CM Whitmore
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ScribdTranslationsCoaching
a nd
Mentoring
What they are and how
to make the most of them
Jane Renton
The coaches
CASE STUDY
Sir John Whitmore
Former motor racing driver Sir John Whitmore is one of the coach-
ing industry's early pioneers. Now in his 70s, he has lost none of
his crusading fire, particularly when it comes to changing what
he regards as the selfish aspects of the modern corporate world, a
process that should rightly begin back in the classroom.
The sporting baronet is in his element challenging the conventional
wisdom of those in positions of authority. The author of Coaching
for Performance is giving an induction in the subject to a group
of 50 largely receptive head teachers of state-controlled schools in
Hertfordshire in his native England.
He asks his audience, whose schools' exam results are among
some of the highest in the UK, to recall their own childhoods and
to think of an adult – not an immediate family member – on whom
they look back with great affection and privately scribble down
the qualities they possessed that engendered such fond memories
ries. Surprisingly, the answers are ubiquitous and universal: that
person made each feel special, valued and intelligent, treated them
as an equal, listened avidly to them, challenged them and believed
in them. Above all, they made them feel that they could succeed.
at their chosen task, given their full attention, care, respect and
trust. In short, they had just demonstrated the key ingredients of
emotional intelligence (ei), which is measured by emotional intel-
intelligence quotient required. He demands:
How come EQ, which has been identified as being as important
as IQ – some say twice as important – to one’s future success in
life and work, is not taught in schools?
How many people in the workforce do you meet who display the
same qualities as those of your favorite aunt or grandmother?
he asks.
Many coaches, particularly business coaches, are happy to work
within the existing status quo: in other words to use coaching as
a means of helping the person being coached climb higher up the
Coaching and Mentoring
career ladder, to attain that coveted pay rise or promotion. Whit-
more is not in that camp:
Coaching is a way of seeing people, don’t try and use it just as
a tool. If you do, you won’t get any real value from it.
In a corporate world obsessed by indicators and measurements of
performance and profitability, Whitmore, chairman of Performance
Consultants International, an international coaching firm, has had
surprisingly little difficulty in commanding a receptive audience
among global business leaders. His words, which may sound harsh,
appear to have struck a chord with corporate clients. He claims:
The economy was invented exclusively for the western mindset.
It is inherently hierarchical and currently in the process of
breakdown.
The workplace, he adds, is also an environment of fear, which
needs to be challenged. There is another way, an environment of
trust.
Conquering fear is something that the former racing driver clearly
relishes
Only by helping people liberate themselves from their fears
can you unlock the unlimited potential that most individuals
possess. That’s what a good coach does.
Fear of failure rather than fear of injury or death is what leads to
underperformance on the motor racing circuits and in life generally
ally. He tells of his own brief return to the race track in 1990 after
his retirement from motor racing in 1966 and the invaluable lesson
learned from his son, who was then five years old. "It was a chal-
Long I couldn't resist," he says. He was asked to drive an 8.4 litre
McLaren M8F in which he came a respectable third and second in
his first two races. But trouble hit just before the third race – and it
wasn’t of the mechanical variety. He explains:
It was in my head. There I was just too full of adrenaline, I feared.
not meeting my goal – to win this one.
Skulking in his hotel room until the last possible moment before
going down to the race in an effort to conquer his fear of failure,
The coaches
he was astounded to receive a badly spelt note from his young son.
“Believe in yourself,” it read. It was a turning point for the sports-
man, who went on to win the race.
His move into initially sports coaching – as opposed to traditional
sports instruction – followed an influential encounter with Tim
Gallwey (see page 79). Gallwey’s big idea that extraneous interfer-
Often the orders given by an overly autocratic coach instruct
tor – interfered with the sophisticated natural mechanisms that the
the human body has in place to deal with the arguably simple task,
found particular resonance with Whitmore, who also suspected
that sports coaches would do better to talk less and listen more to
their charges.
Gallwey's particular philosophy was centred on the core belief
that the biggest obstacle of all to proficiency at sports was the
negative thoughts going on within a player’s own head. The job
of the coach was therefore not to instruct in the traditional sense,
thereby complicating matters still further, but to help de-clutter
the mind of all such unhelpful thoughts to free the person up to
learn naturally.
Whitmore, who claims he has taught golf for 20 years without ever
actually playing the game himself, says:
You don’t have to be an expert in a particular field of endeavor.
our to be an effective coach. I don’t teach people anything about
golf. All I do is help create awareness and self-responsibility in
the person being coached. Their own high awareness is their
teacher.
Many of the more progressive sports coaches have been influenced
influenced by the 'inner game', none of the UK's top sporting stars
more than Olympic Gold medallist David Hemery. However, the
take-up generally has been painfully slow because it requires a
major rethink.
Traditionalists just can’t get away from imposing their long accu-
mulated knowledge, which frequently is entirely inappropriate.
"ate," says Whitmore, who laments that while new technology
is adopted at the speed of light, old habits die hard among the
Coaching and Mentoring
sporting fraternity. He believes that this has been reflected in the
state of British tennis, which with the exception of Tim Henman
and Andy Murray has produced few good players for quite some time.
time. In contrast, New Zealand is well on the way to changing
much of its sports coaching to what Whitmore describes as 'real'
coaching.
Like Gallwey’s, Whitmore’s approach grew out of humanistic philosophy.
philosophy with its essentially optimistic view that mankind can be
improved upon by focusing remedially not on what was wrong
with it, but rather on its potential. He initially set up the Inner
Game skiing and tennis school in Europe before branching out into
other fields, particularly business, with the establishment of his
coaching company.
Whitmore also realized, like Gallwey, who subsequently wrote The
Inner Game of Business, that their respective and similar brands of
Coaching had a much wider application than just sport.
Transpersonal coaching is the next stage of that coaching process.
addressing whole systems such as families, schools, institutions
and organisations. It also addresses what Whitmore calls “whole
personal development, which embraces the higher reaches of
human aspiration, as well as spiritual development. As the fledg-
The coaching industry endeavors to impose standards and qual-
specifications on its less-qualified practitioners, he is determined to
ensure that transpersonal coaching is included in this.
Whitmore, who believes that such coaching applied to the busi-
ness world would do much to engender greater social, environ-
mental and economic responsibility, says:
Transpersonal coaching is about the qualitative rather than the
quantitative. We are knowledgeable but not wise, particularly
in our use of technology.
His mission is to help embed coaching into corporate management.
culture and link it to the entire training process by creating a team
of advanced internal coaches, and by making coaching a key per-
performance indicator as well as part of the return on investment
evaluation.
The coaches
But none of this can work if a company’s chief executive does
not believe in coaching. Whitmore recalls a series of coaching pro-
grams that he was running for one of the five major UK clearing
banks:
I insisted on a meeting with the CEO because I needed to tell
him to his face that he was wasting his money. You have to
believe in coaching at the very top of an organisation for it to
work. Change at the top, with ongoing support and role model-
ling, is crucial.
The same is true for his current audience in the UK’s educational
establishment, with teaching methods that have relied almost
exclusively on instilling knowledge into pupils with mixed success
rather than unleashing a system that initiates self-learning as well
as self-reliance:
We are talking about learning rather than teaching. Once you
realize the principles of how people learn you can apply them
to youngsters.