Every year we host the Meyler Campbell Annual Lecture, where world experts in their field come to shock, surprise and challenge us into new thinking in coaching.
Professor Andrew Scott
Wednesday 16th November
5.45 for 6-7.30pm
Venue: Royal Society of Medicine, 1 Wimpole Street, London W1G 0AE
.Make the most of our early bird offer of £60 for the Annual Lecture to coincide with the release of Andrew Scott’s book, The 100-Year Life, on 2nd June. This will revert to the original price of £70 on the 3rd June.
With Herminia Ibarra
‘Your current way of thinking is exactly what’s keeping you from stepping up. You’ll need to change your mind-set, and there’s only one way to do that: by acting differently’.
If you step up and behave like a leader, ultimately you will start to think and feel as if you are one. Executive coaches have a key role in supporting (aspiring) leaders through this transition. In this year’s much-anticipated Annual Lecture, INSEAD Professor Herminia Ibarra, author of Working Identity and the recent Act Like A Leader, Think Like A Leader will offer us some sparkling new tools to help us in this task. She will dazzle us with her new Outsight Principle for leaders, in which, flouting convention, the acting comes first, the thinking follows. Coaches can help leaders draw on three sources of outsight: redefining their job, their network and their self and Professor Ibarra will give us a suite of practical techniques, ranging from ‘stealing like an artist’ and creative experimentation to strategic networking and reinventing personal narratives. Whether our clients are chameleons or true-to-selfers (and we will hear more about these intriguing classifications!), above all they need to shift their mindsets and their behaviours to act like leaders.
Herminia Ibarra is the Cora Chaired Professor of Leadership and Learning, and Professor of Organizational Behavior at INSEAD, where she directs The Leadership Transition. She previously served on the Harvard Business School faculty, is a member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Councils, a judge for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award, and Chairs the Visiting Committee of the Harvard Business School. Professor Ibarra speaks internationally on leadership, talent management, and women’s careers and Thinkers 50 ranked her #9 among the most influential business gurus in the world. A native of Cuba, Ibarra received her M.A. and Ph.D. from Yale University, where she was a National Science Fellow.
This lecture will be invaluable for any coach working with leaders or indeed for any leader looking to step up to their next role. So act now and book your place! Please note, advance bookings only. There is no admission on the door.
“The key to great performance and well-being is resilience. Your brain prefers a quiet life but you can train to excel during demanding times.”
Leadership discussions don’t usually focus on resilience. Wellbeing is usually seen as a sacrifice on the altar of great performance. Perhaps that’s because so many leadership theories are precisely that – theories – rather than the product of reflective leadership experience, coaching training and sporting excellence. Juan Coto brought all of these to his Meyler Campbell 2014 Meyler Campbell Annual Lecture.
He argues that resilience helps us cope with change. Rate of change – we’d all agree on this – is accelerating. Yet the brain is more efficient on autopilot: among its strategies is ignoring reality.
Resilience is what ensures world-class performance in demanding times – when change is constant, pressure to perform grows and there are setbacks. Juan pointed out that ‘although you can (and people do) take the similarities between elite athletes and business leaders too far, they do exist, not least in the fact that it’s the mental ‘stuff’ that holds back or drives elite sports performance.’
“Business leaders shouldn’t – and mostly wouldn’t be able to – train like elite sports people, but they should be corporate athletes. The demands this makes explain why we encounter genuine mediocrity so often.”
Peak performance (‘flow’ or ‘being in the zone’ are two other terms for this) involves being energised, committed, focused, confident and carefree. We achieve this by training resilience – and here sports do point the way. Effective training involves two elements – stress and recuperation. Without recuperation you get burn out; without stress you get atrophy. Key to this are 4 elements:
| 1.Energy | Pre-requisite for the other three | Involving hydration, nutrition, sleep and movement |
| 2. Purpose | Operating system of the individual | In face of setbacks you need to develop process goals not the outcome goals which corporates live on. |
| 3. Self-Talk | Our reality | Replace internal terrorist with internal coach |
| 4. Emotion | Our heart | Amygdala work to feel safe and carefree. |
Juan argues that “in business, as compared with sport, we don’t give enough attention to the first two and we don’t allow enough time for recuperation and over-emphasise outcome goals.”
He argued that simple willpower will not help to develop these components of resilience. There is a lack of immediate feedback since performance accelerates sometime after behaviour changes. Rituals and habits are the key and setting goals, using an external coach are hugely supportive in doing this.
Finally Juan gave an emotional call to arms: “We should never accept that workplaces have to be strongly toxic or alienating. Employees are human beings first and always.”
