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"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.
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