COMENSAnews March 2012: Diversity in Coaching & Mentoring

March 8, 2012 - PRLog -- We have been in the process of reviewing 2011/2012 in the course of preparing for the COMENSA National AGM Season, and for the end of the Financial Year and start of the next Financial Year.  Fortunately, we have a clear strategy to guide our planning and against which to decide what activities are core for the next year, and what are peripheral or non-essential.  The Executive Committee's High Five Strategy, identified in July 2011 outlines a five pronged approach that overlay the five fingers of a human hand. , Read Harry Welby-Cooke, COMENSA National President's original introductory article on the strategy by following this link .

This five pronged approach is defined by:

1. Thumb                Ethics

2. Index Finger       Member Criteria and Standards of Competence (MCSC)

3. Middle Finger     Our market

4. Ring Finger         You, the Members

5. Little Finger        Diversity

Diversity is one of the areas identified as critical to our strategy and it has been interesting for me to consider diversity in the course of simply working on the marketing strategy for the year ahead.  In a South African context, one of the first aspects of diversity that tends to spring to mind is culture, but you will see in this thought-provoking issue of COMENSAnews on Diversity that there is much more to it.

Even in our profession, diversity abounds and we are HUGELY challenged as an organisation in trying to serve many masters.  Let's look at some of them: we have coaches and mentors, clients and service-providers, we have life, business and executive coaches.  We have internal and external coaches and mentors. Then we have the different models and frameworks: Integral, NLP, Thinking Environment, Psychodynamic, Humanistic, Meta-coaching, Co-Active coaching and the list goes on. We have practitioners who come to this industry from a wide variety of backgrounds, ranging from psychology, medicine, law, management to human resources and education and they all have a place and something to contribute to the emerging profession.  We also have practitioners who believe firmly in experiential learning as the path to professional competence, while at the other end of the spectrum we have practitioners for whom the academic route has been their route of choice.

As a professional body, how do we please all of these diverse players that make up our membership?  Isn't it wonderful that we all have a common space to voice our passion for our emerging profession?  We live in a country that is intrinsically symbolic of change, and the ability to overcome enormous challenges when gathered around a common goal.  Perhaps the members of our emerging profession will be able to do the same.

Please continue to support John Paisley and his Project Team's call for participation in compiling the means and methods of accrediting training providers. We ask for your positive and well-intentioned participation in continuing to help build a meaningful professional community.

Read more at www.comensa.org.za/NEWSLETTERS/COMENSAnews_2012_(Jan_-_Dec)/COMENSAnews_March_2012

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Coaches and Mentors of South Africa - COMENSA - is the national professional body for Coaching and Mentoring in South Africa. Members include individual and corporate providers, buyers and trainers of coaching and mentoring services