Coaching York - The Origin Story
Hello, and welcome to the Coaching Your Podcast. You know, there's nothing quite like a great origin story. You know the genre. It's the story, or it's the account of how a character or group came into being. What happened that brought them about?
Geoff:Where did they get their superpowers? And what are their unique or enduring characteristics? And what was it about their origin that contributes to their legacy? So what about Coaching York? What's our origin story?
Geoff:Some of our newer members and many of our followers may not know where Coaching York came from or how it got started. And today I would like to rectify that in the company of my guest and Coaching York's founder member, Peter Lumley. Peter is quite literally the reason I'm here recording this podcast since without him, not only would there have been no Coaching York podcast, there would have been no Coaching York. Peter, welcome to the show.
Peter:Good morning, Jeff, and thank you very much. It's strange to hear the origin of Coaching York being described in that way because it certainly didn't feel like that at the time of starting. It just kinda came about.
Geoff:Well, we'll do a bit of we'll do a bit of time traveling, Peter. But before we do that, can we just find out a little bit about your good self, Sang Sang. How did you get to be in York?
Peter:I do live in York. I've lived in York since 1980, but I am a West Country lad, born and bred in Bristol, moved up to York in order to pursue a career in personnel management, in Tadcaster in North Yorkshire with John Smith's Brewery, where I became the personnel officer. It was the first time I'd ventured north of the Watford Gap, pleasantly surprised with what I found, and I decided that York would be a great place to stay. I've been here forty years with my partner, Shane, and we love it up here. It's great.
Peter:It's a good city. It's a good city for all sorts of reasons.
Geoff:How how does York compare to Bristol?
Peter:Well, different certainly, but, also great similarity, really, both steeped in history, bloody, and commercial. So I draw parallels there. Bristol is a bigger city. It's a maritime port, on a river dependent upon, liquor, tobacco, and slavery. York, chocolates, glass making, and racehorses.
Peter:So there's, some difference that there's also it's also smaller. Bristol hasn't got a city wall. York has. I find myself on the city walls very often looking down and taking a different perspective of what life is like in, in York.
Geoff:So you've left you left the water behind, Peter. Did you miss the water?
Peter:I miss the water very much. And in fact, I spend quite a lot of my time these days down in Essex, where I delight in being on the water. I sail and kayak and swim in the waters around the Blackwater Estuary, if you're familiar with that part of the world between, Colchester and Malden. Lovely part of the world.
Geoff:Okay. Let's, think a little bit more about how you and Coaching York came together. So you say you were working in Tadcaster. So what would you say were your professional spheres of expertise?
Peter:I suppose quite simply, it was what was then called personnel management. I came to Tadcaster to become the personnel officer for John Smith Brewery, initially focusing on the administrative side of personnel, moving on to the recruitment, training, and development side of personnel. And during the early nineteen eighties, I did my professional, IPM, as it then was, Institute of Personnel Management qualifications, subsequently became a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, which is how the organization developed and how I developed. So my my origins are in personnel management.
Geoff:So what about coaching? How did you get interested in coaching?
Peter:When you asked me to do this, podcast when we met a couple of weeks ago, I I it got me thinking. It it came about largely through an irritation with the initiatives that were being taken to help people in a professional capacity through consultancy, which I did quite a lot of, through training, which I did quite a lot of, and, report writing, which I did quite a lot of, some of which would be acted on, but more often than not, one would get paid for the work, and you'd find the report gathering dust on a shelf, or you'd find the person acknowledging what had been said, but not doing a great deal about it. So Coaching York came about from the perspective of an irritation on the lack of success of some of the initiatives which organizations conventionally look to to seek a change in their people. It also came about through a general observation of the, I choose my words carefully, but the rubbish conversations that people have, the delight that people have of talking over each other, the imperative they feel to make their own point, but their inability to listen to the points of others.
Peter:The the disinclination to look at issues or opportunities from a variety of different perspectives, the delight in being myopic in their approach, and the general belief that there could be a better way to do this. It it also came about through some professional development initiatives that were going on in York. Initially, my involvement was with the Chartered Institute of Personnel Development. I chaired the North Yorkshire branch for some years, and, we had a mentoring program, introduced a mentoring program twenty, maybe thirty years ago, and I chose to be a mentee rather than a mentor, and, I'm very much connected with the benefit of a long term association with a person who knew which way is up. Really helped to see a person week after week, month after month, to progress down a journey, together to see the results of that.
