UPBEAT as a Coaching and Human Leadership Development Tool

Steve Rubin's picture
Submitted by Steve Rubin on July 27, 2009 - 14:59
UPBEAT as a Coaching and Human Leadership Development Tool for PASCAL Members and especially those in Universities interested in improving the leadership, governance and management of University Reach-out to regional businesses and Communities
 
UPBEAT is a structured human resources tool designed to help individual academics who want to engage with the real world evaluate themselves within a given range of skills which have been previously identified as helping people deliver improved leadership, governance and management of Higher Academic Enterprise ( of HÆ - our phrase for University Reach-out).  The attached introduction provides some more information on the approach and some back ground to help anyone understand the essence of the approach. The tool resulted from comprehensive observations of 150 successful academic enterprises. These revealed how through defining a project felt worthy of development by all partners, by improved project development, through team building and leadership development, and by sensible institutional support with the right partners, successful HÆ activity could be developed in a fiarly striaghtforward way. The essence of the approach is to develop sustainable partnerships where all team members strive for ‘virtuous knowledge sharing’. The  approach also recognises that key external factors can impact individuals emotionally in their efforts and should be considered alongside team functions and social networking intelligence development to maximise the potential of an enterprise team working.
 
A simple ‘Questioning Framework’ has been developed that should enable academic enterprise leaders to reveal what creative team players felt of their own individual contribution to the enterprise, how they could improve their performance and why they chose certain courses of action. The approach is also extremely useful in capturing success or failure which is derives from either project factors, external partner factors or institutional factors. These are normally revealed under four key headings
 

- Action - what do you D0 to become more effective?

- Meaning – why am we undertaking the actions as individuals and as teams?

- Enablers – what are the personal (behaviours), project or institutional drivers to ensure meaningful improvements for any team?

- Barriers – what are the personal (behaviours), project or institutional issues that have to be sorted out to ensure progress isn’t thwarted?

 
UPBEAT’s Questioning Framework is in the form of a template which should enable a developed narrative to be structured in a flexible and useful way without constraining an individual to narrowly report events, behaviour, actions and feelings.  Thus what succeeds or fails, or more particularly what needs to be done for higher level success, can be structured in a useful comparative way in order to ensure Æ continues to improve to ensure gradually increasing goals are met, either in terms of an individual’s personal enterprise development or performance, or in terms of the collective development, or in terms of improving levels and quality of project success or with respect to institutional development.   This can be expedited using data brought to coaching session, or afterwards.  From the wider perspective
 
The Value of a Case Exploration
 
A key value of UPBEAT is the knowledge base of case studies which can be used as a yardstick or benchmark for any project development. 150 cases are held on the UPBEAT website for comparison – www.upbeat.eu.com . The approach reveals if things do, or do not work, how we should understand why and whether the lessons are transferable from one project to another and what we can learn better from other projects.  If we want to understand why HÆ works, the answers should be revaluated through cross-case analysis with like minded projects.  I feel we may find a mixture of issues between individuals, projects, organisations as well as some examples of good and bad luck.
 
The ability to draw on these experiences in an intelligent way can go some way to supporting the coaching process as people can see what worked, or did not work, for other people, forming a pool of ideas, or even a mentoring network, for people to draw from.  The case studies are “the yardstick” that separates this, from other tools.
 
UPBEAT coaching as applied to individuals
 
The website also give those interested full guidance on how individuals can take themselves through, or be taken through, a self-assessment which is, in effect, its own coach/facilitator.  This should give academic who want to become exemplary enterprise project leaders a picture of where they are in an enterprises development and where they want to be.  It should identify the factors that are stopping or helping them in their climb up the matrix as they strive for high quality and levels of creative enterprising engagement.  After an initial discussion it is useful for them to draw on relevant case studies that may show how others have dealt with similar problems (this provides an argument for strong structuring of case study data).  If such a network existed, they may also be able to contact a mentor who has overcome similar issues to run ideas past them.
 
