CMI 612 Assignment Example

Ardenlow Architects LLP is a practice of 210 people working from four studios in the United Kingdom, delivering education, healthcare and residential projects. Staff range from Part 1 architectural assistants through to equity partners, and progression to registration requires a lengthy period of supervised professional experience. The author is an Associate Director leading a studio of 46 people. Organisational detail is illustrative and anonymised.

Task 1: Report on the benefits, types and application of coaching used by leaders

AC 1.1 Critique the types and forms of coaching used to empower individuals and teams to achieve success

The word coaching describes a family of practices rather than one, and any useful critique has to separate them, because they differ in purpose, evidential support and suitability for a professional practice where technical mastery confers authority.

Skills and performance coaching. Directed at a defined capability within the present role. In this practice it covers assistants developing detailing competence or associates learning to run a client meeting. Critiquing it, the approach suits situations where the standard is knowable and observable, and it degrades quickly into supervision where the coach holds the technical answer. In architecture the coach almost invariably does, which makes this the form most vulnerable to collapsing into instruction wearing a different name.

Developmental coaching. Concerned with the person over a longer horizon: professional identity, confidence, how they want to practise. Its value at Ardenlow lies in the transition from technically excellent designer to someone who must lead a team and hold a client relationship, which defeats a surprising number of capable people. Critiquing it, the approach asks for a candour that a competitive up-or-out professional culture does not readily produce, and it demands markedly more of the coach than skills coaching does.

Executive coaching. Bought in for senior individuals, addressing strategic effectiveness and personal impact. Its independence is the point, since an external practitioner has no stake in the partnership’s internal politics. Critiquing it, the cost confines it to partners and senior associates, and independence cuts both ways: the coach cannot test the account they are given against any knowledge of the practice.

Team coaching. Addressed to a group’s collective functioning rather than to its members singly. Project teams here assemble for the life of a commission and disband, which makes them an obvious candidate. Critiquing it, team coaching is considerably more demanding than the individual form, and the version usually delivered is a facilitated discussion whose participants then return unchanged to the structural conditions that produced the problem.

Peer coaching. Practitioners of equivalent standing coaching one another under an agreed structure. Its advantage is credibility, since an associate accepts challenge from another associate more readily than from a director. Critiquing it, quality varies enormously without training, and reciprocal arrangements slide easily into mutual reassurance rather than genuine challenge.

Internal against external provision. Cutting across the categories, coaching may be delivered from inside or bought in. Critiquing the trade-off, internal coaches understand the work, cost little and are available quickly, while carrying organisational history and unable to offer real independence. External coaches bring independence and specialist skill at a cost that rations access, and can be given an account they have no means of testing.

Related:

• CMI 612 Coaching Skills for Leaders