Clare Norman: Author of The Transformational Coach, Master Mentor Coach, Podcast host: Lifting the Lid on Coaching Supervision

In this episode master certified coach Clare Norman discusses the evolution and intricacies of coaching. 

Norman elaborates on how coaching culture has shifted within organizations, moving from a traditional command-and-control approach to one that embraces coaching methodologies.

She reflects on her experience at Accenture and her journey to becoming an independent coach, offering insights into the challenges and rewards of this transition. The podcast highlights the differences in coaching at various certification levels, underscoring the value of mentor coaching and supervision in a coach's professional development.

A significant portion of the discussion is devoted to the concept of coachability. Norman emphasizes the crucial role of a coach in fostering coachability in their clients, which involves understanding and adapting to individual client needs. Operational aspects of coaching, such as session duration and structure, are also addressed.

Norman advocates for the ongoing development of coaching skills. She stresses that coaches should continually seek mentor coaching and supervision, beyond meeting formal certification requirements, to enhance their effectiveness.

The episode concludes with Norman's perspective on the future of coaching. She discusses the importance of developing a coaching mindset and cultivating coachability, not only among clients but also within the coaching community itself, to adapt to the evolving demands of the field.

Transcript

Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee
Clare Norman

(interview blurb)

Clare: Supervision, it’s self-reported. It keeps us safe and sane. Mentor coaching is bringing your actual coaching to be scrutinized and it keeps us sharp. It brings us back to our sharpest edge time and time and time again.

(intro)

Alex: Hi, I’m Alex Pascal, CEO of Coaching.com, and this is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. My guest today is a master certified coach with the International Coaching Federation, a mentor coach and a certified coach advisor. She has focused on maximizing individual, team, and organization effectiveness for over 25 years. Her purpose is to enable people to express their needs in service of a more caring world. Please welcome Clare Norman.

(Interview)

Alex: Hi, Clare. 

Clare: Hello, Alex. It’s so nice to re-meet you after all these years. 

Alex: I know. It’s so funny how we’ve been talking for so long and we both went through our email to see when we first connected and it was October 2015 so it’s been a while.

Clare: Yeah, it certainly has.

Alex: Let’s start where we always start on Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee, unless we talk about some old email correspondence first. What are we drinking today? 

Clare: We are drinking a red bush tea, or rooibos, as it is I think more properly known. I drink it with milk because I like it to taste a bit like an old tea, although for somebody who drinks a normal tea, it doesn’t taste like an old tea, it’s a bit of an acquired taste. But I love it. Uncaffeinated, naturally uncaffeinated, so it’s not decaffeinated, it’s naturally uncaffeinated tea. 

Alex: And I was going to match you with the exact same thing but it’s a Wednesday today that we’re shooting this episode and it’s 8:55 a.m. here in LA and I just looked at my matcha that I bought yesterday, I was like, “I gotta make some matcha,” so I’m matching you with the tea category and I’m doing an iced matcha Americano. 

Clare: Ooh. That sounds very LA to me. 

Alex: It is very LA. It is, of course, I’ve got organic matcha, you’re going to be shot here in LA unless you do it the right way. You can get shot in LA for non-matcha-related purposes as well but, you know, I feel like it’s been good lately. I haven’t heard of anyone getting shot — 

Clare: How did we get onto that?

Alex: — recently. Well, I do live in LA. People ask me all the time, like, “But LA is so dangerous,” I’m like, honestly, I grew up in Mexico City so this doesn’t seem dangerous to me. And even Mexico City, I don’t think it’s as dangerous as it used to be many, many years ago when I grew up there. But we’re off to a rocky start with our episode today, already covered all these fascinating topics while we’re talking about our drinks. So, let’s go on to another fascinating topic, which is really your journey, the journey of your career. I know you’ve had some really cool roles at some large companies like Accenture and you’ve always been a coaching advocate, you’re an MCC level coach, so please take me through your journey. How did you end up doing what you do today? And, second question, I’d love to know when you first heard about this thing called coaching. 

