INTERDEVELOPMENTAL ASSOCIATES LAUNCH CONSULTING SERVICES, COACHING, AND ASSESSMENT
By Otto Laske
IDM faculty, students and ambassadors have formed INTERDEVELOPMENTAL ASSOCIATES LLC (interdevelopmentals.org/idma.html), for the purpose of leveraging their cutting edge expertise in developmental process consultation. It is the goal of IDMA to serve clients who are open to rethinking their coaching and HR practices based on social science evidence embodied in the Constructive Developmental Framework (CDF) taught in IDM courses. We have begun to find such clients in North-America as well as in Europe, and look forward to making our interventions felt in organizations, school systems, government agencies, and the military. We are using openBC and other such networks to make our offerings known internationally.
The crucial difference between conventional and developmental coaching is explained to clients as follows:
Conventional Coaching |
IDMA Developmental Coaching |
Coach does not know own developmental level (or does not even care to know) |
Coach knows own developmental level or, minimally, zone of pertinent levels, and thus can act ethically with regard to clients |
Presumption that the client knows his or her needs |
Exploration of what the client knows about his or her needs, and what needs are hidden to the client |
Focus on clients’ goals |
Focus on the clients’ developmental perspective from which goals emerge, thus widening the mental space in which goals can be pursued |
Focus on immediate outcomes |
Focus on outcomes that support clients’ professional and personal development simultaneously and in the long-term |
Focus on task performance |
Focus on the developmental resources (capability) that ground performance |
“Rushing into helping” |
Self awareness of the coach as to his or her own theory of helping and its developmental basis |
Focus on skills |
Focus on learning that induces development |
Focus on change |
Focus on developmental shifts causing change |
Bias in favor of satisfying requirements of the client’s work environment |
Personal development of the client is paramount, being considered the overriding criterion of client success |
In contrast to associations based on Elliott Jacques’s work, such as Requisite Organization (www.requisite.org), Interdevelopmental Associates LLC — who also embrace Jaques’s research — work not only with a single stream of adult development, the cognitive one, but — following Ken Wilber’s work — also employ evidence regarding a second stream, that of social-emotional development (see Measuring Hidden Dimensions, Volume 1, at www.interdevelopmentals.org/book.html). Both the distinction and the linkage of cognitive (CD) and social-emotional (ED) development of clients constitute the hallmark of our approach.
This seemingly slight difference between IDMA and other developmentally oriented consulting groups is actually a huge one, considering that the relationship between individuals’ and teams’ cognitive and social-emotional development (CD& ED) is frequently a major cause of their failing to perform optimally. Since, in addition, IDMA integrates behavioral assessments into its work, our consultants have at their disposal a powerful holistic methodology that presently has no equal in the consulting world.
While we continue to pursue the issue of automating developmental assessments, we feel that interview-based “manual” assessments have their own unique benefit. The benefit lies in being able to establish, from the start of the intervention, highly personal coaching and mentoring relationships with our clients, in contrast to simply making available to them certain sets of developmental data and related “recommendations.”
Cases in point for developmental interventions are issues such as selection, best fit, requisite organization, retention, succession planning, and “executive development” (where the term “development” is the horizontal, flatland notion that is only the surface of adult development as we see it). The core of all of these issues is to understand what the first-person perspective looks like — e.g., how people actually experience their work — and how that perspective relates to what management “thinks” it needs to do to reap the most profit from employing people instead of just using machines.
In more detail, IDMA uses story matching. Clients are invited to select success stories they have either experienced or wish to experience, and which articulate for them the kind of career advancement or life improvement that they aspire to. In order to provide such clients with customized coaching and mentoring, the IDMA team analyzes the stories chosen by clients, rating them against Jaques' size of role (Time Horizon) scale and the Laske-Kegan index of developmental maturity (size of person). Based on this rating, IDMA offers clients customized assessments and coaching sessions. We thereby make sure that the offers are geared to clients’ zone of proximal development. Subsequently, clients choose assessment or coaching and both, and engage the particular IDMA coach they find most compatible.
There are presently two kinds of offers we make to clients:
- A personal assessment of their developmental status and their potential. Clients pay the provider of the assessment. Their initial story-based profile provides a starting hypothesis, and thus facilitates interviewing and response to feedback.
