The Intentional Design of Stewardship: A Case Study

A proposal was presented at the summit for a second phase of this Development of Coaches research project. A revised (and shortened) digital survey would be created that builds off key findings from the first survey. This survey would be sent out to an even more diverse population than that receiving the first survey. Results would once again be published in LPC. Several summit participants have expressed interest in assisting IRPC with this project and one has suggested serving as a liaison with the University of Chicago researchers so that a unique and detailed comparison might be made between the development, perspectives and practices of professional coaches and psychotherapists. This comparative study has long been wanted by practitioners in both human service fields.

Follow-up Programs

Consideration is now being given to future summit-related programs. As was done in planning for the original summit, a survey monkey was sent to the 120 invitees to the 2022 summit asking about their interest in a future summit (both in-person and virtual) and about the reasons they might attend or decide not to attend such an event.

While there might not be another summit convened in the near future, the other initiatives that have been sparked by the 2022 summit suggest that there is ongoing stewardship of the executive coaching field that has been nurtured by the New Executive Coaching Summit, along with the pre-summit and post-summit activities associated with this special open space meeting.

Conclusions

In this essay, we’ve tried to elaborate on a model of stewardship by actively leading the way with NECS. In convening, communicating, and clarifying we tried to find the people who want to be involved and share and sharpen a common vision about what we would do together—we created consensus.

Each of those four steps provide important input to whether stewardship makes any change because the quality of convening, communicating, and clarifying develop the amount of ownership in consensus. And ownership—the personal emotional investment we have creating particular outcomes—is what drives (or fails to drive) execution. Ultimately, stewardship requires a disciplined and sustained engagement based on this personal investment. It is in this engagement that a vision becomes real.

It’s only with ownership animating execution and disciplined, sustained engagement that we can really change things—this is what gives energy to shape process, energizes the changes in structure, and continues to positively focus on attitude.
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