While most management development and training options involve a professional trainer or a train-the-trainer type model, CoachingOurselves is different in that it is a collaborative learning model.
It has been challenging articulating to potential clients and participants how the process works, given that there is no consultant, professional facilitator or trainer present during most CoachingOurselves sessions. (Sometimes one of us does work with new groups, acting as the facilitator, or we sometimes hold a kick-off session with participants identified as group facilitators.)
I’ve been motivated to read about experiential learning lately and read a quote that got my attention. In 1948, Kenneth Benne and Paul Sheats described a new concept of team roles and team leadership based on the first National Training Laboratory in Group Development:
“… In contrast to the then-prevailing idea that leadership was a characteristic of the person and that teams should be led by a single leader, [the researchers]… discovered that mature groups shared leadership. While initially group members were oriented to individual roles focused on satisfying their personal needs; they later came to share responsibility for team leadership by organizing themselves into team roles.” *
These roles could include everything from information seeker, coordinator, and critic, to encourager, standard setter, and group-observer.
This so accurately articulates what I see time and time again in practice. While some groups do appoint a facilitator, we are not always comfortable making this role explicit. We prefer to think of the facilitator as a need for someone (or everyone!) to implicitly act as a catalyst for learning and development. I feel that this is another way CoachingOurselves contributes to managers developing themselves and also each other.
* As cited in a paper written by Anna B. Adams and D. Christopher Kayes, The George Washington University, and David A. Kolb, Case Western Reserve University, (December 2004) “Experiential Learning In Teams”.