This common Code of Conduct is not meant to replace the ICF Code of Ethics that all ICF members and ICF Credentialed coaches agree to follow, but rather be used in conjunction with the ICF Code of Ethics.

The Code establishes a set of guidelines as a benchmark for ethics and good practice in coaching and mentoring. It forms the basis for the development of self-regulation for the coaching and mentoring profession. It was drafted with regard to European law and is now listed on the dedicated European Union Self- and Co-Regulation Database.

See the registrationhttp://www.eesc.europa.eu/self-and-coregulation/full.asp?w=n&ID=142.

You can download The Code of Conduct for Coaching and Mentoring here.

This publicly accessible database is co-managed by the European Commission and the EESC and also includes codes of conduct for other professions such as the Council of Bar and Law Societies of Europe and the European Association for Psychotherapy.

The inclusion of the code of conduct is intended to help promote public confidence in coaching and mentoring as a process for professional and personal development.

The main goal is to ensure that practising coaches and mentors conduct their practice in a professional and ethical manner. The objective is also to inform clients of coaching and mentoring, and to promote public confidence in coaching and mentoring as a process for professional and personal development.

The Code serves three primary goals:

• to guide the conduct of coaches and mentors;
• to inform clients; and
• to promote public confidence in coaching and mentoring as a process for professional and personal development.

The ICF and EMCC have worked together over the years on various projects in the spirit of encouraging and supporting the growth and integrity of professional coaching worldwide. Joint efforts and discussions are centered on research, standards for coach-specific training programs, and individual credentials and regulatory items.

As the two largest professional bodies in Europe, EMCC and ICF now jointly call on other representative professional organizations to join this initiative for the further professionalisation of coaching and mentoring.

USEFUL LINKS

• International Coach Federation
• European Mentoring and Coaching Council
• The Code of Conduct for Coaching and Mentoring

Back to CorporateCoach

It is an expensive investment of time and money but a key part of my programme of keeping up to date, if not ahead of the game.

I reported in September that the ICF are introducing new rules that mean that I shall be unable to continue as a member after April 2013.

I am sure that within their 15,000 members there are many others in the same position.

Death throes of the conference
It appears that there is a determined policy to destroy the conference, too.

Let me explain. Three years ago there were almost 1,500 delegates. This year there were 970.

You might think that this is because of the recession. But perhaps there are other reasons.

Less days
Until this year the annual conference was in North America and lasted for three days – Thursday to Saturday.

This year it was only two and half days Sunday to Tuesday lunch time.

No dinner dance
There used to be a dinner dance on the Friday night. We could pay extra for this at the time of booking and I always did so. Although not everybody attended, there was a good turn out and it was a great social event.

When we were in Orlando the committee decided to cut the costs by ‘allowing’ people to make their own arrangements for dinner. The ICF only provided a late dance.

Since I was staying off site, I did not book. Worse, the many people who were staying in the conference hotel overwhelmed the restaurants and could not complete the meal in time to get to the dance. It was a big disappointment.

The next year there was neither dance nor dinner dance.

Bookshop lost, too
One of the major highlights of the conference was the book shop. I normally bought an average of six books, and I was certainly not alone. There seemed always to be a queue at the till.

Last year they dropped the bookshop – to save people having to carry books on their flights home.

Instead they created an Amazon list – a virtual bookstore.

This year the same applied. Repeatedly I met people, last year and this, who complained about the loss of the bookshop. Where else could we find – and touch – such a wonderful collection of titles dedicated to our interests? A reading list is not the same.

To be fair, there was, this year, a shelf with a few books on it – about half a dozen – that was called the virtual bookshop. However, that really did not count.

Is there any hope for next year?
Next year the conference will be in London. I was concerned that this would mean even less people attending, because of the journey from America.

However, I was surprised by how many Americans expressed their excitement about the chance to visit London.

Central London is full of bookshops.

Next year, please bring back the bookshop. Do include a dinner dance, and make it a full three days.

Unless you happen to live locally, attending the ICF conference is a major investment. If people are prepared to spend their earnings on conference, flights and hotel, then surely they are prepared to spend just a little more to attend a full blown event.

Give it a try London (and please stop wearing those awful hats!!).

Back to CorporateCoach

They are: -

Invisible Coaching explained

The basic model of coaching

The ThreeTicks™ Model of Coaching

But it nearly did not happen. There is a process called “Setting well formed outcomes”. This is so powerful that when I first give out the sheet of eight questions I tell people that this could be the most valuable sheet of paper they will ever touch.

The first question requires people to say what they want. It has to be stated in the positive.

