The Coach - Interview with Rusudan Kvachantiradze

Rusudan Kvachantiradze - International Certified Georgian Coach on the Quest to Making Coaching a Popular Choice Among Georgians

It is true that the main driving force of any organization is its human capital. Yet, in our modern world, a team of qualified personnel only is no longer sufficient to guarantee the success of any organization. Today, people change jobs, and sometimes, they change their locations too and move to new countries because of their work. When they do so, they have to acclimatize with the new corporate culture, and they have to deal and adapt to different environments or stressful situations, etc. In these kinds of situations, a helper that will make it easier for the new person to interact or cooperate with other people quickly, and make them become an integrated member of the company is necessary.

Successful organizations have a lot of work to do in terms of training and staff development. In order for an employee to be productive, they need certain skills and knowledge that will enable them to work as efficiently as possible. To meet this human development need, coaching contributes greatly in this regard, and it has no close alternatives. In this interview with Rusudan Kvachantiradze, a Georgian coach on the international scene, we spoke extensively about coaching, what it means, who needs coaching services and when should coaching be necessary.

Mrs. Kvachantiradze, who is the Vice President of the International Coaching Federation (ICF) in Georgia, is a Professional Certified Coach (PCC) accredited by the International Coaching Federation (ICF) and an International Certified Mentor. She works as a coach, mentor, and trainer at the British organization – Thrive Partners. Mrs. Rusudan Kvachantiradze also works as a mentor and coach at Erickson Coaching International Asia and Caucasus Representative Office, and she is a doctoral candidate at Tbilisi State University where she is conducting a research on Organizational and Personal Development.

Coaching is a relatively new field, and many people have misconceptions about coaching. What is your definition of coaching?

Coaching is an effective and fast method of personal and professional development. Our focus in coaching is to open up a person’s inner potential. Every person has the resources to achieve what they want, and our minds never pushes us to desire what we can’t actually do. That is, if we start dreaming about something, we have an idea and a desire, but that’s not all, it means that we also have the resources to realize our dream.

When we know what we want to achieve, we very often hear the opinions of different people about what to do, and how to do it. They give us advice, teach us, or we learn from the examples of others about how they were able to do the same. However, every person is naturally different, therefore the path to the goal should be set by everyone individually, according to the things that will be acceptable and comfortable for them. Only then will they be completely faithful to this path that they have chosen.

This is where the role and importance of coaching comes into play. Coaching helps us to understand what we want, it helps us to set goals, and it helps us to work out ways to achieve our goals.

Due to their many similarities, coaching is often confused as mentoring or training. How do we distinguish and understand which one we need?

The most important difference from mentoring and training is that coaching is a space completely devoid of advice, evaluation and teaching. In coaching, a person creates new knowledge by himself. Therefore, its use is effective when we want to make decisions, find new ways of development, and when we want to develop the best visions and strategies for ourselves.

Mentoring is necessary when a person has some knowledge and experience, but wants to further expand and deepen it by evaluating the quality of their own work. Accordingly, the mentor evaluates and helps the mentee to understand their strengths and development zones, gives advice, and teaches them how to develop the best methods for applying new knowledge and skills. It is therefore important that the mentor should be an expert in the field in which they are mentoring others.

For example, I work as a mentor with coaches who want to upgrade or validate their accreditation, or with coaches who are happy with the quality of their accreditation but want to be in constant development mode. Mentoring requires in-depth knowledge and experience in the field, the ability to identify nuances, when and how the mentee demonstrated professional competencies, as well as knowledge of the mentoring process itself. Interestingly, mentoring is also often effective when the mentee is more qualified than the mentor; in this case, the key is for the mentor to be able to show the mentee other visions and methods.

As for training, the need for training arises when we want to acquire new knowledge and skills or improve existing ones. In training, what is of great importance is the experience and ability of the trainer to lead the team and create supportive environment for team members. A supportive environment is not only necessary to receive information from the trainer on how to develop new knowledge and skills, but also to share each other’s experience as new knowledge.

