[IOC Conference Report] The Impact of Leaders Becoming Coaches:　Insights from Our Practice and Evidence of Generating Co-Creative Dialogues for Organizational Transformation

Sou Uchimura, the executive coach at COACH A Co., Ltd. presented at the Networking Activities session in "Coaching in Leadership and Healthcare: Sculpting our Future Conference", a collaboration by the Institute of Coaching, McLean Hospital, and Harvard Medical School during September 23-25, 2021. After the presentation, there were many comments from the audiences and it was a wonderful networking activity with coaches and researchers from all over the world. This is a brief summary of his presentation.

Presentation Title

The Impact of Leaders Becoming Coaches:　Insights from Our Practice and Evidence of Generating Co-Creative Dialogues for Organizational Transformation

Brief Summary

(1) What are the challenges of Coaching and Organizational Development that COACH A Co., Ltd. has faced over 20 years of experience in Japan?

• Coaching was brought to Japan in the late 1990s. The coaching industry in Japan was predominantly focused on individuals who were interested in improving their communication skills.
• Since 2005, many companies have offered us to implement 1-2 day intensive coach training program for leaders to improve their leadership skills.
• Through our experiences of coaching "individuals" and providing "skill-based" training, we have started to feel the limitation in changing the reality of the coachees and their environment.

(2) How did we shift the nature of coaching and what are the current features of COACH A's coaching?

With 100+ Coaches (including 60+ ICF credentialed Coaches), we provide coaching which is:

1. Systemic: We see the entire organization as an inseparable whole, and so the development of leaders and the organizational transformation always happen at the same time. This idea is based on the Social Constructionism that describes
   • People live in relationships
   • Reality is socially constructed
   • Our future is being constructed through the dialogue HERE AND NOW
2. Supporting Leaders become Coaches: Rather than coaching individual leaders to improve their leadership skills, we support leaders to become coaches who can develop others to become the next leaders and create "dialogue" to transform the current organization together.
3. Evidence-based: We founded the Coaching Research Institute which has developed a number of ways to measure changes in individual communication and changes in organizations. The below is the evidence that shows the effectiveness of our Systemic Coaching program, DCD (Driving Corporate Dynamism), compared with the group training we had previously provided as our major service.
   DCD is more effective for changing the condition of direct reports than group training
   (Coaching Research Institute, 2019)

As the oldest and biggest coaching company in Japan and with our coaching experiences and results, we are looking forward to connecting with great coaches all over the world and empower our systemic coaching together to support leaders in the world.

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