Clare: Yeah. So, well, I’m going to answer that one first because I was heading up our leaders of all levels strategy within Accenture and this was 22 years ago. And I was noticing that people were coming on our programs, on our courses and having all these wonderful epiphanies about how they might wish to be different when they went back to the workplace. Habits that they wanted to change in the way that they led their people. But then when they got back into the real world of work, they slipped back into their old habits. So, I was looking around for ways to transfer the learning out of the classroom and into the workplace, and coaching was one of the things that I stumbled across. And I remember reading some research at the time that suggested that if you went on training alone, you might, if you were lucky, get 20 percent change in behavior, but if you tagged on coaching on the back end of that training, then you were more likely to get about an 88 percent change in behavior, so I was fascinated by that idea of being able to support people to make the changes that they really wanted to make as a result of being in these workshops. So that’s how I got into coaching. I started to get myself trained. Yes, you talked about me being a great advocate for coaching. I really was one of the major advocates for coaching within Accenture, trying to move us from being a command and control kind of culture to using more of a coach approach to leadership. It was a long, long, long, long journey, but with persistence and patience, that did start to make — we made some inroads. And so I was coaching internally, not officially part of my job but I made it a part of my job because I loved it so much and I could see the difference it was making to people and the ripple effects that it was having around the organization as that one person I was coaching had an impact on somebody else who had an impact on somebody else. And I created this thing called the 30-Day Challenge which was all about making a ripple effect with tiny, tiny micro habit changes and that had a big impact. Those were kind of coach-like habit changes. I could go on and on and on about what I did there at Accenture. So I was coaching in Accenture for about 14 years and then my role was made redundant and it was at that point that I went independent. So I’ve been independent for nine years in January 2024. At first, I thought I wanted to be a head of coaching in another organization but those roles don’t get advertised, they get created by somebody internally. 

Alex: Yeah, that’s a hard role to kind of get recruited onto. 

Clare: Yeah, exactly. 

Alex: It happens. 

Clare: Yeah, occasionally, yeah. I also realized I would quite like to be my own boss. 

Alex: It’s not terrible being your own boss, yeah.

Clare: It’s really not terrible at all. 

Alex: Well, I can’t really speak from experience because I report to a board, but, yeah, I know what you mean.

Clare: Yeah. There’s lots to learn in those first few years of being independent. There’s still lots to learn about building a business, which, of course, is a skill that many coaches don’t necessarily have behind them when they start a coaching business. 

Alex: You don’t think about it when you start a coaching business, right? You’re like, “Oh, now I’m gonna be a coach,” and, suddenly, it’s like, okay, where are all the leads coming from and who’s was managing your website? 

Clare: Yeah, all the operations, all the admin, all the bookkeeping, all the —

Alex: The fun stuff.

Clare: Yeah. Well, no.

Alex: Hint of sarcasm there, yes.

Clare: Yeah. So I’ve been doing that for nine years. In that time, well, just this year, in fact, I finally racked up enough hours to be able to go for my MCC. So 22 years in, took me a long time to get enough hours, but as I say to people, it is not all about the hours because if every hour of coaching we do is the same hour of coaching that we did when we were an ACC or even a PCC, we’re not going to get our MCC. It is really different. And in the last couple of years, I invested in 23 hours of mentor coaching to make sure I was ready and that I am consistently coaching at the MCC level, not just for the purposes of the two recordings that I submitted but that it’s consistent. 

Alex: For those coaches listening that perhaps don’t know, they heard about MCC, they know it’s kind of where they would want to end up, maybe they’re ACC, maybe they’re a PCC, maybe they haven’t kind of caught on the ICF pathway, when you say coaching at the MCC level, just briefly, what does that mean? 

Clare: It means going deeper than you might otherwise go. It’s digging underneath the surface. It’s being completely with them in that moment. So coaching presence is — I mean, we talked about it at the other levels but it is just like exponentially higher at MCC. You need to be triply curious. I mean, coaches are being curious all the time but there is something about — it’s curiosity on their behalf, not on my behalf. So all the time, helping them to make meaning of what they’re saying. So as one MCC I know says, skipping over nothing. So checking out what they mean by certain words or what an emotion says to them. It’s also accessing wisdom so we would call it evoking awareness in ICC competency terms but it’s accessing that wisdom from every part of the body as well, every sense that we have. So, it’s not just sitting and talking, it is also tapping into the somatics, it is tapping into the feelings, it is what’s that facial expression and what does it say to them. So it’s all of those things, and more. And some — I think I used to believe that it was a bit of magic because I couldn’t figure out what is this thing that I’m aiming for? How do I know that I am operating at that level? At the time, the ICF had not created the behaviorally anchored rating scales which they now have and that makes it really clear what the measures of success are for being masterful. So that said, it’s not magic. It is aligned to a benchmark. But there is something really magical about masterful coaching. 