Juan Coto is a strategy (M&A) specialist; He had a number of global leadership roles in strategy and general management before switching to the people side as European HR Director for major engineering consultant CH2M Hill, responsible for 4,000 employees in eight countries. Juan was a top Spanish Junior tennis player and played briefly in the professional ATP tour, and most recently had a world ranking of 79 in the over 40s. He has throughout his business career kept up and developed his specialism in mental toughness, both in elite sport and in the Boardroom, and is now a professional business coach and a mental trainer for elite athletes. He is now a master coach specialising in the mental aspects of the game in both sport and business.
During the lecture Juan drew on a defining moment in his own life:
“I succeeded at almost everything as a child and young adult. I became addicted to achievement and the praise that came with it. Like all drugs I needed stronger and stronger doses to create less and less effect. Then one day, after my son’s six month birthday, I found I couldn’t get out of bed. I’d burnt out emotionally. During my recuperation I started to read and in the last 15 years I’ve read every book about the psychology of performance I can find. My ideas stem from that period and I believe it’s also returned me from sickness, not to normalcy but to, at times, extraordinary performance.”
Here is short video of highlights from Juan’s 2014 Meyler Campbell Annual Lecture.
People can and do change over time and such change – when it happens - requires dedication and sometimes even a considerable amount of pain!
This was one of the key findings from the 2013 Meyler Campbell Annual Lecture delivered by world famous psychologist, Professor Adrian Furnham from University College London.
In his highly thought-provoking and stimulating lecture, Professor Furnham grappled with the fundamental questions – ‘What can you change and what can’t you change? What change strategies work best and why? And how long does that change last?’
While he admitted that those who believe individuals can change, and those who believe that one’s personality remains fundamentally the same, both have compelling data to support their positions, Professor Furnham came up with a number of conclusions. Namely:
Read a full write up of the 2013 Annual Lecture, here.
Professor Furnham’s slides are available here or view the lecture in full (1hr 11mins).
“What can business and business coaching learn from sports coaching,” this was the key question addressed at the 2012 Meyler Campbell Annual Lecture, delivered by Dr. Simon Jenkins, Principal Lecturer in Sports Coaching from the Carnegie Faculty at Leeds Metropolitan University.
In his address, Simon looked at the seven ways in which coaches can get the best from athletes and how these might be applied to business coaching. These seven key principles related to authenticity, trust, controlling the controllable, motivation, meeting a client or athlete’s needs, peaking at the right time, and the importance of being non-directive.
Neuroscience is the fastest-moving frontier of science. If this rapid rate of progress continues, we will be able to model the human brain, neuron by neuron, in the foreseeable future. This would represent a scientific achievement on a par with mapping the human genome, so it’s understandable that neuroscience, the scientific study of the brain and the nervous system, is in a state of excitable ferment. These ongoing discoveries about how the brain operates have important implications for the coaching profession.
Was the ‘credit crunch’ the planet’s first case of ‘global Groupthink’ – where cohesive groups of the world’s most highly intelligent high performers, sometimes even acting with the best of intent, got it appallingly wrong? And what do business coaches need to learn from it, so we can help prevent it occurring next time, next place?
A positive approach to ageing can have huge impact. Professor Felicia Huppert outlines five key points that make a difference in performance and wellbeing when getting older, as UK life expectancy increases by five hours per day!
The current economic slowdown and transitions that companies are going through is creating a favourable environment for corporate psychopaths. This was just one of the warnings posed by Dr. Paul Babiak at the 2008 Meyler Campbell Annual Lecture – ‘Psychopaths in the Boardroom’.
Professor Herminia Ibarra, formerly of Harvard, now of INSEAD, and author of “Working Identity”, one of the top ten essential books for coaches, spoke about her new research on the identity shift people must make to grasp the strategic, complex, roles at the very top – and the types of transformational experiences that aid this critical leadership transition.
Professor Carol Kauffman, who has taught for twenty years at Harvard Medical School, and has herself over 35,000 hours of one to one work, challenged coaches to re-orient their approaches given the startling research results from the new science of Positive Psychology. Her lecture ranged from research results around the world, through the convergence of technology and coaching, to some of the early practical applications and tools spawned by Positive Psychology.
Professor Felicia Huppert, neuroscientist and Co-Director of the Centre for Study on Ageing at Cambridge University, devoted her lecture to the revolution now occuring in life expectancy. Peoples’ “mental maps” about life expectancy are often 15 to 20 years short of the new reality: a tertiary-educated British middle-class male aged 60 is now predicted to have average life expectancy of 91. Professor Huppert challenged coaches and leaders to re-evaluate their financial models, fundamental assumptions, and pay-off periods for investment, against this data.