It is very important to be able to exactly decipher a person’s needs. For example, I have the experience of working on improving management skills in an organization with training, after a while, when we noticed that people as a result of training have accumulated some knowledge, we began to engage them with coaching. Coaching can be done in two ways: one is when we conduct individual coaching sessions and the other, “Shadow Coaching” is also very effective. In “Shadow Coaching”, the coach attends manager meetings, and observes the manager’s process of talking to employees to observe what the manager does not notice, and then, the coach returns this to the manager in form of feedback. Feedback is very important information in the session format, and if there is any need for mentoring in management skills, it can be included too.

Who needs coaching and when do they need coaching?

Coaching is needed by anyone who wants to change or improve something, maintain positive momentum in the organization or push even further. Organizations apply coaching when they want to advance as a unit, when they want to make amendments to their organizational culture by improving personal development and skills, or when they want to form a new vision. As a result, the scope of coaching is quite wide, but to be clearer I will give a few examples.

For example, if there is rapid growth in an organization, because it requires a completely different attitude to manage a large organization, employees have to adapt to new roles and responsibilities.

The need for coaching arises even when there are serious changes in the organization, this can be a change in the management structure, e.g. moving to the agile process management method. Coaching is very much needed in this case as well, because even during positive changes, people need some helper who will make this positive path even easier.

There may be situations when the alarm sounds and we find that something is not going so well. For example, a deterioration of organizational culture, a decrease in motivation, or a decline in results. Recently, I began to work with organizations that need help in motivating employees to switch to remote mode when people need to develop new approaches to increase efficiency at work. Or when faced with new realities, it is necessary to develop new strategies, and directions to support and justify the interests of the business. In such cases, effective method for developing organizational vision, values and mission is team coaching.

Why is coaching considered to be for top managers and how is this decision made not at the organizational but at the individual level? Here, too, there may be confusions between the need for a psychologist and the coaching service.

Coaching is a transformational process. As a result of coaching, people themselves change significantly and make tangible changes in their environment as well. In order for these changes to be implemented as comfortably as possible in the organization, the introduction of coaching should follow the top to bottom principle. It often happens that when you work with CEOs, senior and middle managers, their transformation and the changes they make have such a ripple effect that it is no longer necessary to work with other staff members. However, there are organizations that prefer to involve coaches with employees in all positions.

On a personal level, I believe that everything starts with a desire to change something, for example, taking on new challenges, implementing a new vision, personal growth, or changing personal views. For example, people form a lot of beliefs, which help us in the process of formation, but then it may become a limitation, when the belief orperception does not allow us to act differently and do something in a different way. To solve these problems, coaching is needed. Coaching also helps us to deal with personal relationships, including family relationships. Coaching is very common for parents who may well know how to raise their children, yet behave differently due to so much care and responsibility. Also, coaching is often done to develop personal qualities and skills, such as improving communication, overcoming audience fears, and so on.

Coaches work closely with psychologists. Of course, there are many details but the simplest thing that will make a person understand the difference between the two is the following: We need a psychologist when we want to process an issue from the present to the past. We need a coach when we want to process an issue from the present to the future. Of course, there are many factors that we consider before we determine whether a person needs a coach or a psychologist. Most of us coaches work very closely with psychologists on cases especially those that I can advise the person who came to me to work on a specific issue with a psychologist and vice versa, the psychologist may refer the person to me as coach too.

What do you like most about coaching and what are some remarkable examples of your coaching accomplishments?

What I like most is that as a result of coaching, people even find opportunities where they had thought there was no opportunity for any advancement or even for a minimal change. And I also like the fact that coaching helps people take responsibility for their own lives, it helps them to manage and improve the reality and quality of life both for themselves and those around them.

Confidentiality is the starting point of coaching, so I will only share cases where I have received the right to share from both the organization and the client.

One good example is when a person moved from one country to another to work in a managerial position and they become extremely dissatisfied with the professionalism and skills of their new team members. We started working with each team member on specific skills which included managing results, managing time, delegating, prioritizing, seeing the big picture, and more. We pushed towards improving these skills but as soon as the sessions started, it became clear that the problem was not tied to the initial skills that we focused on, but the new manager had a different management style. The management methods of the manager from another country and their corporate culture were so foreign and disturbing to the team that they could not understand each other, neither could they understand the essence of his tasks and they attributed many of his demands to this person’s whim and personal character. As a result, the case escalated into a serious conflict.

