to be given a framework to use; but developing our own made it much more relevant and useful.'

And as always, I learned from them. One insight I gained was how well this helps one to articulate one's identity as a coach or supervisor. As I am considering re-designing my website to reflect who I am now, rather than who I was X years ago when we last did it, that was particularly timely. Other intelligent questions and discussions led me to see a wider range of uses for the framework, and a way of using it more consistently and systematically. So as from this autumn, I will be holding one aspect of the framework under review for a period of four weeks, and then moving on to another, and so on, cycling round the whole thing every year.

And that is part of the joy of my work: I always learn from my clients whose questions, challenges and reflections both keep me on my toes and teach me my craft.