Alex: Yeah, I agree. And presence is so important and is one of those things that we talk about but there’s a whole art of being present and I think it’s part of the reasons why we call coaching and someone’s coaching a coaching practice and when I think about “practice” of things, I also think about like meditation. I think it’s so important for coaches to master breath work and meditation because nothing grounds you more than being in tune with your breath. And, as a coach, you get pulled in different directions in a conversation and being able to go back to that breathing and stay present, it’s hard. It’s hard to listen to someone for an extended period of time digging underneath the surface and even if you’re at MCC level, if you’re doing that all the time with your clients, it can get monotonous. And the thing about presence is it can never get monotonous because if it gets monotonous and you just get on autopilot, are you really truly present or are you on that? autopilot mode? 

Clare: Yeah, yeah, exactly. One of my mentor coaches, Tara Nolan, said to me that actually 40 minutes is probably about the extent of the time that we can physically stay that present and masterful. So, that says to me, that perhaps all of our coaching sessions should not exceed 40 minutes if that’s the length of time that we can stay that present. 

Alex: You know, that’s a very good, interesting point and one that I’ve been talking to a lot of coaches about, which is the duration of their coaching sessions and there seems to be a shift towards shorter sessions, hitting a couple points then going back to work for the client to apply some of these follow-on items that they may have from coaching, maybe it’s actually, “Okay, well, this is something I wanted to work on, I get it, let’s connect next week, let’s connect in two weeks,” and it seems like coaching is becoming a lot more fluid and coaches are less pragmatic about — they’re more flexible, it seems like, and I do notice that across levels on the ICF, ACC, PCC, MCC kind of journey. I do get a sense that the more advanced the coach is, the more they’re able to be flexible with the way they think about how they structure their coaching relationships. 

Clare: Yes, I agree, and it’s not a one size fits all. Packages of coaching I don’t think work for everyone. I’d rather talk to a person and find out what they need and then we decide together what the amount of sessions they need is and if we decide that we’re going to do walking coaching together, we might have longer sessions maybe but, actually, an hour tends to be enough for a walking session and we only really make it a bit longer because they’re traveling to get here so it makes most of them getting here so they come to me in the forest. I live in the New Forest, which is a national park in the south of the UK, and it’s beautiful. We have ponies clip clopping past the door. 

Alex: I want to go for a walking coaching session. 

Clare: Come, Alex. It would be very different to LA, definitely. I get off track now talking about ponies in the New Forest. 

Alex: You’re just thinking about the forest. 

Clare: Yeah, exactly. But I like the focus of a half-an-hour or 45-minute session. I know if we are that focused, we can do some really great work because we’re not shilly-shallying around, that might be a very British expression. We’re not messing around. We’re getting to the point. They walk away with something of real value. I know some coaches who coach for two hours who say, “How can you do that in such a short space of time?” Well, you can if you get focused. But what I also find with that, particularly a 45-minute session, given the current climate where people are in back-to-back meetings, a 45-minute meeting means that they usually have 15 minutes before their next meeting, which means if they don’t go straight back into their emails or pick up the phone to somebody else, they’ve got 15 minutes to let it sink in, to really assimilate what they have learned about themselves in that coaching session and to just let it percolate a bit more or to make some inroads on some of those actions that they said they were going to take. So if, for example, they decided that they were going to, I don’t know, schedule a meeting with somebody, they’ve got that 15 minutes to do it right there and then. It’s more likely to happen if they do it straight away. So, I don’t know, there’s lots of good reasons for doing a 45-minute session, it feels to me.