When the manager realized that the problem was the miscommunication caused by the difference in approaches after all, both sides wanted to achieve the same goals, he began to probe and identify the attitude that the team members needed so they could understand each other so, he changed the attitude. The changed attitude was followed by a change in behavior and very soon these people turned into a cohesive team and, they quickly became an effective body that registered a 45% growth in business in one year.

Another example concerns a CEO, whose strong point was his strategic vision and conduct of negotiations, nevertheless, after about 8-9 months of negotiations with their partner organization, he was in a deadlock and could not get out of this situation. As a result of the coaching sessions he was able to see moments that he had not seen before, so he adjusted his approach and very soon it ended in a win-win situation where an agreement was reached, and both sides were satisfied with the result.

Another very interesting example is how our personal qualities affect our management style. We have been taught for a very long time that people need to be able to differentiate between service and personal issues, that there is no connection between them, but often, it is our personal issues that affect the work we do. Coaching focuses on a holistic perception of a person and never observes a person in isolation. For example, I had a client who worked in a leading position in an industry-leading organization, and after a period of stress in their personal space, this person who had previously managed their personal qualities could no longer control the situation. Their behavior was perceived aggressively by their team and partners. The results in their department reduced drastically, with the partners openly expressing dissatisfaction. The organization decided to solve this problem by coaching. Of course, no matter how much we worked on this topic by focusing on work issues, we couldn’t achieve much then, we began to focus on relations with employees and partners, but there was no big breakthrough also, because the root of everything was personal issues. So, it is the coach’s responsibility to identify the root cause of the problem. The root-cause of problems is mostly hidden, and the coach can help you get to the root of the problem at each session. As a result, this person identified the cause of the problem by processing the issue then, we worked out the problem, solved it, and as a result completely changed the relationship with employees and partners. Eventually, my client had to make changes not only in his job but also in his personal space, and he learned to manage himself. At the end of the sessions, he could testify that ‘finally, I am happy and I became effective again at work.’ After some time, the same client called me, he wanted to share that their company was facing very difficult challenges. Before undergoing coaching, the client shared that he would have been so demotivated and would not know how to cope when faced with such difficult situation. After the coaching, the client just started to enjoy the situation no matter the difficulty it poses, and he was particularly amazed about how they could do everything calmly and help to create a conducive environment for himself and for others.

Finally, how do we find a coach so that we do not miss out on their benefits?

Although coaching is very popular and many people have experienced coaching, the questions – what is coaching? And how to choose a qualified professional coach? – are still prevalent.

Credential issued by the International Coaching Federation (ICF) is the most reliable way to prove the professionalism of a coach. Professional coaching standards are regulated at a very high level in the ICF, with a focus on relevant knowledge, relevant experience, and successful passing of required examination: Coach Knowledge Assessment . The credential issued by the ICF is not permanent and needs to be confirmed every three years so, the ICF encourages coaches that have been working consistently to raise their qualifications. Credential holder coaches can present relevant documentation, and we can also find the qualifications and credential status of the coach we are interested in on the ICF website, or we can find coaches in our region according to their qualifications. When selecting a coach, it will also help to find out what certificates the coach has and what is their field of expertise.

When we, coaches working in Georgia realized that the population did not have a clear idea about coaching, its use and benefits, we decided, (and I am proud that I am one of the initiators) to establish an International Coaching Federation (ICF) Chapter in Georgia in order to create a correct perception of the profession and the field.. This Chapter is aiming to provide opportunity, and it is creating a space where coaches in Georgia could help each other develop. Our Chapter ICF Sakartvelo works in several directions, including: Raising awareness about coaching so that people can actually understand quality coach`ing, and what it means to be a professional coach. The second is to create a supportive environment for coaches. Our members are both experienced and novice coaches. We often have meetings where we discuss issues related to the profession, share knowledge and experience. We also have active contacts with the International Coaching Federation and its various chapers, which is also a very good opportunity to share our achievements, opportunities, and innovations in the profession.