Coaches Take Center Stage - Alison Roper

Alison Roper: So yeah, Alison Roper I've been working with Hone for about three years, I'm one of their principal coaches. As you can probably tell by the accent, I live in London. So I'm there with my husband, I've got two sons who are still living at home, kind of useful things to know about me. I am an avid reader, as you can probably see from my bookcase behind, I'm always reading, always reading, always drinking tea because obviously I'm British and I have to do that, and I'm also a kind of lover of all things social, so I love parties, concerts, hanging out with buddies, so yeah, a little bit about me.

Alison Roper: Yes, so I think if I think about my career, I've probably been doing coaching fairly informally for quite a long time, so I had people would typically come to me, you know, if they needed some advice or they wanted to kind of some run ideas by me and things like that. And I also realized quite early on in my career that I had a real desire to see other people succeed. So I took real joy in people developing growing and and kind of moving on in their career. So the nature of the role that I was doing at the time when I worked for Mars was kind of needed a lot of the core skills that you needed as a coach around listening, you know, in asking empowering questions, that type of thing, so it felt like a logical step to start to bring all of that informal stuff together and kind of train as a coach. So I think that's what took me on that journey.

Alison Roper: Yes, so I have this fundamental belief that everybody is awesome at something, they just need to know what it is, so they just need to identify what it is. And I also kind of believe that we can develop that at any age, you know, I think I kind of found my niche when I was in my early 40s, you know, I'd taken one career path and then moved down another. So I like this concept around Hone around this kind of lifelong and life changing learning, so I think that we, you know, we need to continue to learn and you know what I love about the Hone model is that when we're teaching the classes, you see people identify skills they didn't even know they had, so they'll realize informally, oh that's what it's called, that's what I do. So it's just, you know, it's great for them to see the value in that business context, so I think that's kind of what, what led me down that route and also why I relate so well to what Hone is trying to do.

Alison Roper: Yes, so yeah, one of my friends kind of said that they think I'm a master at building rapport, which I think I would agree with, so, you know, I really love getting to know people, I love getting to understand what makes them tick and what matters to them, so I think, you know, often I'm working with groups, I kind of get to know them quite well quite quickly. Some people would say that's maybe nosy, I would like to say that's probably a bit more curious and you know, it's really powerful, it's a really powerful skill when you're starting to build rapport with a group for the first time, particularly as we're virtual. So as we start to get to know our delegates and we work with them for a period of time, it's really good to be able to kind of build that rapport so that people have that psychological safety as soon as they join the class and they feel in the place that they can be kind of really open and honest.

Alison Roper: So what I would say is I typically see when we get people coming back, so they've done the 101 classes and really enjoyed those and they may come back kind of six months to a year later and start to join the 201 classes. And what I love is they share their experiences of where they've started to, You know have really good feedback conversations or effective 1-1 with their team and where they started to put their coaching skills in place. So I think that's I see that a lot, I had one particularly memorable experience where there was somebody we were teaching a class on powerful questions. So as you know, at the end of every session we asked people to put a commitment in, the following week we did a check in on the commitments, how do people get on? And this one guy said, "Oh yes, I practiced the powerful questions, I asked my girlfriend to marry me and she said yes." So I thought that was a brilliant example of a powerful question being executed really well.

Alison Roper: There's a great one I'm reading at the moment, which is all about resilience and about kind of robustness, which I think is a really critical skill at the moment, which is "The Path Through the Jungle" which is actually by Steve Peters who wrote "The Chimp Paradox". And it's a really, really good book to think about how we can build resilience and how we can kind of continue develop and particularly over the last couple of years, how we can protect ourselves and make sure that we continue to grow in a safe way in terms of

Alison Roper: to grow in a safe way. In terms of people, I think funny enough it's one of our other Hone coaches, so Nick, who is one of our coaches, actually used to be my former boss when I worked at Mars and he really inspires me with his, his compassion, his empathy, his ability to see the kind of the bigger picture and just the fact that he genuinely really cares about people. So when he was, when I worked for him, he was an amazing manager and all of our team, thought he was a major manager and he really kind of cared about us as people, so that's my book recommendation and then just a bit about somebody who inspires me.

Alison Roper: you know, I love working for Hone, I think what we're doing is amazing and the fact that we're making training accessible to people that they can do this as part of their day to day, they have the opportunity to go away and practice things come back and kind of share their learnings and grow as a cohort I think is a really powerful tool and I think it's a really great model that we're using, I love that lovely thanks