You would think that was simple enough. But when I did my NLP Certificate test nearly 20 years ago I failed on this very question. The key is to recognise what you want – and not what you don’t want. Repeatedly I answered what I didn’t want, I couldn’t understand the difference and I failed the test.

Unless I passed this test I could not have gone on to the further training that has formed the basis for my business.

Fortunately, two of the trainers took me aside and after several attempts I suddenly saw the light, and they gave me my certificate.

Focusing on what you do want is key to coaching. Before you can have what you want, you must know what you want.

Unfortunately, finding out is often not as simple as it seems and knowing what you want in life can be a major challenge.

The core purpose of Brefi Group is to “help individuals and teams in organisations discover and achieve their potential so that they can be more effective with less stress”. It is our passion to help people achieve their potential, but first they must discover it.

Coaches and other professionals in the personal development field may well make it their life’s work to decide their mission and purpose. However, this is much less likely to be true for their clients.

So, learning to notice when people talk in negative terms is really important for a coach.

My whole career has been based on failing to understand this.

Thirty years ago when I was a management student in Cardiff I was convinced that I did not want to work in London. So I took the easy way out and stayed where I was by becoming a consultant.

In fact, if I had had a coach who had asked me what opportunities might there be for working in cities other than London, I might have had a successful career in the corporate world.

In fact, one of my colleagues on the course immediately obtained a director role at the Welsh Development Agency – in Cardiff. And, many years later, I had a short career in charge of director development for an international engineering group in Solihull – where I had grown up.

So, remember to insist on asking positive questions and getting positive answers.

Richard Winfield is founder of Brefi Group.
An international facilitator, he coaches and
facilitates directors and boards in transition:
helping them to make progress by bringing
structure and clarity to their thinking.

Price: £14.95

Larry has a knack of helping people discover latent feelings from the past. Very often these might be emotions of anger or resentment against another party; maybe someone who has since died.

He encourages them to verbalise and state their feelings in a way that they were unable to do at the time. What he then does is to get everyone in the room to shout out the same anger or abuse, so that the person being helped has a really intense experience of expressing their emotions.

I was reminded of this, recently, when reading Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert.

The book is about spirituality and the example is about divorce. However, I think that the concept could be used in a coaching situation with a client with a sense that they did not deserve something – not an uncommon situation.

Elizabeth complains to her friend Iva about her husband’s inability to make a decision about their divorce.

“I don’t think I can endure another year in court. I wish I could get some divine intervention here. I wish I could write a petition to God, asking for this thing to end.”

Iva listened politely, then asked, “Where did you get the idea you aren’t allowed to petition the universe with prayer? You are part of this universe, Liz. You’re a constituent – you have every entitlement to participate in the actions of the universe, and to let your feelings be known. So put your opinion out there. Make your case. believe me – it will at least be taken into consideration.”

Elizabeth then wrote her petition and read it out to Iva, and she nodded her approval.

“I would sign that,” she said.
“Now who else would sign it? she asked.
“My family. My mother and father. My sister.”

“OK,” she said. “They just did. Consider their names added. I actually felt them sign it. They’re on the list now. OK – who else would sign it? Start naming names.”

They then went through a long list, including Bill and Hilary Clinton and people from history. In each case it was clear that they would sign it, and they were deemed to have done so.

Eventually, there was such a long list of supporters that Elizabeth just had to believe that it would happen. And, in fact her phone rang soon afterwards to confirm that her husband had just signed the papers.

Whether or not you believe in the power of the universe, it seems to me that this is a pretty good way of building a case that will overcome anyone’s sense of unworthiness, or strengthen a belief in a vision. I intend to use it with some of my own goals.

Services such as VISA only became attractive when there were sufficient merchants signed up – and these in turn were only viable when there were enough customer users. This required a major and expensive marketing and promotional strategy, which was unnecessary when Paypal was launched to provide a similar service for Internet payments.

With the invention of the Internet, promotion of services and recruitment of members could become automatic, and the viral business model was created.

Viral businesses exhibit viral growth as an inherent part of the business model. Whereas in viral marketing, it is only the marketing message that is viral, a viral business must either involve a core part of the customer transaction such that, simply by using it, customers publicise it, or have network benefits so that its users are encouraged to invite others to become customers as well.

A sustainable viral business requires two components: a viral marketing element to stimulate network growth, and scalability to cope with exponential growth; this implies a high level of automation, especially virtual products or customer created content.

Examples of viral business models include:

• Social Networking sites, such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter: There is no benefit to membership unless your friends or business contacts are also members, so each member is highly incentivised to encourage others to join. Further, once most of your friends or business contacts are members, you become under a lot of pressure to join up or risk being “left out”.