Peter:And that was a mentoring relationship, but nevertheless, it got me thinking about the difference between a long term relationship founded on trust and professional standards and short term initiatives such as half day training courses, one day training courses, whatever. What what is it about that that's
Geoff:important to you? I mean, is a view that in a work context, you know, human beings are just another commodity. You've got your paper clips, you've got your paper, you've got your computers, and then you've got people and you allocate them to do jobs, and you give them resources and training to enable them to do it. You were talking a lot there about how people relate together, how people converse with one another, how people show respect to each other. I mean, what is it about that that's important to you?
Peter:I think it's the missed opportunities if that doesn't happen. Let me give a very trite example. Sit on the top of a bus and observe what's going on, and you'll see some people chattering away 19 to the dozen. They may or may not be having a good conversation, but something will be happening between them. Look at other people, and there'll be no conversation taking place.
Peter:And you wonder if either of them were to open their mouth and just start talking where that conversation might lead. And we've only have to look back on our own lives to see the the happenstance, the the good fortune of just entering into a conversation, and great things come, from it. Now I believe in the workplace, yes, people are allocated to jobs and roles. They're given the skills and tools to do that, but that represents in my book just a start point. It's not an end point.
Peter:The the start point is having those basic tools, and then interacting with other people to see where the synergy of interaction can actually take, people. So many so many things have happened in life through through conversations. Almost a mantra of mine is that, it all starts with a conversation. If you don't start with a conversation, nothing's going to happen. I think that many workplaces don't encourage that.
Peter:Many workplaces monitor the things one is told to do, but doesn't provide sufficient encouragement to be creative, to collaborate, to converse, to challenge, and other things beginning with C.
Geoff:You've got some desires there in terms of how you'd like to see a culture in a workplace develop. You could have just taken that on for yourself and decided that you want to get really good at what you do. There was something here about bringing together a group of people to promote this kind of culture more broadly. What was it that made you want to bring a group of people together to promote coaching?
Peter:I come back to that kind of word irritation, really. Irritation that in York, whilst, there were coaching initiatives going on, and I think before coaching York coaching York's been around for ten years now or more, I think, but there were initiatives around then and before then that I was part of. There was the York Coaching Circle where we coached each other. We had took the alternative roles of being a coach and a coachee. There was the York Coaching Group, hosted by York St John University, Both very powerful forums for an exchange of best practice in terms of coaching.
Peter:Many people in those two forums were, like myself, freelance, and most bemoaned the fact that employers in and around York rarely looked to York to resource their coaches. They would flock off down to London or Manchester or wherever other big big cities to get, coaches who then trundle all the way up to York, incurring first class rail fares, overnight accommodation, southern centric fees, as opposed to perfectly good people who are quite capable of jumping on their bicycle and going to do their stuff without all the nonsense and overheads that goes with long long distance contracting. I also felt that by getting a group of professional coaches together into some formalized structure, we would represent a more tangible entity to the employers in York who might feel more comfortable engaging with a formal entity rather than a bunch of individuals, if you like. So there's something there about the way that we were perceived. One of the fundamental reasons for getting Coaching York together, comes back to the concept of rubbish conversations, poor conversations in in communities, and, the ability to find ways for people to empower themselves, to enable themselves to to do rather better in the in their lives, be it looking at issues around family, looking at issues around social interaction, looking at issues around health, unemployment, all the all the difficult things that people wrestle with in their lives, where a better quality of conversation may be enabled through coaching might improve their chances of dealing with whatever issues, there were.
Peter:I I often took the example of going to the doctor, the number of people that would abdicate responsibility for themselves to the doctor rather than having a discussion with themselves or with others about what they can do to improve their own a lot. And I think that that going to the doctor is almost a metaphor for many aspects of life. You know? We we we go to others for advice when, in fact, a good conversation may well help us enable to address whatever issue it is. So two things then.
Peter:Size dictates a presence which might have more impact with employers, because most of us were self employed. And secondly, there was an opportunity for us to do more within the communities and to help people in whatever way improve quality of quality of life, I guess.
