Por David Fischman

Coaching: palabra inglesa muy usada en el entorno empresarial, pero con significados diferentes. Aunque han traducido el término como “entrenador”, “mentor” o “consejero”, aún no han encontrado una buena palabra que explique todo su significado…

Para definir qué es “coaching”, primero entendamos qué no es.

Un gerente tiene problemas delegando el poder, y pide a una persona que le haga “coaching”. Este gerente quiere alguien que lo capacite, que le dé algunos trucos para hacer empowerment. Está buscando un entrenador más que un “coach”. El coach no enseña.

Un gerente general busca una persona que le haga “coaching” a uno de sus gerentes de área que tiene problemas interpersonales. Este gerente es eficaz y productivo, pero crea problemas al clima laboral. El gerente general lo obliga a aceptar un coaching, diciéndole que es su última oportunidad. Luego se reúne con el “coach” para que le arregle el problema. Este proceso no es “coaching”. El coaching ve lo posible, lo positivo y el enorme potencial de la persona. No es un proceso obligatorio y no garantiza arreglar nada.

Finalmente, un gerente general llama a un “coach” para que evalúe a uno de sus gerentes. Quiere que el “coach” le diga si la persona tiene potencial. La “evaluación del potencial” no es coaching. Un coach tiene un convenio de confidencial con su cliente directo y no puede revelar ninguna información del proceso, a menos que el cliente directo lo solicite.

¿Qué es el “coaching”? Según la Federación Internacional de Coaching, es un proceso por el cual el “coach” sirve a un cliente, o “coachee”, para ayudarlo a alcanzar su misión en la vida, a vivir una vida personal y profesional sobre la base de sus valores, a ser mejor persona, a superar sus obstáculos y alcanzar sus metas.

It was a lovely day in Berkeley when Gibor Basri decided to clean out the flowerpots on his second floor balcony, which overlooks a quiet tree-lined street not far from the University of California, where Basri works. Suddenly, two police cars pulled up, and a knot of officers ran into his yard, guns drawn and pointed. When Basri’s wife Jessica opened the door, they said they would rush her to safety because a “hot prowl”—a burglary in action—was in progress. She looked up. “Oh, that’s my husband.”

An astrophysicist, Gibor Basri claims Jamaican and Iraqi heritage and has dark skin. Jessica Broitman, who works as a psychoanalyst, is white. The two have been married for more than 40 years, have a grown son, and chose Berkeley as their home partly because of its reputation for diversity and a liberal attitude. But when someone driving by spotted a dark-skinned man on a porch in a good neighborhood, bias reared its ugly head. They called 911.

The police were quite embarrassed and apologetic, says Jessica. But they had been alerted that something strange was going on. “Yeah,” she shot back, “Something strange was happening, all right. It’s very unusual when my husband does any household chores. Really!”

“We are social creatures and need to be in relationship with others. Yet we find ways to deny our interconnectedness and marginalize each other. ”

john a. powell, researcher and law professor at the University of California, Berkeley

“A lot of people think about black teens and poor black people as victims of bias, but it’s everywhere,” says Basri. Ironically, in addition to his work as a professor, Basri is also the Vice Chancellor for Equity and Inclusion at the University of California, Berkeley, where one of his goals has been to increase the number of African-American students and faculty at the university and to make the campus a more welcoming place for them. “It is hard for someone who has not experienced a sense of pervasive negative stereotyping based on appearance alone to appreciate how incredibly wearing it can be,” says Basri.

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Un directivo de Google encendió la polémica al afirmar que los antecedentes académicos no aseguran a la empresa obtener lo que necesita de sus empleados

Cada época tiene su paradigma sagrado respecto de la gestión interna, basado en aquellas empresas que son más exitosas. Hubo un tiempo que primó el “fordismo”, con su cadena de montaje en serie; otro en el que se afirmó el “toyotismo”, dando lugar a los círculos de calidad y la calidad total, y ahora estamos pasando por la fiebre del “googlismo”, no sin razón.

El resto de las empresas se alinean, miran y copian, a veces a contramano de sus propias necesidades y cultura, mediante el mismo mecanismo de las modas en el vestir. Pero más allá de estos disparates frecuentes, producto de la pereza intelectual, todo lo nuevo puede ser un aporte valioso si es considerado como opción, saliendo de una miope rutina. Tal es lo que sucede con las definiciones del vicepresidente de Recursos Humanos de Google, Laszlo Bock, quien afirma que “los antecedentes académicos no sirven para nada” y que “las puntuaciones de los candidatos en los test son inútiles como criterio de contratación”.

Naturalmente, estas afirmaciones pondrán los pelos de punta a más de un académico, a los profesionales de recursos humanos y cualquier otro dirigente, convencidos todos de que ser buen alumno equivale a ser buen empleado. Este vínculo indiscutible es lo que cuestiona Laszlo Bock, debido a “la desconexión existente entre lo que se enseña en la universidad y el trabajo que se realiza en la compañía”. Y amplía: “La gente que tiene éxito en la universidad es un tipo de gente específicamente entrenada para tener éxito en ese ambiente. Una de mis frustraciones cuando estaba en la universidad es que sabía que el profesor estaba buscando una respuesta específica”.