  Friendship is by permission only. Facebook and LinkedIn require an invitation and an acceptance; Twitter users can only send direct messages to people who follow them.

• Multi-level marketing (MLM) or network marketing businesses succeed by incentivising their members to recruit more members. By encouraging new members to join their networks and sell the organisation’s products, members benefit from commission on sales made by their immediate team and several levels of their downline. To be successful, members need to train their team members, both to sell product and to recruit members, thus continuously expanding and renewing the network.
• Services that advertise themselves when their customers use them to share their own content, such as free e-mail providers (Hotmail and Gmail), blog hosts (Blogger), email marketing services (AWeber) and content sharing sites (YouTube and Flickr), all of which advertise themselves in their URLs if not more overtly.
• Customer generated content sites, including micro-blogging sites like Twitter and Where are You Now? Users of Twitter can retweet messages so that their followers are introduced to new users, whom they might then choose to follow. Every time someone chooses to follow a user, who is likely to share an interest, that user is advised and able to check out whether they in turn wish to follow them.
• Social commerce in which bulk buying discount deals are only available if sufficient people take them up. Groupon, launched in November 2008, has more than 50 million subscribers worldwide, including almost 10 percent of American adults. Although the service is distributed by the Internet, Groupon is a local marketing business and employs 3,000 people in 29 countries.

Reaching critical mass
The key to creating a viral business model is to create a circular process whereby each activity in the cycle involves promoting to or inviting additional users. This process can be the member enrolment process itself, but it is even better if it is another process such as YouTube or Flickr, as the customer then has multiple opportunities to publicise the business and/or invite new members to use it.

A viral business model needs to be built into a new business from the outset, or it will require significant business re-engineering to implement it at a later stage.

Viral business models tend to have ‘tipping points’ – points at which the adoption rates change markedly. These can be hard to predict. For example, one of the tipping points for Twitter was the adoption by celebrities such as Britney Spears, Oprah and, in the UK, Stephen Fry.

When it comes to consumer technologies, how big is big enough? When do they really start to catch on and gain momentum? What happens when they do? These are questions of critical mass – the magical tipping point when user adoption starts producing that old cliche hockey-stick growth that fosters sustainable businesses. It’s worth considering just what defines critical mass in consumer technology.

Historically, critical mass tends to occur when about 15 percent of households or users adopt a new consumer medium or technology. At that point, two things happen: adoption accelerates and new businesses or markets emerge.

In the early 1980s, when 15 to 20 percent of American households owned a VCR, a whole new business around home video rental was created. Blockbuster was born. Adoption accelerated and rental revenues flowed.

Social network usage showed a similar pattern. In 2005, social and professional networks like Friendster, MySpace and LinkedIn were used by fewer than 15 percent of the online population. Two years later, MySpace was generating more page views than Yahoo and cutting billion-dollar ad deals with Google.

Today, with more than 500 million active users, Facebook has more than 10,000 third party applications and widgets, is a platform for other businesses such as social gaming and an advertising and promotional vehicle for brand-name marketers like McDonald’s. The next stage is for it to provide micro-transactions and a virtual currency.

What can we learn from these examples?

Host a sharing service and provide it explicitly. Hotmail, YouTube or Flickr are only of value if they are shared with others and whenever others take advantage of it, they are exposed to the provider of the service.

Tap a social need that requires a network for success. Facebook and Twitter fulfil an emotional need for contact or communication.

Fulfil a practical need. By providing a private network populated only by chosen ‘friends’ Facebook has become a replacement for email that is free from spam.

Provide a service that requires minimum numbers. Groupon requires a minimum number of subscribers for each deal; it is in the interest of prospective purchasers to promote the deal to their friends, and they use social networks like Twitter and Facebook to spread the word.

Make it easy to promote. Many of the viral businesses have buttons that can be placed on other people’s web sites, or links on their services – like the signature link on hotmail. Ancillary services integrate different social networks to provide a one click service.

Recommend a friend; make it easy or reward it. Groupon credits members with £6 for every friend they recommend who then purchases a deal within 72 hours.

Let users generate content. Social networking businesses provide a platform for users to contribute their own content, whether it be videos, photographs or traditional text articles and reviews, and many depend on carrying personal communications. The business provides only the platform and is thus more easily scalable.

Retain first mover advantage. These businesses are successful because of their network. The network is their unique selling proposition. In many cases coming second does not count. It is essential to obtain and retain market leadership. MySpace lost it to Facebook.

Design in scalability. Exponential growth is represented by the hockey stick graph. Growth appears suddenly to take off. If the system fails at this stage, all is lost.