Geoff:You're starting to get an idea of some kind of coming together of people that can create some kind of critical mass that will be recognized in York. Was there a moment where it all came together and you thought, right, I've just had my I've had my apple falling to the ground moment. I've suddenly seen what it is that I want to see starting to come together. I've got an idea of what it might look like. Did you have a moment like that?
Geoff:I think it was actually more gradual
Peter:than that. My background involved quite a lot of event management. You know, I was forever organizing events for the CIPD and and others, so I was quite used to the idea of getting people together to either address a specific subject, or just getting like minded people together to have a blooming good explore of of stuff. The idea of getting people together just to explore what we could do from a coaching perspective came about when I was traveling with a colleague to do a little bit of work, at a sixteenth century windmill on, the side of the River Humber. The person concerned, I'm sure, will remember, and, Hugo was his name, and we were off to do a team building day and for a client, which is great fun.
Peter:And Hugo and I had recently been at a, York coaching group event at York St John University, and had shared a similar experience on coaching, which kind of bred almost like a a a kindred view towards coaching and some of the nonsense that goes on around coaching. And the the the story was the story was that, and the the person who was actually leading this will remain nameless. That was a long time ago. But we were asked to pair up, And the contention was that you can read a lot into people just by looking into their eyes. And we were asked to pair up and simply say nothing, look into their eyes for five minutes, and then report back on what we found.
Peter:And, I paired up with Hugo for no other reason than he was there and I was there, and we we did that. And at the end of five minutes, people started to report on what they had found out and comments like, oh, there's some real sensitivity going on in there, and, I detect that there is trouble with whatever, or there's a real love for Hugo and I looked at each other and just said, it made my eyes hurt. And and, so we were reflecting on this story whilst traveling out to the sixteenth century windmill, and said, you know, in management and the world of business, there is a lot of nonsense talk, but, there is some real pragmatic feet on the ground things that can be done. And, the idea of just getting together a meeting of like minded people just to talk this through. And I suppose the the idea was, look, we've got the coaching circle.
Peter:We've got the York coaching group, we are professional coaches, but we're all we haven't got a collective entity. You know, what can we do about that? And that's that's how the first meeting came about. And Steve Steve Flinders, who's the chief executive of York Associates in the center of York, had been a longtime supporter of the CIPD. I knew him well.
Peter:He was interested in coaching, and, he offered us a venue. We pulled together a bunch of people for that first, meeting. I I seem to remember Bernadette Cass, who was highly, effective in the coaching world. I think I seem to remember that she kicked off the idea of International Coaching Week, in York many years ago. Steve Gordon, who I've known for twenty or thirty years through the CIPD, a great, administrator and effective events coordinator.
Peter:Hugo, who I've just mentioned. Who else was there? Fiona Sprace was instrumental as well. She was an effective coach and management trainer. There was a guy called David, I'm definitely trying to remember his surname, who, I was so glad that he came because I was, you know, just wondering how effective this meeting might be.
Peter:And this guy, he was so enthusiastic about the idea. He he he just injected the meeting with a level of optimism that couldn't be ignored, and we had to do something about it. So always grateful for him coming along. And was someone who became our, president, professor Bob Garvey, who I've known for that for many years. And the idea of coaching York started to emerge from that meeting.
Peter:And it was actually it was quite refreshing, really, to actually come up with a handle and a concept from that meeting.
Geoff:And what was the concept that emerged from that?
Peter:The concept from that really was twofold. One was to form an entity that could offer coaching support within local communities through community centers, and similar. Two, to offer a commercial offering to organizations in and around York. I I suppose tangential to that was the obvious and important aspect of synergy that comes from people working together and CPD continuing professional development by working with other other coaches. I suppose also, you'll relate to this.
Peter:I'm sure working for yourself is very rewarding. It's also quite taxing if you do everything by yourself, And it's rather nice to have other people around you who are similarly minded. And whilst I talk about providing services to the community, we also became a community, and are a community of coaches that provide each other, support. As kind of physician heal ourselves, I guess.
Geoff:At one point we came up with this strapline, a community of coaches serving communities, a place where coaches can form a mutually supporting generous community. And then we've got this overflow into commercial work where people want that, and some of the pro bono or gifted coaching that we've been able to offer people over the years. Now at one point, Peter, I'm prompting you here, there was a there was an image that we came to use to bring together these ideas of, being a community, serving communities. You like to tell us a little bit about the, the cycling image that we that we came up with?