- Individual coaching for career development and support in their life choices (developmental process consulting), subsequent to an assessment.
To support the consistency of this offer, IDMA is forming testing teams from among its members. Testing teams are led by a lead presenter, an individual who has graduated from IDM Program 2. IDM students are invited to participate in testing teams to the limit of their present ability to interview and score interviews. In this way, education at IDM gains practicum opportunities not otherwise available. This also assures that those being educated at IDM can work in smooth connection with their current coaching and/or consulting practice.
Advanced IDM students are invited to apply for membership in IDMA.
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Example of the Benefit of Developmental Thinking: Manager as Coach
Most if not all human capital issues can benefit from developmental thinking. Let’s briefly investigate here how such thinking contributes to an issue such as manager as coach.
“Manager” is a role that is filled by people in very different developmental positions possessing very different developmental resources. It is a role involving control over work others do, and presuming the ability to manage oneself. One might say that, just as “teacher,” it is a critical and evaluative role more than a supportive one.
This changes when we require of a manager that s(he) act as a coach of others. We are then merging what superficially seem to be opposing talents and proclivities. How can a manager do justice to both requirements, being in control and being supportive? And what kind of a coach or mentor would such a manager need, to succeed in both roles?
It seems to me that developmental thinking is crucial in answering this question, regardless of the ‘behavioral profile’ of the manager concerned. Regardless of whether a manager is flexible, resourceful, and enduring in approaching tasks, or rather confrontational, in need of power, or need to self-protect, we need that manager to be able to REFLECT UPON HIS/HER ACTIONS, and stand back from assumptions s(he) makes about people and situations.
However, reflection and even eagerness to succeed will not do. We can make a behavioral assessment of managers and still get nowhere in coaching them to be acting like coaches. The “hidden” ingredient for success here is to understand how managers MAKE MEANING of their work and, even more importantly, of themselves. And this can largely be predicted when looking at their developmental assessment outcomes.
For example, a manager whose center of gravity — or developmental comfort zone — lies at level L-3/4 — thus between defining oneself by group membership and being defined by one’s own values, with a proclivity to give prominence to the former rather than the latter — such a manager will tend to find it impossible to be both controlling and supportive of others. This is so because at level L-3/4 a person is struggling to assert autonomy in managing him- or herself and, largely failing at that, will not possess any resources to be supportive of others irrespective of his or her own safety as member of a work group. Such a manager is too conflicted internally between depending on those s(he) is supposed to support and his or her own strivings for autonomy, and therefore needs more help than s(he) can give.
You can coach such a manager to act as a coach until you exhaust yourself, especially if you yourself, the coach, are not at a higher developmental level than your client, the manager. You could have avoided this misplaced energy had you known your own developmental level, and had you known your own developmental level. No factual knowledge or procedural know-how will save you in this situation. You are simply not the right person for the job at hand.
I leave it to the reader to puzzle out what the situation would be like if the manager were at level L-4/3 and the coach at level L-4(3), that is, one stage higher. Obviously, such a manager would have more of a potential to be a change agent, because s(he) would be able to resolve Me-Other conflicts more to the side of going with his or her own drummer. But even here, a coach who is only at the same level as the client would fail because s(he) would not have the resources to make the client’s conflictual situation fruitful for mental growth — precisely because the coach would be in the same boat as the client, the blind thus leading the blind (as so often in coaching). It would take a coach who is at least one step beyond L-4/3, that is, L-4(3), to have any real chances of success.
This really quite simple developmental mathematics is known to every IDM student.
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Massachusetts Psychological Association (MPA) Co-Sponsors IDM Courses
Psychologists have the advantage over coaches or other helping professionals that they are versed in interviewing and assessment, whether they have a doctorate or are moving towards one. For this reason, it is with pleasure that IDM welcomes psychologists to its courses.
Recently, IDM was accepted by the Massachusetts Psychological Association (MPA) as a provider of continuing education (CE) credits. MPA will henceforth co-sponsor IDM courses. This co-sponsorship extends to psychologists in states other than Massachusetts, since MPA works under the aegis of the American Psychological Association (APA). MPA follows the APA ethics code, which is much more stringent than that of ICF.