Have a robust business model. Successful viral businesses can consume resources at a great rate. They need either a positive cash flow or considerable working capital. Many of the viral businesses described above generate revenue indirectly, by advertising or from services attracted by the power of their network. Until the network achieves a critical mass, they might have nothing to sell.

Enable Internet sharing. YouTube and Amazon provide HTML code or hyperlinks so that others can embed content into web pages or emails.

Engage in the mobile revolution. The shift to the mobile App Internet using smart phones and tablets is dramatically impacting how traditional services are sold and delivered. Every part of the Internet delivery system will be affected by these tiny tools we call apps. It is forecast that the combined spend on apps and services will be $US54.6 billion a year by 2015.

Introduction
The government intends to build a new dedicated Y-shaped high-speed rail network, comprising a line from London to the West Midlands and onward links to Manchester and Leeds, with stops in the East Midlands and South Yorkshire.

It is intended to create jobs, reshape the economic geography, regenerate urban centres and help to bridge the north-south divide, slashing journey times between Britain’s major cities. It will place Birmingham at the centre of a national railway system with direct links to Europe.

The new network will be built in two phases.

The first phase will run from London’s Euston station to north of Birmingham, where it will join the West Coast mainline railway. A spur at Water Orton will run to a new station at Curzon Street, adjacent to Moor Street Station. There will be intermediate stations west of London at Old Oak Common and at Birmingham Interchange, adjacent to the National Exhibition Centre and Birmingham Airport. At Old Oak Common it will connect to London’s Crossrail, Heathrow Express and, by a new single track link, to High Speed 1.

There will be a rolling stock maintenance depot at Washwood Heath.

The new railway will be constructed to the European loading gauge, which features a larger cross section. In phase one, dedicated high-speed trains will operate between Birmingham and London and Europe, and hybrid trains will operate beyond the system to Manchester, Leeds and Scotland.

Phase two will feature the extensions from the West Midlands to Manchester and Leeds, as well as a high speed spur to Heathrow Airport.

Design and construction will follow seamlessly behind construction of Crossrail. This will provide continuity of expenditure for the public purse and of work for the railway construction supply chain.

By 2026 the journey between Birmingham and London will be reduced from one hour 24 minutes to 49 minutes, Canary Wharf will be one hour 40 minutes and Birmingham Interchange to Paris will be under three hours.

With completion of phase two in 2032/3 the journey time to Manchester will be reduced from 90 minutes to 49 minutes and to Leeds from over two hours to one hour and five minutes.

Capacity
The new railway is needed because the West Coast Mainline will run out of capacity by 2024, if not before.

Passenger journeys increased by 71% between 1994/95 and 2009/10. Rail freight grew by 45% in the ten years to 2006/7. Long distance services on the West Coast route regularly see passengers standing for a significant portion of their journey, particularly in peak hours and at other popular times.

Potential for further upgrading the capacity of the existing line is limited and would incur very considerable disruption to rail users.

Constructing a new line to conventional standards would be only 9% cheaper than a high speed line, with a loss of benefits of 33%.

Britain’s road network cannot offer an effective solution to the rail capacity issues. The unreliability and delay caused by congestion in cities, and particularly in central London, make road travel an unattractive option for journeys into city centres, which are seeing the highest levels of demand growth on the rail network.

Reliability
The dedicated rail service will be able to deliver significantly improved reliability. The High Speed 1 line has a current annual average of just 6.8 seconds delay per train from infrastructure incidents.

‘Classic’ rail
The existing routes between Birmingham and London carry national, local and freight traffic, whose needs conflict. The removal of long distance traffic from the West Coast Main Line will enable the train operators to improve intermediate and local services, with particular benefits for Coventry, Northampton, Rugby and Milton Keynes.

Regeneration
Over the past decade, around half the UK’s economic growth has been concentrated in London and the surrounding regions.

The planning for high speed rail in the UK is able to benefit from the considerable experience of implementing high speed lines in Europe and Japan, so that forecasts of economic regeneration and behavioural change can be based on practical case studies as well as traditional modelling.

Experience in Europe and Japan indicates that investment and regeneration take place near to high speed rail terminals and that economic activity can be dispersed away from the centre. In Lyon, the high speed link to Paris has enabled firms from the city to benefit from improved access to the French capital; 5.3 million square feet of office space and 20,000 jobs have been generated around Lyon’s Part Dieu high speed rail station.

Euralille, adjacent to the Lille TGV interchange station, is now the third largest office complex in France.

Similar patterns have been observed in Japan, where high speed rail has seen a dispersal of investment and economic activity from the main developed region towards the periphery.

