Observation Of Unstructured Play

The 5 Hidden Roles of the Managerial Coach

Much has been written about the critical role that managers play as developmental coaches, and how essential such coaching is to helping leaders improve their performance and prepare for next-level assignments. In attempting to identify what makes managers successful as coaches, many leadership development and talent management professionals have focused on the need for managers to be able to build trust, listen effectively, provide clear performance feedback, and model effective leadership behaviors.

While I would be the first to agree that these foundational factors are very important, I would also suggest that we often overlook five managerial coaching roles that are critical to the success of developmental coaching. In the remainder of this article, I would like to briefly discuss how managers who are capable of excelling within these coaching roles can greatly accelerate the development of their leaders. These suggestions are based, in part, on my book, (Pfeiffer, 2011).

ROLE 1 Organizational translator

Most learning and organization development professionals would agree that the starting point for developmental coaching involves helping leaders identify their most critical development gaps. While this sounds simple enough, let’s consider how this step is typically performed today. Quite often, the catalyst for a development discussion is the annual performance review.

In conducting the review, a manager typically reviews the work that an employee has performed during the past year, and provides feedback on that individual’s overall performance. Hopefully, managers also use this opportunity to provide targeted feedback regarding a leader’s strengths and areas for improvement.

The problem with this approach is that it comes up short when we are dealing with exceptional leaders. I say this because this approach is designed to help leaders make incremental improvements in their current performance, rather than developing them for broader leadership roles that may involve entirely different sets of job demands and work challenges.

In contrast, managers who wish to engage in a “close-the-gap” discussion with exceptional performers need to start out by helping each leader construct a clear picture of that individual’s career target; that is, the next-step leadership role or position that the leader wishes to achieve. (For some leaders, this may involve a significant expansion of responsibilities within their present position.) Managers and leaders need to work together to identify the critical demand features of that role or position. The term “demand features” refers to those job characteristics that are likely to present a leader with her greatest developmental challenges.

Questions Arising from Course Discussions at Jukupedia • Shadowing ...

I always enjoy presenting aspects of my research on juku to new groups of people as there never fail to be different questions on various aspects that I report on.

The UBC Continuing Studies course that I’m teaching is no different in this regard especially since most of the course participants have a (Canadian schools) teaching background and seem to be quite interested in aspects of the developments that I’m recounting.

One of the questions that came up today was about the impact of time spent in structured activities, including juku, on Japanese children and especially on their overall development.

As with so many questions on juku outcome measurements (including, very significantly, the efficacy of juku instruction), my first response was to point to the very real methodological challenge in comparing populations of students when these are young and ethical concerns prevent the use of non-voluntary control groups.

[ HUGE CAVEAT : I'm neither a neurologist, nor childhood development expert, so what follows are informed musings rather than research conclusions.]

My eyes have been opened to many different aspects of and aspirations for education through my research on juku. While inclined toward cultural relativism to begin with (some simplistic form thereof, not entirely thought-out or developed) and intent on a Weberian stance of neutrality in observation and analysis, I have abandoned most of my notions associated with ‘cram school’ in the course of my research. Most of this shift in my thinking has come about through interactions with many of the individuals involved in juku who not only talk about having the best interests of their students in mind, but act accordingly as well.

That is not to romanticize the juku world and to claim that parts of it are not focused exclusively on a relatively rote memorization that does not seem to make the world, nor the students involved a better place/person.

So when a question about human development is raised and focuses on an area like unstructured play, I often think to myself that that is a very contemporary, North American/Oceanian/European notion. That doesn’t mean that I don’t share the intuition that unstructured play seems to offer elements of social development that many organized play activities don’t, I’m just not certain that these elements are typical or necessary for human development. The question in the discussion today, by the way, did not imply that necessary link.

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Creative arts therapies manual, a guide to the history, theoretical approaches, assessment, and work with special populations of art, play, dance, music, drama, and poetry therapies

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International handbook of play therapy, advances in assessment, theory, research, and practice