In its courses, IDM addresses all helping professionals and varieties of consultants. This is so since our methodology and teaching is foundational, not specialized toward one or the other mode of consultation. It is up to the IDM student to adapt his/her foundational knowledge to the particular pursuit. This mode of instruction works since our students are adults, and have sufficient resources to adapt what they learn at IDM to their individual pursuits.
First 6-hr Training Program for Psychologists
As a first offering co-sponsored by MPA, IDM will present a 6-CE credit tele-seminar for psychologists in and out of state beginning Saturday, May 6, and continuing May 13 & 20, 2006. In this seminar, IDM offers a central piece of the Gateway class. To learn more details about the May offering, go to www.interdevelopmentals.org/psychconted.html.
Register for the tele-seminar ($199).
April Class announcements
See also interdevelopmentals.org/course-descriptions.html
In addition to on-going courses, three new IDM courses will start in April of 2006:
- New Gateway course starts April 25, 2006
- New Module A course starts April 11, 2006
- New Module B course starts April 11, 2006
- New Module D course starts April 19, 2006
Gateway
Gateway is the time-proven introduction to developmental thinking in coaching and consultation in North America. The class prepares participants for entering IDM Program One. A new 8x2 hr Gateway class starts Tuesday, April 25, 06. Since the time is presently open, please indicate your interest by writing to info@interdevelopmentals.org. The textbook for Gateway is Measuring Hidden Dimensions, volume1, chapters 1 to 5, which you can obtain at www.interdevelopmentals.org/book.html.
Register for Gateway program
Module A
Module A is the first section of Program One, and is focused on hands-on work with interviews designed to deepen the coaching/consulting practitioner’s understanding of developmental level. The textbook for Module A is Measuring Hidden Dimensions, Volume 1, chapters 6 to 9, available at www.interdevelopmentals.org/book.html.
Register for Module A program
Module B
Module B introduces to a cognitive, dialectical approach to process consultation (including coaching). Participants learn to carry out and evaluate semi-structured interviews that elicit the thought forms presently used by clients, and to assist clients in boosting their way of approach life and work based on systemic thinking. Participants also learn to relate cognitive to social-emotional scores, to determine gaps between the two lines of adult development. The tools taught in B are central for all of coaching, including social-emotional and behavioral coaching.
A textbook for B is in the works. For now, participants will receive slide material and handouts.
Register for Module B program
Module D, in Combination with Program Two
Module D is the concluding section of Program One, and is focused on preparing and submitting a written case study on a single client. Since this agenda is shared with Program Two, we will henceforth conduct these two courses together. This has the advantage for Program One students that they can benefit from the expertise of their more advanced colleagues who are writing their second, third, and fourth case study. For Program Two students it has the advantage that they are enabled to begin teaching what they know to less experienced students.
Program One completes with a Certificate of Developmental Assessment and Coaching. Program Two completes with Certification as a Developmental Coach/Consultant, depending on the candidate’s choice.
As before, Module D/Program Two will comprise 8x2 hour sessions. For students who entered the IDM program before September of 2005, the cost of the combined course will be $700 ($1,750 henceforth).
For further questions regarding these courses, write to info@interdevelopmentals.org.
Register for Module D/Program Two
Developmental Coaching Instruction at Seneca College, Toronto, Canada
The IDM Gateway course is being taught at Seneca College, Toronto, as an integral part of PERFORMANCE COACHING FOR THE WORKPLACE, under the title of Developmental Coaching; it is scheduled to start in April of 2006. The course description reads:
This course provides an introduction to evidence-based coaching, Developmental Coaching - a coaching model that examines a person’s fundamental frame of reference through their use of language. Changes in belief, lead to changes in behaviour, and subsequent positive changes in action. Learning takes place through discussion, application, and practice labs. Developmental Coaching is offered in partnership with the Interdevelopmental Institute and employs cutting edge research from the Kohlberg School at Harvard University.
For more information, go to http://www.senecac.on.ca/performancecoaching/, or contact Wendy Knowles, Program Director, at wendy.knowles@senecac.on.ca.
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