Accreditation

What about you?

You may be interested in personal development knowledge and skills for yourself, or for others. Or you may want to train with us. You will probably want a professional service, at a price you can afford, provided by competent, trustworthy informed people who ‘live the brand’.

Powerchange is committed to providing you with the coaching and training you need, to a standard we’ll all be proud of, by a company with a reputation to keep. We want to be worthy of your trust so you buy what you need from us.

We want you to be proud of your association with Powerchange and recommend us to others because you’ve received the best available.

Who decides how good we are? You do.

Setting the Standards for our Coaches  –  the Powerchange Approach
Over the last 15 years Powerchange has monitored the attempts of coaching and training organisations, including formal educational establishments, to agree objective criteria for setting standards that keep pace with the progress of innovative coaching, only to find they are immediately inadequate and outdated. There is currently no objective national or international regulatory body for accrediting coaching.

Some groups of coaches attempting to regulate coaching include:

European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC)
International Coach Federation (ICF)
The Association for Coaching (AfC)
The European Coaching Institute (ECI)
The Coaching Network
International Society for Neuro Semantics (ISNS)
Coach Training Alliance

There are many more worldwide.

Credibility of Assessment?
Worthwhile assessment is not so easy. One organisation told us they had to explain to their potential accrediting body assessor what he was supposed to be assessing when he arrived to assess them. We ourselves were told by a university that if we "played the game" required for academic recognition and jumped through the hoops over the next two years the university would accredit our course and "pretty much leave you alone". That approach didn’t fit our values.

What we decided
We decided that Powerchange is a commercial business that is determined to build a valuable reputation around its brand name. We decided that the best people to assess Powerchange are our clients.  They’ll do it anyway.  We decided not to pretend we were something we are not.  We are building a team of bona-fide specialists working in a wide range of fields and we decided our work would speak for itself.

We set out some simple aims:

  • To take responsibility for our own quality of coaching and training
  • To train our own Powerchange coaches to our own standards, and constantly lever those standards. We’ve been doing that for years now.
  • Only Powerchange-trained coaches work with us. We have known and ‘assessed’ each of them personally – attitude and personal values as much as coaching standard – for at least a year
  • To have a clear Code of Conduct for our coaches and a formal Client Agreement with our clients so everyone can know what we’re about
  • To work with the healthy business principle of providing our clients with quality products (coaching, services and materials) that they are pleased to buy and fulfil (if not exceed) client expectations
  • To resist the temptation to ‘hype’. If what we provide is really good, we don’t need to risk credibility by overpromising (we made that mistake early on and let down several clients)
  • To develop a blame-free culture within Powerchange that constantly honours our team, sponsors honesty and facilitates dynamic quality improvement
  • To give our clients – those who pay for our services and products – the last word on our quality, and make our businesses dependent on client success.  We win only when they do
  • To have the courage of our convictions and set out to lead the field with fresh, creative, innovative and unique coaching that fuels our vision:

Men, women and young people living lives they’re proud to own, wherever they are, every day.

This vision, and our determination to fulfil our aims, inspires us in what we do and the choices we make.

So how do we work?

  1. We create a culture of curiosity and enquiry to help us and our clients learn more and do more – and at a significantly deeper level
  2. We initially examine and assess our coaches’ performance to make sure it is up to OUR standard and commercially viable. We don’t want to be associated with poor coaching.  Neither do our Powerchange coaches (even the ones that we are assessing!) Nor do their valuable clients and potential clients
  3. We have a client feedback system that our coaches’ clients can use to tell us about what’s happening. No one feels ‘reported on’ – we’re committed to  improvement and everyone’s success, including our own. We’re here for each other
  4. We proactively support our coaches and their coaching to help us all ‘live the brand’ and model what we offer. We honour each others’ mistake-making capabilities too.  (We learn most when we have made mistakes.)
  5. In the spirit of true coaching, we live with constant innovation and upgrading. No training course or coaching pack is the same as the last one – it’s better. We want you to have the finest coaching available, and we want to provide it.

As Accreditation Executive, Gillian Curtis leads the team responsible for the initial assessment, benchmarking and on-demand continuous professional development of Powerchange coaches. Gillian comments,"We want Powerchange Coaches to be steadily building their coaching skills and reputation as well as the reputation of Powerchange. The initial accreditation of each of our Powerchange GOLD coaches ensures that they are trained to the high standards of Powerchange (24 days over a year) and have credibility with our clients. It is important to us that we ‘live the  brand’ and are accountable to one another."  Gillian’s light-touch support and input is really appreciated, particularly those who are just starting out in coaching.

Do No Harm

The bottom line is "Do no harm".  From then on Powerchange coaching can only benefit our clients, can’t it?  They can decide who they want, and how much they want, and work out how it will work for them.