Alex: I like the idea of a 45-minute session, both as a coach and a coachee. But it is interesting how you go through that journey as a coach and you start more rigid with, “Hey, I’m selling this package,” and then you develop the expertise to understand where to meet the client, and I was talking to David Goldsmith not too long ago and he was saying, “I’m looking at my calendar and I have a few 15-minute coaching sessions and I have a few hour-and-a-half coaching sessions and I have few 45-minute sessions.” So it is kind of cool to be able to get to that level of mastery where you can meet the client where they are as opposed to the client kind of meeting you where you kind of pre-structure your packages around, so it’s interesting and for us building kind of software to help coaches manage their coaching practices, I think, over time, we could embed some functionality to enable more of that flexibility. I mean, you can change the duration of the session but it’ll be interesting, maybe some innovation around when you’re scheduling a session, just kind of asking some questions and then, based on the answers, say, “You know, it seems like you may need like 30-minute coaching checking,” or something like that. That’s interesting, I think that works best when you are purchasing coaching as a package for a certain period of time versus just paying on an hourly basis or something. So there’s so many interesting innovations you could do at the boring side of coaching, which is a lot of what we handle, the operational side. A lot of the innovation in coaching comes down to rethinking some of these established processes too.

Clare: Yeah, and streamlining them and giving us time back in our days to get on with the actual coaching rather than the faffing around with. I don’t know what we’d be faffing around with but admin and operations and —

Alex: Totally.

Clare: Yeah.

Alex: Before they start sounding like a Coaching.com commercial, which we never do in these episodes, we really don’t, I actually have a question for you. So, you have a distinction between supervision and coach mentoring or mentorship or mentor coaching that I think is really cool. So, I saw it kind of like in the preface of one of your books so would love for you to walk me through how you see coach supervision and mentor coaching being different. 

Clare: Yeah. The short description that I — the pithy way that I describe the difference between the two is that mentor coaching keeps us sharp and supervision keeps us safe and sane. So there are different things that we bring to each. And so mentor coaching keeps us sharp. That is where we bring a recording of ourselves coaching, or we coach live in the room, and we get feedback on our coaching. So we’re really shining a light on our actual coaching. That means that we start to see all of our blind spots because they’ll alight, the spotlight is right on us. And I don’t mean to scare people away with this talk. But that’s what makes it really distinct from supervision. It is a form of supervision, you could say, because supervision does look at our competence as a coach but we’re not talking about our competence, we are looking at or listening to our competence. So there is nowhere to hide from the mentor coach and the feedback. And from an ICF perspective, we use the competencies as the benchmark. So I use the PCC markers, whether people are going for ACC or PCC, and if they are going for MCC, we use the competencies as the benchmark. So I use the PCC markers whether people are going for ACC or PCC, and if they are going for MCC, we use the behaviorally anchored rating scales, it’s really hard to get that out. 

Alex: Behaviorally anchored rating scales, yes, that is — it almost sounds like a drinking game.

Clare: Yes. Yeah, exactly. Can’t get your teeth around that. So because we’re using that benchmark of the markers or the bars, it means that the feedback can be objective and evidence based. So I heard you say X and that was an example of Y PCC marker, or there was an opportunity at this point to insert said PCC marker. So it’s really objective if you’re working with a mental coach who really understands the PCC markers inside out and back to front. Supervision, on the other hand, is you bring something to talk about. So it might be talking about how-tos, particularly if you’re a beginner coach and you’re still finding your feet and you’re wanting to figure out what interventions you might want to use with a particular client who you’re getting stuck with, for example, so you would talk about that, or you would talk about an ethical issue that you’re facing or you would talk about your own health and wellbeing. So, I’ve said supervision is about your sanity and your safety so sanity is about re-resourcing yourself, if you are feeling exhausted because maybe you’ve been doing too much coaching or it might be that you’re doing too much coaching back to back and not getting a rest in between or maybe it’s something in life, like you’re not getting enough sleep, whatever. So supervision, you can bring any of those things to talk about. Anything that has an impact on your coaching, you would bring to supervision. Supervision is self-reported. It keeps us safe and sane. Mental coaching is bringing your actual coaching to be scrutinized and it keeps us sharp. It brings us back to our sharpest edge time and time and time again. So, at this point, I don’t need to do any more mentor coaching because I got my MCC. In fact, it was a requirement for my MCC. But I believe that mentor coaching is for life, not just credentialing, because I notice how much development I get by talking with another coach, more experienced coach, and scrutinizing a recording that I bring to him or her and figuring out where could I tweak that and then experimenting in between mentor coaching sessions in my coaching, trying stuff out and seeing the difference that it can make to the person that I’m working with.

