Tuesday, November 30, 2004

More on Coaching

More on Coaching

I've had some very interesting feedback on my recent post on coaching.  It has largely been in the vein of  "Yeah, but how??" 

 

It is not easy.  Not everyone wants to improve or is interested in helping others improve, at a substantial level.  And not everyone has the skill set to help improve.  Yet, improve we must. 

 

Last night, while looking for something else in my stack of HBR, I came across a Harvard Business Review article from the September 2004 edition that speaks to this.  Entitled Deep Smarts, by Dorothy Leonard and Walter Swap, the authors explore just how knowledge transfers from person to person in an organization, particularly the seemingly intuitive knowledge that comes from experience and pattern recognition.  It runs pretty deep and goes far beyond the usual list of job descriptions and knowledge databases.  They deal deeply with the progression from story telling to Socratic Teaching to Guided Observation to Guided Experimentation. 

 

If you have access to HBR, you may find the article useful.  If not, you can download the article for $6 and it may be well worth it.  I know I'm exploring it with some colleagues here.

 

I hope this is helpful.

 

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