Frances White - Communications
Frances White - Communications
My approach to my coaching and supervision practice
“In all my work, I focus on the team, the person, the relationships, the system and the wider context. I work to provide a psychologically safe space, listening attentively,, engaging energetically, allowing for silences. I work with metaphor and story, playfully using language to tease out vulnerabilities, darker aspects, let shame leave and allow for the inner critic to be heard and understood, notice any "voices" of victim or archetypes, look for patterns together. I prefer to have a lot of deep structure and provide whatever process enables my clients to feel that more is possible, whilst holding those very lightly so that more flexibility does enable new thinking. I notice and often highlight paradoxes, where meaning may reside. I like to avoid judgments and evaluations or measuring - I will use outcome focused thinking to pace where organisations love to be, but I treat them casually. Through really good connected relationships in coaching, new things will often way exceed what pre-determined outcomes could have predicted. Working with teams, I work a lot with diversity, hoping always to enable more voices in the room to be heard, more aspects of people to be able to show up, as I think this enriches the dialogue and deepens the connection with the work.
My philosophy is that playful, light and compassionate interactions are much more likely to be useful and engaging enough for us to do the work that needs to be addressed. I "dress this in a suit", when necessary!
What APECS means to me
I really love connecting with professional coaches who are broad not evangelical in their approaches, who want to inquire together and to expand the edges of our thinking and who are keen to experiment and be curious.
APECS is about thinking not superficial networking. I love the dialogue and new perspectives and there is always another workshop or event I can join which helps me to keep at my learning edges. My clients benefit greatly from my being more reflective and inquiring. I don't want to be ticking boxes but really expanding my mind and supporting my practice in practical, relevant way.
The value I bring to my clients
I have been a coach consultant for 33 years, after an early career in PR, Comms, Marketing and Sales. My clients value my extensive psychology-based training to Masters level as this brings insight to key business issues - orchestrating organisational change; supporting connected 'teaming'; inquiry based collaboration that delivers flexible, agile results and learning. My work with teams is systemic, stretching and deeply shifts their ability to manage their own process, to resolve and explore together, to generate new thinking and to work as a learning organisation. My clients also get value from my training as a Mediator, Narrative Coach and Facilitator, also from the Psychological Safety and neuroscience.
Examples of coaching/supervisor work
Team coaching with Leaders in an engineering business: An innovative engineering programme had simply never got off the ground as it needed to, due mostly to unclear contracting, no platform for collaboration and a failure to establish good teamwork in the very diverse group pf leaders brought together. The executive team was struggling to connect and align over important principles on key areas of decision making and hierarchy/status was being used to over-ride others. The team coaching included thoughtful and compassionate contracting and appreciation of each other, sharing their stories of how the programme could be working really well and the neuroscience behind some of the feelings and consequent behaviours. The team needed to face into how their behaviours were impacting on the whole programme and how to change some things. Once the exec team was really connecting in a more psychologically safe environment, I worked with the broader project management and engineering teams to share the same kind of thinking and process of contracting, honesty, taking responsibility for self and impact on others, working together productively. Within a few months, they had changed the fear-filled culture and turned round some of the projects. They said recently that they still talk about those sessions and use that language to keep themselves on track.
Restoring trust with a Leader - I was asked to coach a Regional Director whose situation had led to diminished inner confidence, which had manifest in some pretty destructive exchanges with others and an attitude of being a "hero leader" who could do everything alone. He was failing to engage his HRBPs and had alienated many stakeholders. He was desperate to prove that he could do what was needed - which was leading to further pressure on himself and others. I coached him online at first and helped him to consider how his experience, his responses to that and his behaviours towards others has resulted in the situation he was in.
We talked about reflection and slowing down, choosing responses and approaches that were more in line with the collaborative approach the organisation valued. He found this very useful and did some reading of his own on EQ, concluding that he could rewind on some of his key relationships, explain his thinking following reflection and apologise to some key people, most notably in his team.
Qualifications and Experience
Honours Degree in Linguistic Science & Psychology
Ashridge Masters in Executive Coaching and Accredited Ashridge Coach
APECS Accredited Executive Coach
Masters in Neuro-Linguistic Psychology
Psychological Safety (PSI) and LDF Authorised (Leadership Development Framework)
Accredited in Coaching & Leadership Supervision and MBTI Step II
Accredited Conflict Mediator and Transformational Mediation
Diplomas/Accreditation in Accelerated Training, Emotional Intelligence and Neuroscience, Narrative Coaching, Transactional Analysis, Cultural Orientations Framework, LAB Profiling, Systemic Team Coaching, Systemic Constellations, Organisational Modelling