Alex: How do you balance both? If you’re a coach, let’s say you’re a PCC coach, you’re on your journey to MCC, how do you balance access to supervision and also mentor coaching? Both from just a practical perspective and also a cost perspective, because it’s expensive to do supervision, to do coach mentoring, so if you’re sitting as a kind of full-time PCC coach that is on the kind of road to mastery, what does that look like in terms of the blending of both? 

Clare: Yeah. So I do think it’s a blend of both. I see them as yin and yang. They go together but are separate and very different. So my personal commitment to myself is to have three sessions of mentor coaching a year. I have more supervision than that. I probably have six to eight sessions of supervision a year. And my philosophy is that mentor coaching and supervision, they meet me where I am, are much more tailored to me and the coach I am and where I am at the moment in my coaching journey so I would much prefer to spend my training budget, if you want to call it a training budget, on mentor coaching and supervision rather than more training because I learn a load more by focusing on who I am being rather than being in a room of 20 or 30 other people or a virtual room where it’s not tailored to who I am coming into that room. I’m probably biased because I offer both of those things, mentor coaching and supervision, but also for myself, I do practice what I preach and those are the two. If I were short on money for development, those would be the two things I would not drop. I would drop training rather than those two things.

Alex: Yeah, I think finding a balance is important. You just don’t know what we’re walking into sometimes in our coaching journey, and even the distinction you made around mentor coaching and supervision, it’s probably very enlightening to a lot of coaches that have heard about these as a requirement, but it’s interesting when you go from something being a requirement to something that actually makes sense to you and you can connect with how it will help you achieve your goals. And training — you know, I’m a big proponent of continuing education for coaches.

Clare: Of course you do.

Alex: Obviously, we do a lot of really cool programs. What I get excited about is the different methodologies that you can learn about that then you can bring to your practice. So, ultimately, we really focus on bringing tools, but then you have to sharpen those tools, right? To me, it all comes together, it’s like get interesting tools and then work with a mentor coach to make sure that those are sharpened in a way that makes sense for you and your clients and then stay sane in the process. So I think it all is kind of part of the cycle and they’re all requirements in the ICF process, which you can make CCEUs something like, “Oh, I have to go and do it,” or you can make it something exciting that you learn from. I do want to anchor on the fact that, at least in the United States, we are very early stage with a more deep approach to supervision and mentor coaching. And to me, it’s just such a big opportunity to upscale the level of coaching. And I say to the US because it is the largest market in the world for coaching and it is one that also has been very resistant to put supervision and mentor coaching at the forefront, like other regions, certain countries have done. Well, first of all, do you agree with that? And, second, if you do, which I can see you do because everyone agrees in coaching, it’s kind of like shocking the state of supervision and mentor coaching in the US, why do you think that the US market has resisted a more definite approach to these?

Clare: I don’t know. I don’t understand your culture sometimes. Yeah, we’re definitely further ahead in the UK and in Europe, I don’t know about Asia, in embracing this thing called supervision. I think anyone who aligns themselves with the ICF will automatically be required to do mentor coaching so they will do that, whether they’re in the US or not, if they want to be an ICF aligned coach. But supervision has never been required by the ICF. It is required by the EMCC, European Mentoring and Coaching Council. It is required by the Association for Coaching. It is required by APEX. So all these other coaching bodies, apart from the ICF require supervision. So there may be something about that that the ICF requires mentor coaching but it doesn’t require supervision and so people just haven’t gotten onboard with the need to stay safe and sane through supervision. Whether they’re finding other means to say stay safe and sane, I don’t know, but I do think we will slowly, slowly move towards it becoming a requirement to have supervision as well as mentor coaching. At the moment, the ICF does say that you can use up to 10 hours of mentor coaching and up to 10 hours of supervision towards your re-credential, so the 40 hours of CCEs that you need for renewal. So supervision is in there but it’s not a requirement. You can use those things. If you’re in supervision and you want to use those hours, you can. So the only thing is making it a requirement doesn’t mean that people will necessarily feel that they are falling over themselves to do it. They might feel that they’re being forced to do it. That’s the downside of things being a requirement. It might be a tick-the-box exercise. So we do need to be careful about how we introduce something that’s a requirement. With mentor coaching, sometimes, coaches approach that as a tick box exercise, they think, “Oh, I’ve got to get these 10 hours,” and they try and get through them as quickly as they can and with the minimum of effort. But, actually, if you look at it as a developmental tool, that’s going to help you to become a much better coach and if you do the prep before you come to your mentor coaching so that you can have a really in-depth discussion with your mentor coach about the bits that you want to have a discussion about, then the more you put in, the more you get out. Even making something required doesn’t necessarily mean that people will show up in a way that enables them to get the most development from it. 

