At the leadership Summit in Singapore, I gave a session about Mentorship and Coaching systems. My notes from that session are below. Part of that session was to introduce an idea to test in the coming months, regarding a system that community members could use to coach each other.
Like I said at that time, I’m working on that plan and I want to share from the beginning my ideas and proposals so we could discuss here, and after some work, begin to test it with people interested. Luckily, participants at that session shows interest in help, so here I am, beginning this (late than what I wish, but finally make it).
Background
The Participation team begun last year coaching some community members. We select people from countries where we were focusing our work. I wrote about that work in my blog (1,2), but we knew from the beginning that our team didn’t have the amount of people needed it to scale this project.
At the same time, if the community could use coaching tools to help each other, we could create a great program for self development inside Mozilla.
What do we mean when we say coaching
A quick definition of coaching is:
Coaching: Personal support for setting and achieving goals.
And a quick method to make this could be (as suggested in Max Lansberg’s Book that were distributed on Singapore)
- Ask the coachee to describe the current issue or problem, with specific examples and a small amount of relevant background.
- Ask her/him to describe the outcome – paint as specific a ‘picture’ as possible of how things would be if s/he had sorted out the problem. Do not try to solve the problem, but note down any emerging ideas.
- With the coachee, list all the obstacles/blocks that lie between 1 and 2. Sort them into three groups:
- Blocks that exist in the coachee (lack of skill/knowledge, low motivation, attitude, etc.)
- Blocks that exist in others (anxious customer, manager stressed and panicking, etc.)
- Blocks in the situation (inadequate resources, shift in deadlines, etc.).
- Jointly brainstorm ways around these blocks, and possible next steps. Agree an approach, actions and timing.
The Idea
The plan is to form groups of 3 people that could meet bi-weekly (two times by month) and have conversations about their projects following this approach. Each session will be separated in three blocks, and in those blocks, by turn, somebody will take the role of the coach, another the coachee role and the other one will take notes.
One big question is how we could match these people. Should we make a random pick? Should we encourage people that know each other from other communication channels?
Next steps
In the coming weeks I want to work on materials and tutorials needed to give good feedback, have better conversations, etc. There are some resources on Landsberg’s book, but there are other places where we could find more resources.
Once we have these material ready, we could begin with our learnings and test.
If you are interested on help, let me know so I could add you to discussions. If you want just to be informed, I will continue updating this thread, so it will be easy to follow up the discussions.
Also, if you know somebody that could be interested (or have knowledge about coaching or other important skill), please let me know or add her in this thread.
Thanks!