Articles

"Coaching At Work" Magazine

Published in England by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD)
January/February 2007 Volume 2 Issue 1, page 19

Letter from Turkey

Merhaba and hosgeldiniz! Hello and welcome from Turkey, and from me, an American who adopted Istanbul as hometown and headquarters five years ago. In 2002, I started Istanbul’s first executive coaching firm with my Turkish partner Hande Yasargil. Since then the Turkish economy has slowly and steadily improved, and the popularity of our profession has grown right along with it.
 
Virtually unknown five years ago, coaching and mentoring are accepted best practices in Turkey today, not only in multinationals, but in leading Turkish companies like Turkcell and Koc Group as well.  Even traditional and state-owned companies are beginning to test the waters, and several charitable organizations are making use of mentoring to address social concerns. Let me offer my view on how these changes have happened so rapidly in the last five years.
 
The words themselves faced a kind of challenge here. Transliterated in Turkish, “Coach” is “Koc” – a male sheep, also a family name belonging to the country’s largest holding group. “Mentor” is something Greek. Enough said. Some efforts have been made to engineer more Turkish sounding alternatives, but “Kocluk ve Mentorluk” are generally accepted now.
 
The term “coaching” first appeared here in the late 90s when HR departments added coaching skills training to the menu of their management development programs. Looking back, these programs introduced ideas about questioning and being non-directive, but had little impact on management behavior. Why? At that time, traditional ways of managing were not sufficiently challenged by the new business realities. High unemployment, absence of performance appraisal and incentives, and limits on competition created a comfortable environment for most managers to “do what they had always done.”
 
The 2001 economic crisis started a radical change. Massive layoffs made business organizations flatter, bureaucracy less viable, and inefficiencies easier to track down. Reforms related to EU accession also led to greater competition—for sales, and for talent. Today, managers and executives are under greater pressure to perform with less command and control. It isn’t New York or London, but the ball is rolling.
 
Our coaching firm, which is now a part of the international Praesta organization, has hosted an annual coaching and mentoring conference in Istanbul since 2003. Conference speakers like David Clutterbuck, Jessica Jarvis, Robin Linnecar, and Steve Crabb, have gone a long way to educate local buyers about the practice and value of coaching and mentoring.
 
Multinational companies have been influential in encouraging Turkish managers to develop a coaching style. Sector leaders like Pfizer, PepsiCo, Microsoft and Turkcell were early buyers of external executive coaching services in Turkey; and have gone a step further in supporting the profession as founder members in Turkey’s first professional association for coaching and mentoring. EMCC Turkey was chartered in 2005 with a balanced membership, half coaching providers and the rest evenly divided between HR managers and business school professors/researchers. EMCC’s President Julie Hay visited Istanbul this summer and spoke at a public reception. There is also an ICF chapter forming in Turkey, and visitors from abroad have offered some training opportunities for life coaches during the last twelve months.
 
In every locale, companies want to retain their best talent, develop leaders, and foster a learning culture. In pursuit of those goals some companies in Turkey are now initiating coordinated mentoring programs. Local drug maker Bilim Ilac, as well as Coca-Cola, and DHL have all used the International Standards for Mentoring Programs in Employment (ISMPE) as a guidepost for new mentoring schemes in 2006.
 
What is available in the market today? An HR director searching for coaching and mentoring services in Turkey now will find 4 or 5 coaching companies with a corporate approach and international connections. They may discover 10 or so individual coaches with reputable training—some with a background in business, others in psychology. A couple of foreign consulting firms will offer to fly-in a coach from abroad. As in every other market, there are a few “cowboys” and “gurus” who focus on everything from NLP to reducing cellulite. Almost every training company they talk to will have added “coaching skills” to their menu of offerings. And for an in-company mentoring program they will find only one or two consultants with a successful track record.
 
Maybe the most newsworthy development is that Istanbul Bilgi Universtity is preparing to offer a professional coaching and mentoring certification program in cooperation with PDF/Middlesex University in the U.K. “We believe this will be the first internationally recognized practitioner-level coaching certification offered by a Turkish University,” says Ecmel Ayral of the University’s executive development center. “We hope it will set a standard for the profession in Turkey by creating an EMCC Quality Award certification program to benefit both line-managers and professional coaches.”
 
That sums up what I know about coaching and mentoring in Turkey, but I’m sure it isn’t the whole story. Turkey has a population of 70 million with +14 million in Istanbul alone, so I’m sure there are things going on out there that I know little or nothing about. For example, I met two young women from Izmir recently who were starting a niche business, coaching students on exam preparations and career choices. I’m sure the profession will expand in many interesting directions here in the years ahead.

Lloyd Denton

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Lloyd Denton is a Board Director of Praesta International Ltd., and Managing Partner of Mentor Leadership Development. He provides coaching for senior executives in Turkey and the Arab Gulf region, and consults on leadership development issues. Lloyd is a member of the EMCC steering committee, and serves as the EMCC’s board liaison with the ICF.