Personal Presentation

I am a senior executive coach, and organization development consultant based in Tokyo, Japan.

On my gravitation to coaching:

I was initially drawn to coaching while serving in General Manager roles (Global Assignment Management) in Japan. In these functions, I was responsible for ensuring the success of leaders who were transitioning to very challenging positions in the Tokyo branches of multinational corporations. My team and I learned, over time, that an emerging approach called “coaching” accelerated our client’s ability to understand their teams and business environments, and to effectively lead across culture.

Based on this experience, I focused on this discipline, was trained and supervised by exceptional practitioners, mostly I.O. Psychologists. That training was research-based, data-driven. We cared about working with our coaching clients to set realistic goals for development – their goals – to measure progress against those goals, to revamp, revise, reconfigure the coaching work until we got it right. I saw this as an ‘act’ of co-creation on the part of the coach, and coachee. We were also committed to ensuring that coaching clients developed the skills to sustain development throughout their careers, and to model development for their team members, and within their organizations.

I have always thought that coaching was about the coachee’s needs, and that belief impelled me to access ANY body of knowledge and experience I thought could be useful to my coachees, corporate clients, and my community, OB, OD, Cross-Cultural Studies, Global Leaderships Studies, traditions in western and eastern philosophy, art, literature. I experienced this skilling up as a highly creative self-development process.

I recall working with a coachee who wished to address 360 feedback related to perceived “empathy” deficits through the lens of Augustine. We read and discussed Augustine ‘on empathy’.

I jumped on research projects, local, regional, global, facilitated learning groups, and devoted M.A. studies to understanding how coaching solutions could be applied in Asian cultural contexts, and conducted applied research toward this end. I believe the field of coaching, like good coaches, must take in information from multiple disciplines, and environments, AND, that great coaching concepts, innovations will come from this activity.

On my migration to non-directive coaching, and this community:

For the last decade or so, I have perceived certain trends operant in the field of coaching. One of these is “commoditization”. This trend manifest itself in HR process outsourcing, which insulated coaches from organizations, and each other. It also manifest in standardization of programs, and delivery of “cookie cutter solutions”. The impact of standardization is probably felt less acutely in western environments, but it has been disastrous to coaching practice in Asia, and frankly to OD, as well. It seems to me that “commoditization” has rendered coaching highly “directive”.

Another trend I am aware of is a shift from data-driven, research-based approaches to what I will refer to “transformational technologies”. I believe this strand in coaching has its roots in the “New Age” or the “Human Potential” movements in the West. I am very dubious of these solutions based on what the research indicates, and also because they are culturally biased; e.g. the Japanese language contains no word for “transformation”.

I think the field of coaching must find some grounding in behavioral and other science, and must also evolve based on a global exchanges of ideas and experience, or it cannot ultimately succeed as a discipline.