Peter:Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Yeah. Yeah. You're referring, I think, to the image of the, the penny farthing and, the penny farthing, cycle with the big wheel and the small wheel.
Peter:There was some debate about the appropriateness of this as an image, but it was adopted. The idea was that each wheel, represented an aspect of Coaching York, and one wheel represented our commitment to working within communities, and the other wheel represented our need to generate an income. The debate raged about which is the bigger of the two wheels. Are we are we primarily pro bono big wheel or commercially big wheel? We're doing a little bit in the community.
Peter:Over the years, you become quite pragmatic about where the demand most evidently is. If someone asks you to do stuff, if it happens to be a pro bono community based project, you do it. If it happens to be a commercially based project that satisfies whatever ethical values one one has, then you do it.
Geoff:Either way, you need to put the wheels together to get a bicycle, and you need a bicycle.
Peter:Yeah. And it need and to to extend the metaphor, know, wheels by themselves do do nothing. It needs a driving force. It it it needs a drive chain. It needs pedals.
Peter:It needs energy, to make the the wheels go forward. And that's where I think, you know, the committee of Coaching York and the goodwill of members of Coaching York represent the energy as well as the resource to contribute to either of those wheels.
Geoff:Obviously, background work in a business context and then Coaching York is voluntary organisation. So what was the challenge for you in leading an organization of volunteers?
Peter:Interesting. Much of my latter professional life was in the, what I loosely call, the cultural sector, working with museums and galleries, which was a delight. They are perhaps rather different to many other organizations inasmuch as they rely heavily upon volunteers for their output as much as paid staff. And there's no doubt that working with volunteers has its own set of challenges, which working with paid employees perhaps is is less so. The volunteer has a much freer and more liberal agenda than someone who is contractually tied.
Peter:I suppose the very best principles of coaching come to apply when looking to run a voluntary organization. You have to listen like Billio and accommodate as much as practical and realistic the desires and needs of the participants, because they are giving of their time freely and willingly. Such is the nature of that population. You know, they're pretty high octane people who have busy lives and, have committed, you know, a chunk of time to help drive Coaching York. And as such, it would be clumsy to corral those people too much.
Peter:So it's quite it's quite an education, really. I I I what do I take from this? I commend the idea of having a go at managing volunteers as a CPD exercise for anyone. It's a it's a joy and a privilege.
Geoff:Ketchy New York has directed its collective energies in various directions over the ten or more years it's been going. And various bits of community based work, have had some commercial interest. One of the constants in Coaching York has been contribution to International Coaching Week. Yes. So for listeners not familiar with this, one of the umbrella organizations for coaching, the International Coach Federation, nominates a week every year and encourages coaches globally to showcase their work and to promote coaching as an industry and as a profession and as a way of working, I think we might say as a way of being.
Geoff:Now for a number of years Coaching York had a unique contribution to this in that we were the only town in the whole world that actually run an event on every day of an international coaching week. It's not happened so much recently for various reasons, but, it was quite an achievement for the years when we were able to do it. What were your fond memories of some of the things that we got up to during International Coaching Weeks?
Peter:It was tremendous. The excitement, I think, of learning about International Coaching Week. And it was it was Bernadette who drew our attention to it. The excitement because it gave us a real focus, something really to, to to do that was practical, community based, diverse, provide the opportunity for local employers to get involved. Without sort of picking out particular events, what I'd like to draw attention to is a, the excitement of getting a focus on international coaching.
Peter:What a great platform, that was. Be the energy with which the team, the Coaching Your team, got on board with the idea, and the huge amount of time in planning and organizing and rehearsing and collating and all the other, things that go on, are there. It was amazing. See the number of organizations that we were able to access and get excited about the prospect. And I'm thinking here of city of York council, York CVS community volunteer service was tremendous.
Peter:York St John University got on board that big time. Autocabin, major employer in in York. Norwich Union, got involved, as well. York Minster, you know, some big employers in York. So so I I got really excited, and I think we all got excited about the fact that International Coaching Week gave us a focus, it gave us a profile, it gave us a platform, and a springboard, and all sorts of good good events that, that that we that we that we did.
Peter:The porta cabin one was a was a great, event. Do do you do you recall that one, Jeff?
Geoff:Essentially, the deal was porta cabin offered to host today's conference.
Peter:It did.
