Coaching the Executive Coach

Executive coaching is still relatively new in India. The Centre for Executive Education at the Indian School of Business , one of India’s leading business schools set up in collaboration with Wharton and Kellogg , organised an interesting event recently.

It was a program on executive coaching for those responsible for coaching. The program was conducted by Marshall Goldsmith-ranked by the Wall Street Journal as one of the top 10 executive educators.

Usually CEO coaching focuses on three aspects- strategy, organisational change, and behavioural coaching. The Programme at the ISB concentrated only on behavioural change. It aimed towards positive and measurable behaviour improvement of the participants, by identifying specific behaviours to improve upon and choosing concrete methods of change.

The program reaffirms the increasing importance being given to executive coaching by corporate India.

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Eating breaks at the workplace

With stress levels increasing and greater incidence of workplace maladies than ever before, medical research now suggest diet consumed in office can play a role in healthy living. A recent study undertaken by UK’s Health Development Agency shows positive effects of healthy-eating interventions in the workplace may even decrease blood cholesterol levels by 10%.

“A combination of factors leads to severe health problems in high-stresses individuals. A healthy diet then can keep certain basic health parameters normal,” says Wockhardt Heart Institute Bangalore head (cardiology) PR Nayak. The key to healthy food habit is to make wise meal choices and practice moderation in portion control and menu selections. And if you can take this diet habit beyond office to your home, nothing like it.

So, folks, keep eating- the right quantities of the right things and you will be better off.

Dr. Edgar Schein & Career Anchors

One of the world’s foremost thought leaders in the area of behavioural science is Dr. Edgar Schein, Professor Emeritus at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

A person’s career anchor is his or her self-concept consisting of 1) self-perceived talents and abilities, 2) basic values, and, most important, 3) the evolved sense of motives and needs as they pertain to the career.

Career anchors only evolve as one gains occupational and life experience. However, once the self-concept has been formed, it functions as a stabilizing force, hence the metaphor of “anchor,” and can be thought of as the values and motives that the person will not give up if forced to make a choice. Most of us are not aware of our career anchors until we are forced to make choices pertaining to self-development, family, or career. Yet it is important to become aware of our anchors so that we can choose wisely when choices have to be made.

Dr. Schein’s original research in the mid-1970’s showed that most people’s self-concepts revolved around 5 categories reflecting basic values, motives and needs:

1. Autonomy/independence
2. Security/stability
3. Technical-functional competence
4. General Managerial Competence
5. Entrepreneurial Creativity.

Follow-up studies with a wider range of occupations in the 1980’s revealed three additional anchor categories–

• Service or Dedication to a Cause
• Pure Challenge
• Life Style

Dr. Schein re-visits his pioneering work on Career Anchors in an article titled ” Career Anchors Revisited: Implications for Career Development in the 21st Century”.

 

Congratulations,Vikas Jhingran

I do not know Vikas Jhingran personally but wish to congratulate him on his splendid feat.

He recently won the first prize in the Toastmasters International World Championship of Public Speaking . Vikas, a graduate of IIT, Kharagpur, is a Doctoral candidate in mechanical and ocean engineering at MIT.

This year’s competition featured 10 finalists, each of whom presented a seven-minute original speech to a panel of judges. Contestants were judged on content, speech organization, voice quality, gestures and delivery.

The event is called the Olympics of Public Speaking . Jhingran presented “The Swami’s Question”, a speech about finding himself through meditation and about getting into MIT, his dream school.

Expat, Moving to Bangalore?

Every country and indeed every city has an unique culture. A large number of US and European companies have business interests in Bangalore, India.

With many expats being posted to India for a tour of a few years, a guide for the “new” expat is of great value. Joanna Budelman, Co-founder of Chillibreeze, attracted a lot of email enquiries. What to bring? Where to live? How safe is the place? Will it be difficult to adjust? What about schools?

Her ebook “Bangalore: An Expat Survival Guide” will be of immense use to expats. She has first hand experience of shifting to and living in Bangalore as her husband, Ralph, is the Managing Director of Stylus Inc. here.

Belbin’s Team Roles

Increasingly in today’s world, more and more work is being carried out in teams. A key factor in carrying out an assignments effectively is the team composition. As they say, you cannot have all generals and no soldiers!

One way to understand team composition is the model presented by Dr. Meredith Belbin following his work at the Henley Management College. Dr. Belbin defines a team role as:-
“A tendency to behave, contribute and interrelate with others in a particular way.”

He identified 9 clusters of behaviour:-

• 3 Action-oriented roles: Shaper ( drives the team to task completion), Implementer( turns ideas into action) and Completer Finisher(ensures task completion)
• 3 People-oriented roles: Co-ordinator ( ensures every one’s view is taken into account ), Teamworker ( maintains team harmony)and Resource Investigator ( builds contacts outside the team)
• 3 Cerebral roles: Plant ( provides new ideas), Monitor Evaluator ( ensures all choices are considered) and Specialist( contributes deep knowledge in specific areas)

All the roles must be represented for the team to succeed though one person may play more than one role. Team members may actually work on the basis of a primary role – based on their strengths -and secondary roles which they could perform if called upon to do so.

"In Search of the Good Company"

Read in The Economist about a new book by Robert Reich, former Secretary for Labour in the Clinton cabinet. In his book ” Supercapitalism” he trashes Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR ). Debating whether Wal-Mart or Google is good or evil misses the point, he writes, which is that governments are responsible for setting rules that ensure that competing, profit-maximising firms do not act against the interests of society

On the other hand, there are strong supporters of CSR who believe it can change the way organisations conduct business. To quote Simon Zadek, the boss of AccountAbility, a CSR lobby group. “The ‘whether in principle’ conversation about Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR )is over,” he says. “What remains is ‘What, specifically, and how?’.