There are also key identified courses of action for individual academics to understand and develop if they are to establish themselves as able to successfully engage in real world affairs and then to improve their own capabilities.  They should  work hard to develop these actions which will give them high level entrprise engagement skills.  The approach then drive them for continuous improvement, by asking them to take part in a follow up assessment after an agreed period.  This will help them evaluate the actions that they have taken and suggest how they could change and improve their UPBEAT profile.  Successes and failures is recorded withina database to allow other people to draw on this experience.  Failures should be included as it highlights the risks inherent in adopting such actions.
 
Implications for Æ Activity
 
The key implications for using the apporach are as follows:
 

- UPBEAT has a value for the development of leaders, but may also be linked with, not only data collection, but also some guidance which can support people to come to their own conclusions about what they need to do to develop as UPBEAT Leaders.

- UPBEAT is dynamic and longitudinal – the regular snapshots the approach reveals tell us what is successful at any moment, and the approach should then be used to continuously drive improvement in Higher Academic Enterprise.

- UPBEAT’s core value is based around the Questioning Framework and the potential for effective use of case studies to inform people’s choices.  This is a valuable knowledge base which can inform, not only the effective use of the UPBEAT approach, but also research success and risk factors in Æ decision making.  We should start to learn what works, what doesn’t and why.

- There is potential for networks of mentors.

- UPBEAT is about change and this can be individual or organisational. There may also be a market in assessing universities in terms of their ability to undertake HÆ.

 
Invitation
 
The designer of UPBEAT, Professor James Powell – a Board member of PASCAL – believes the approach will enable PASCAL members to engage better with their regional businesses and communities. He is making it freely available to members via the website – www.upbeat.eu.com . It is clear that the approach does engender key enterprise skills, complementary to the traditional skills of the academic, namely scholarship, analysis, science research and lecturing, enabling academics to become more enterprising, and creative with respect to enterprise.   The four skills are Foresight Enabling Capability, Individual Creative Performance, Social Networking Intelligence and Academic Business Acumen.  The tool is meant be self evaluatory and self coaching, as it tries to develop the enterprising skills of the academic so that they become key members of their creative enterprise team, and leading their part of any development.  As they usee the approach PASCAL members can give Professor Powell feedback on  its use so as to improve i) its ease of use, ii) its functionality; and iii) its ability to drive traditional academics to become succyssfully enterprising. Key in the approach is the need to engender new qualities and levels of engagement in the systemic understanding of any problem and the team characteristics required to solve it.  At the initial level of engagement academics have to work with colleagues to develop a worthy enterprise problem to explore and develop, thus exploiting a key aspect of any new research understanding in the form of a consultancy, product development or process enrichment.
 
Value of UPBEAT
 
We believe the greatest value of UPBEAT is to help academics become enterprising leaders, and has to help them recognise emergent leadership skills of others in their creative teams or to help the team define creative agendas for constructive change.  It should help an emergent leader to see beyond institutional constraints, and recognise how to remove barriers to change in order to determine more appropriately the creative scope of their work, with a clearer definition of key objectives.
 
UPBEAT is highly personal in focussing on exploration on what an individual academic feels to be important, but in a non judgemental way giving a person self power over their own understanding of their role and how to change it for themselves.  Thus the coach tries to engender a frame of mind in the interviewee of self evaluation and self coaching based upon a ? personal reflection on some key concepts:
 

- What did the individual DO at any stage in the project in order to take the enterprise project on to a creative solution?  Why did they do what they did and how effective was it?  How would they have acted differently with hindsight?

- What did the academic feel about what they were doing and how effective this was in creativity terms?  Similarly what did they feel about what others were doing and how they were working collaboratively?  Was it a team working, if not why not?

- If it is not clear what or why they are doing something or reporting the way they feel, unwrap the understanding further by asking questions about what the interviewee meant in any situation.

- Explore any changes in behaviour – constructive or otherwise.

 
So, PASCAL is offering UPBEAT as a tool to help University Reach-out. Why not have a go at using the tool and letting its design know its value and how to imprve the apporach still further.
 
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UPBEAT Brochure.pdf1.54 MB
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