Geoff:And our patron, Bob Garvey, managed to persuade one of the leading international coach, theorists, and practitioners, David Clutterbuck, to come to York and to be the guest speaker. So, thought this is a good trade off, but yeah, very exciting opportunity that presented itself.
Peter:But it's also the engagement of the HR director of of Porta Kaplan, who was an active member of, Coaching York. So so my reflection on on international coaching coaching week were were were it was significant, I think, in terms of the development of Coaching York. It it is the single biggest thing, in terms of giving profile and credibility and coherence and all those all those things.
Geoff:We as we circle to find our landing slot on the runway
Peter:Right. See what we did there.
Geoff:It might be useful just to spend a few minutes thinking about coaching York's, legacy. I mean, obviously, it's still ongoing, but it's enduring benefits. One of the things that came out of International Coaching Week, we did a lot of events online. A lot of the input to those events is available on the Coaching York website. You can go to our video downloader page and you can find contributions about coaching on all kinds of issues from career coaching, mental health, coaching across cultures, climate coaching, and a whole host of other things.
Geoff:The podcast, of course, we have listeners in Europe, as well as The UK. And we still have an active membership, 70 members, and it's been fairly consistent for a number of years now. What's, what fond memory or sense or feeling does this left you with having been able to to work and develop this?
Peter:I guess there are a couple of of things, really. Firstly, I love the idea of happenstance and good fortune just to be in the right place at the right time with the right people, getting the chemistry right to conceive the idea of Coaching York. I'm really proud of what Coaching York has has done, you know, from the germ of an idea ten years on or more. It's still going strong with 70 members and internationals of reputation or recognition. I think that's that's that's super.
Peter:One thing that I'm particularly pleased about, we haven't mentioned thus far, is the number of other towns or cities that have been in touch with Coaching York and said, we've heard about Coaching York. We like the idea. How do we do this in our town or our city? So I'm particularly pleased to note that the idea of Coaching York is infectious. That's the word that we haven't used thus far, but we used to use quite a lot, didn't they?
Peter:We we want to infect people with the enthusiasm for coaching and the benefits of coaching. So I'm proud of what we've done, and I'm glad that it's proving to be infectious beyond York.
Geoff:Go to the doctor and get infected.
Peter:That'll be yeah. Great.
Geoff:New strapline. Peter, are up to now?
Peter:I hate the word retired. I'm still busy doing stuff, but people don't put money in my back pocket anymore. But I concern myself with the arts. One of the things I'm particularly pleased with is set up a a group of people who are of similar age and disposition to myself, called the Suits to Boots group, and, consultants and professionals who have left the world to work, but enjoy rambling over the North York Moors and other places. So I do a lot of that.
Peter:We have book groups and art groups. I play a lot of music these days. I'm going to see a poet tonight up in Stockton on teas, what I'm looking forward to. So I keep keep pretty pretty busy, and, I'm looking forward to getting back on the water in a week or two as well when I get back down to, down to Essex. So life is good, Joe.
Geoff:I usually like to ask our guests to to leave our audience with a thought. So we obviously, we have people who who listen to this, who are coaches, those who are interested in coaching. If you had a message to one or more group that you would like to leave them with, what would that be?
Peter:That's a good question. I think one of the things that's guided me on my coaching journey has been the words of Nancy Cline, who wrote that lovely book Time to Think. I'm reminded in her preface to her Pearls of Wisdom, she says that our grandchildren will look on amazed to read that we were paid to do this stuff called coaching. So the message that I would leave with anyone is at the end of the day, coaching is the art of having a bloody good conversation and I think there should be more bloody good conversations than currently happen. So have great conversations guys.
Geoff:Peter thank you very much for your time. Thank you very much for your investment in coaching York. So all the best for you and for the future.
Peter:It's been a great pleasure. Thank you, Jeff. Good luck.
Geoff:Thank you for listening to the Coaching York podcast. I'm Geoff Ashton, and I edit and produce the show. Coaching York is a social enterprise, a community of coaches serving the communities of York, the counties of Yorkshire, and beyond. We provide coaching, mentoring, training, and coaching supervision on a commercial and time gifted basis. If you want to know more about our offers and services, or if you want to join our expert, generous, and creative community, find out more about us at coachingyork.co.uk.
Geoff:That's coachingyork.co.uk.