Connectivity between the cities of the Midlands and North is particularly poor and is an important reason why their economies continue to function more as isolated units than as a coherent whole. This reduces their potential to act together as a counterweight to the economic strength of London and the South East.

By enabling improved connectivity between the major conurbations in the Midlands and the North, high speed rail could also enable those cities to work more effectively together, bringing benefits from increased competition and specialisation, and putting them in a strong position to benefit from access to wider markets.

Access to Heathrow is often an important factor in business location decisions, particularly for international firms.

Jobs
A London to West Midlands line alone could support the creation of around 40,000 jobs, including more than 8,000 jobs around the proposed Curzon Street terminus and the interchange station near to Birmingham Airport.

Construction of the new London to Birmingham line, would create 9,000 jobs, with a further 1,500 permanent jobs created in operations and maintenance.

New high speed rail lines could also provide business opportunities for firms involved in design, engineering, training and development and operations throughout the UK’s rail industry supply chain.

Environment
Even though power requirements rise with speed, the emissions per passenger mile associated with high speed rail would not necessarily be higher than those from conventional speed rail routes, due to its ability to attract high levels of usage and thus highly efficient load factors.

The enhanced capacity and connectivity of high speed rail could see as many as six million air trips and nine million road trips a year shift onto rail.

The Government is committed to reducing the carbon intensity of electricity generation, and as these improvements take place, the carbon efficiency of electrified rail travel will automatically improve over time.

The new railway would present a major opportunity to reinforce and enhance biodiversity. It would provide a green corridor to be colonised by plants and animals, and could link with and form connections between existing habitats.

Overall, HS2 Ltd expects to plant more than two million trees along the line from London to the West Midlands.

Impact
Around 30 dwellings would need to be demolished to make way for the proposed rolling stock depot at Washwood Heath. Along the London to Birmingham line as a whole around 10 dwellings would be likely to be affected by high noise levels, with around 150 additional properties likely to experience levels of noise which would qualify for noise insulation.

Statutory provisions on blight and compensation will apply to any new high speed line. The Government is also considering what additional measures may be appropriate to help those whose properties would be unlikely to need to be compulsorily purchased in order to build a new line, but who may still experience a significant loss in the value of their property as a result of its proximity.

Issues for concern
The single track link to HS1 from Old Oak Common would enable only three trains per hour in each direction between HS2 and HS1.

Provision for an interchange station serving Birmingham Airport and the National Exhibition Centre, and giving access to the West Midlands motorway network, has been made in the proposed network subject to the identification of an appropriate funding package, including third party contributions.

Richard Winfield, 7/3/2011

As ever, it will be continuously evolving. However, there is plenty for you to browse.

Previous visitors will notice that we have changed the focus from consultancy, coaching, facilitation and training to organisations, managers and directors. This will be reflected in our own internal management structure and make it easier for you to find what you want where you want it.

Use the search box to access the full range of resources
However, we would always recommend that you use our search box. You may be surprised at what is available in the several thousand pages that cannot be easily represented in the menus.

New section for coach training and business resources
You will notice a new section for coaches. This is for people who wish to train as coaches and for coaches who wish to develop their businesses.

ASEC is the coach training arm of Brefi Group in which we draw on three decades of study and experience to design, deliver and license comprehensive training programs; from an introduction for managers through to full professional and commercial training for individuals who wish to make a career in coaching.

We aspire to develop coaches capable of supporting senior executives in major organisations – as well as entrepreneurs and managers of the future.

The programmes draw on international best practice from North America, Europe and Asia, including a range of different coaching methodologies, as well as NeuroLinguistic Programming (NLP) and management consultancy.

They are specifically designed to incorporate the IAC Coaching Masteries™ and are compatible with the 60 hours entry level training for the ICF.

International licensing opportunities
ASEC programs are delivered under licence by partner organisations across Asia, Africa and the Middle East. If you are a coaching or training organisation, or an events organiser, who would like to add coach training programmes to your portfolio – or you would like a licence to deliver them within your own organisation – we would like to hear from you.

The Brefi Group family brought together
The Brefi Group site now incorporates the Director Development Centre, KnowYourProfile, CoachesGetRich and B1G1forCoaches.

Feedback please
We would appreciate your feedback so that we can continue to expand and improve. In particular, we are looking for more business service affiliations for coaches and downloadable products for our resources section.

We have introduced a new comment box for this purpose.

Next stage is to develop a ‘coach in a box’ self development resource, for which we need to video the programmes.

As a result we shall be running a low cost Manager Coach programme in Birmingham, UK, probably in early April. We would like your advice on the best days to hold it. Thank you for your support