Alex: I think we need to start with a basic definition like we did today and really understanding how they’re different and I think a lot of coaches overlap those and I like your take on, if we make something a requirement, maybe the value seems different and then you may feel forced to do it. But I see great potential in bringing more supervision to the fold in the US as well as also thinking about the role of mentor coaching beyond the requirements. You’re really thinking about how do we, as coaches, how do we find a good fit? What does a good fit look like for a mentor coach and how long you should work with that person, how frequently and when it’s time to maybe find another mentor coach? And those relationships can really help you accelerate your development as a coach. I think coach development is fascinating because coaches are out there helping people develop at scale so the impact of coaching is exponential. To be able to have the people that have, in our nurturing that exponential force and power, to be able to help them continue to develop themselves through supervision, mentor coaching, different certification pathways, learning about sharpening different tools, it is so powerful. I mean, it really has such a major impact in the world.

Clare: Yeah, I’m with you. Coaching is fab. 

Alex: It really is. I mean, but, you know, preaching to the choir, right?

Clare: Yes, exactly. Exactly.

Alex: So, speaking of just the fabulous nature of coaching, as we’re getting to the latter stages of our conversation here today, what are some of the things that you’re excited about with what is happening in coaching today?

Clare: I’m excited about us starting to recognize, I hope we’re starting to recognize it. I mean, I’ve certainly realized it, given I’ve been coaching for 22 years, you would have thought I would have realized it before, but I realized that, as coaches, we need to work on our own mindsets before our skill sets will shift. So, if that’s what we’re doing with the people we work with, then actually, as coaches, we need to look at what are the mindsets that that are getting in the way of us being the best coach we can be because we’re holding on to a mindset that leads us into non-coach-like skills, behaviors. I think there’s work for us to do to underpin the competencies, because the competencies are the skills that we need to demonstrate, but unless we look at our mindsets as well and shift those mindsets, and unlearn some stuff, which is what my book, The Transformational Coach, is all about, unlearning to coach, unless we do that, then it’s going to be really tough for us to showcase the competencies if we don’t really believe in them because we have a different mindset. That’s one thing that I’m hoping we might start to move towards as a community, to look at the coach’s mindset, not just the skill set. I’m also interested, personally, in how can we increase or cultivate the coachability of the people that we work with? So I know Marshall Goldsmith has a book coming out about the coachable leader, but I want to do it from the — I want to write something about how can the coach cultivate more coachability in the people that they’re partnering with, because it does need to be a partnership and the thinker, as I call them, does need to show up in a way that enables them to do their best thinking and to get the most out of the coaching and there are certain things that we as coaches know are going to support them in that. And so I believe there is work for us to do as coaches in figuring out at every step of the way of that coaching experience what can we do to draw out that coachability in the people that we work with. And that’s partly so that we don’t get frustrated with people who start to try and hook us into mentoring, for example. But also it is so that they can get the most out of it. I am all about bringing the most value out of these things. And both parties showing up and being fully present. So, it’s all very well the coach being great, but if the thinker is not ready to think or willing to think or ready to change, then is this the right time for coaching for them or is coaching even the right intervention at this particular point in time? So I think there’s more work that we can do about that so that’s where my research is going at the moment. 

Alex: Thank you, Clare. I really enjoyed reconnecting with you and getting all this great wisdom from you and you sharing your journey with us so thank you for that

Clare: Thank you