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A
box of Girl Scout Thin Mint cookies led Mike Jay into professional
business coaching. The
Oregon Trail led him to training coaches. Jay took up coaching the day a
doctor came to his door delivering Girl Scout cookies for his daughter.
The two men began talking, and soon the doctor asked for Jay’s help in
solving some business problems.
“He
needed someone he could talk with, other than his partners or someone in
his business,” Jay recalls. At the time, Jay, a former Marine,
award-winning chef and Certified Foodservice Management Professional, was working as a business consultant. “I realized
coaching was a much better fit for my skills and talents," he says.
Jay
had long been the recipient of coaching as he spent most of his
childhood in one athletic pursuit or another. Eventually making it to big-time college football as a
Southwest Conference Championship Quarterback at Texas A&M, Jay saw
first-hand the difference between good and bad coaching in high-stress,
high-performance
situations.
After
launching a career in business coaching, it wasn’t long before
colleagues, who knew he coached from rural Nebraska along the Oregon
Trail, began asking him to train them as business coaches. Publishing his first book in 1999 after taking 10 years
to write it: Coach2 The Bottom Line:
An Executive Guide to Coaching Performance, Change and
Transformation in Organizations has consistently sold well.
“They
wanted to know how I made a living from where I was. They wanted the
same freedom to do what they love and make a decent living,” Jay says.
“Many of us want to work in corporate America because that's where the
excitement is, and that's where the money is. But we don't want to
become part of the corporate culture. Coaching provides that opportunity
to be external; to be involved, and to make a difference and still
maintain one's autonomy.”
To
meet the need Jay called on Lifetime Coach Mel Sonneman and a coach's
best friend--a successful client--Dr. Steven Baisch, who helped him
found B\Coach Systems, LLC. B\Coach is a virtual company that provides coach
training via remote virtual learning and group retreats. Its six-month Business
Coach program already boasts more than 250 graduates and is attracting a broad
range of professionals who want to launch coaching careers or hone their
skills in coaching and mentoring all over the world.
B\Coach training builds a sense of community--even through
remote virtual learning systems are used. Students go through training together, learning about
each other on the phone, through discussion lists and bios, and at a
final initiation into business and executive coaching--a face-to-face
retreat with video-taping and real-time feedback on their coaching.
The
highly structured training program progresses from basic skills to
sophisticated coaching techniques including a developmental path of more
than 36 months of advanced coach training--the most sophisticated
approach of any coach training system currently training coaches.
Most importantly it creates an
environment of trust that allows students to be safe, honest and comfortable
with each other in action learning. Jay says,
“The depth of learning is directly proportional to one's ability to
feel safe, non-threatened and to become open to feedback about
performance, change and transformation."
Graduate coaches then apply what they’ve learned to the
high-level professionals they typically coach.
"In
their interaction with a coach, executives can be vulnerable without
giving away their position in the organization,” Jay says. “This is
critical for executive development.” Even when hierarchical
organizations seem “political and dangerous” to executives, “the
coaching interaction provides an oasis of discovery, learning and
support,"
he adds.
B\Coach students
learn this way of interaction in a “virtual breakout session” that
provides a “facilitated--coaching triad,” similar to training used
in top organizations. A trained coach acting as a facilitator leads a
session for three people: the student coach, the person being coached
and an observer. “Even though the observation role may seem passive,
it lends a rich and active learning role. Students develop rapidly by
participating in the breakout with facilitated feedback -- much more
rapidly than watching or listening to someone else do it,” Jay notes.
Participants
also are trained to coach by phone in a virtual environment and
face-to-face. "In a project environment it’s essential to add a
coach to a project team leader's repertoire of performance tools. The
coach remains in the background, holding the mirror up, being a sounding
board and confidentially protecting executives from the effects of
internal politics. That's something coaches can easily do in a virtual
environment at a much lower cost to the team."
Phone
coaching and virtual coaching also eliminate geographical restrictions.
“I'm in Nebraska working with a person in New York, who is working
with a person in California, and we're working through a person in
Baltimore,” Jay notes. You can’t do that face to face.”
For
business coach and psychologist Patsi Krakoff, a formal training program
was the most efficient way to get the training her previous education
had not. “I was naturally
attracted to Mike Jay's B\Coach Developmental Coaching System because it was so thorough in
covering organizational principles and business,” she says.
“I was concerned the training would repeat lessons from
graduate school and would not give me anything new. This concern was not
valid because this course of training focused on business systems,
although it included many organizational and developmental principles
from psychology.”
Coaching
has helped Krakoff continue her love of learning in sometimes surprising
ways. “I sometimes wonder at that process of attraction, because every
once in a while a client appears at the cyber door step with something
to teach me...at just the right moment,” she says, adding that
coaching means first working on yourself first. “Too many people
forget that they can only coach others to the level that they have gone
to themselves,” Krakoff says. “If you have not done some in-depth
personal exploration with coaching and assessments, you may not know yourself well
enough to be able to recognize patterns in other people. Read, learn, be
coached, do assessments, get feedback and grow, even if it means failing
some times!”
B\Coach
Systems, LLC continues to evolve and develop as more and more content is added to
create the premiere business and executive coach training program in the
world. Since its public
inception in late 1999, B\Coach Systems, LLC has added the
Strategy Focused
Developmental Coaching System™
Program. This program
focuses the coaching in leadership systems and creates opportunities for
business coaches to learn valuable information about leadership
competence. “No business
coaching relationship occurs outside of leadership issues,” says Jay.
In
early 2000, the CoachMBA program was launched to give participants ample
opportunities to interface business strategies with coaching in
business. Later in the
year, the MAP$ program named as Marketing for Attractive Professionals was launched to create a professional marketing
system for participants. Since
then, participants have the option of continuing their 6 months of core
Business Coach Training in Master Business Coach, Performance Leadership
and the new CosMos System to prepare them for their journey into
The Developmentalist™
System.
“What’s
unique about B\Coach,” Jay says, “is the syndication program for
participants.” Once the
participant completes the development training they are offered the
opportunity to license three of the four programs.
This provides participants will a business in a box if they
decide to pursue leadership and management development along with
business coaching.
“Being
able to hit the ground running at the conclusion of the program is key
to the success of our participants in the program,” claims Jay.
“It is critical to our mutual success that we integrate our
value added community with theirs in the long run,” says Jay.
In
late 2000, B\coach began the Master Business Coach Program.
“This program is the flagship of our development systems,”
states Jay. The MBC program
caps the experiential learning of the COACH2 Model into a sophisticated
integration of skills, assessment and development training.
“We aim to create a journey of mastery for experienced
coaches,” says Jay. The
MBC program is a serious professional graduate coaching system designed
for professional coaches and leaders.
“We are serious about personal, professional and organizational
development,” states Jay.
In 2001, The Executive Program™
made its debut,
and in 2002 a performance leadership coaching program were added to the
core offerings.
Strategy focused coaching is a key thread that weaves itself
through all of the B\Coach Programs and an integral approach is at the
core of all program development.
B\Coach
Programs are designed for new and experienced coaches and are provided
to organizations that are interested in creating coaching systems
surrounding performance, change and transformation.
In the future, all organizations will have coaches.
There won’t be any other way to compete for top employees in a
competitive global business environment.
It’s not just about winning, it’s about creating appreciative
and collaborative organizational agility while helping people have
lives,” says Jay.
REGISTER
For
more info: www.b-coach.com/$ or
call 877.901.COACH
Thomas Leonard interviews B\coach Founder Mike Jay |