Who is the happiest man in the world? If you Google it, the name “Matthieu Ricard” pops up.

Matthieu Ricard, 69, is a Tibetan Buddhist monk originally from France who has been called “the world’s happiest man.”

That’s because he participated in a 12-year brain study on meditation and compassion led by a neuroscientist from the University of Wisconsin, Richard Davidson.

Davidson hooked up Ricard’s head to 256 sensors and found that when Ricard was meditating on compassion his mind was unusually light.

Simple Capacity details the findings:

The scans showed that when meditating on compassion, Ricard’s brain produces a level of gamma waves – those linked to consciousness, attention, learning and memory – ‘never reported before in the neuroscience literature’, Davidson said. The scans also showed excessive activity in his brain’s left prefrontal cortex compared to its right counterpart, allowing him an abnormally large capacity for happiness and a reduced propensity towards negativity.

Ricard, who says he sometimes meditates for entire days without getting bored, admits he’s a generally happy person (although he feels his “happiest man” title is a media-driven overstatement).

He spoke with Business Insider at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Here’s his advice for how to be happy.

Stop thinking ‘me, me, me’
To Ricard, the answer comes down to altruism. The reason is that, thinking about yourself and how to make things better for yourself all the time is exhausting and stressful, and it ultimately leads to unhappiness.

“It’s not the moral ground,” Ricard says. “It’s simply that me, me, me all day long is very stuffy. And it’s quite miserable, because you instrumentalize the whole world as a threat, or as a potential sort of interest [to yourself].”

If you want to be happy, Ricard says you should strive to be “benevolent,” which will not only make you feel better but also make others like you more.

If you’re lucky, you’ve been there.

With practice, you can get there many times a day.

Where? That place called Flow… where you are totally focused, everything else falls away, you perform at your best, and work feels effortless.

What is Flow?

Flow was first explained by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly and a team of researchers at the University of Chicago. They asked people to describe a time when they performed at their peak. Regardless of profession – sports, chess, surgery – everyone’s description was the flow state. It’s not just experts who can experience this mindset. Everyone works best when they’re in what some people call the zone.

Smart leaders who help people get into flow and stay there know they will work at their peak abilities. The more time an organization’s employees spend there, the better they will perform. This is especially true for anyone whose work requires creativity.

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Until last year, the number of students in my classes at MIT numbered 50 or so. Less than twelve months later, I have just completed my first class with 50,000 registered participants. They came from 185 countries, and together they co-generated:
• >400 prototype (action learning) initiatives
• >560 self-organized hubs in a vibrant global eco-system
• >1,000 self-organized coaching circles.

What explains the growth in group size from 50 to 50,000? It’s moving my class at MIT Sloan to the edX platform, making it a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course).

Designed to blend open access with deep learning, the u.lab was first launched in early 2015 with 26,000 registered participants. When we offered it for a second time, in September, we had 50,000 registered participants. According to the exit survey, 93% found their experience “inspiring” (60%) or “life changing” (33%); and 62% of those who came into the u.lab without any contemplative practice have one now.

Inverting the 21st-Century University

One-third of the participants had “life changing” experiences? How is that possible in a mere seven-week online course? The answer is: it’s not. The u.lab isn’t just an online course. It’s an o2o (online-to-offline) blended learning environment that provides participants with quality spaces for reflection, dialogue, and collaborative action.

Mindfulness is quickly following yoga in becoming a billion-dollar industry. It’s no surprise, then, that the popularity of meditation – one way to practice mindfulness – is also growing among CEOs and senior executives. Why are business leaders embracing meditation rather than, say, massage or ping-pong? Because there’s something to meditation that appears to benefit CEOs more than recreation or relaxation do alone.

As CEO of the TLEX Institute, Johann Berlin specializes in bringing mindfulness training to CEOs and corporate teams. He says he’s seeing a growing interest among leaders in meditation as a way to build leadership skills – and achieve business goals. “Most of our new clients … are not sold by mindfulness as a novelty. They want to see how these approaches … are truly beneficial to existing priorities like retention, talent advancement, innovation.” For example, one of Berlin’s clients, a Fortune 25 company, has integrated mindfulness techniques into its high potentials program with the goal of creating agile and flexible mindsets as a foundation for leadership.

The research on mindfulness suggests that meditation sharpens skills like attention, memory, and emotional intelligence. I spoke with a number of executives about their experiences with meditation, and saw again and again how their observations about meditation in the workplace connected back to the findings of academic research.

El secreto del samurai para mantener completamente la calma: Uno de los precedentes intelectuales más claros de los coach, los nuevos gurú de la sociedad del éxito inmediato, son los sumaráis.

Las técnicas mentales que empleaban para mantener la calma bajo la presión de la guerra, así como la estrategia orientadas para obtener el máximo rendimiento y alzarse con la victoria siguen siendo explotadas hoy en día.

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