When we changed our entire organisational structure a few years ago there’s no question that we took a collective leap of faith. We moved from a traditional management hierarchy to a flat structure based around self organising teams.
(I won’t go into the ins and outs of how and why we made these changes – you can read all about that in our forthcoming book ‘Made without Managers’…..!)
One of the biggest motivators for taking this leap of faith was that we wanted to place accountability and responsibility for innovation directly into the hands of the experts we recruit – our colleagues. At the same time we also recognised that we couldn’t just pull managers out and leave people working in a vacuum with no support should they need it. Those who are familiar with our journey will know that at this point we introduced our coaching culture to Mayden.
Nurturing our coaching culture at Mayden
Six years on and our internal coaching programme is supporting many of our staff as they navigate how we work, as well as their own professional development and progression journeys and so much more. We recognise that everyone should have the opportunity to make the absolute best of being a part of the Mayden team and coaching is one way in which we support our people to do that.
We also recognise that coaches are privy to the hopes, ambitions, challenges, conflicts, emotional ups and downs and personal journeys of their clients and with that comes a high degree of responsibility for holding that space for them in the right way. Therefore doing it half heartedly or without investment simply isn’t going to cut it.
Working with the the International Coaching Federation
As a consequence we have put our money where our mouth is with continuous investment in our coaching programme. It has always been important to us to clearly signal how much we value the coaching space and that we strive for excellence in the coaching that our colleagues have access to. We therefore made a decision right from the start to align our programme with the International Coaching Federation’s (ICF) standards of competence and ethics to which we hold ourselves accountable.
In practical terms this has ranged from regular development training for our wider team of coaches to me in my capacity as Product Owner for our programme gaining professional certification from the ICF itself. Keeping pace with changes in the coaching industry, progress, research and new ideas means our programme keeps evolving. We have introduced learning sets for our coaches to keep honing our skills, triad practice to give each other good, useful feedback right there in the moment, and personal training budgets means we can explore different coaching methodologies and approaches helping us avoid a ‘one size fits all’ mentality.
The way that we work here at Mayden demands a lot of our people so coaching is available to absolutely everyone in the business. As coaching becomes an ever more integral part of how organisations work, whether through internal teams of coaches or external commissioned coaches, we believe it is important to place emphasis on the quality of the coaching that our people receive. Our expectation is that their experience of being part of Team Mayden will be all the richer for it.
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This blog has been written by Michele Rees-Jones, Mayden’s ACC level accredited coach professionally certified with the ICF.
