Diversity: The Key to 10 Years of Success
For the ICF Hungary Chapter, International Coaching Week (ICW) offers the opportunity to organize our largest event during the year. For several years, we contributed with other organizations to carry out the event, but in the last four years, our chapter has grown big, experienced and ambitious enough to do it on our own. This event is by far the largest coaching related event in Hungary, a milestone for the profession among ICF coaches and others alike.
Each year there is a theme around which the keynote and workshop speakers orient their stories, lectures and messages. We work in three parallel sections, investigating different aspects of the given topic. For example, in 2015 the main topic was “Directions of Coaching on Individual -Group/Team – Organizational level;” in 2016 we addressed the challenges and improvement of our profession: “Adventures – Experiments – Challenges;” and in 2017 the main topic was “Self-Reflection from the angles of the Coach – Client – Organizations.”
The topic changes, but some attributes always stay the same like quality and professionalism.
- We expect high standards from speakers (basically adopted the methodology ICF uses for its international events and campaigns). They send in their materials well ahead of the event and test their content—knowledge sharing, up-to-date coaching topics, firsthand experience and useful takeaways are basic musts for any speaker
- We have a good number of highly trained and credentialed speakers to work with, but we also believe that other coaching organizations and professionals have a lot of value to add for our attendees. Finding the best possible balance and panel of speakers is one of the most exciting enterprises our chapter undertakes
- We record each keynote and workshop session and share it with participants afterward, as we ourselves also know how difficult it is to make a decision on which sessions to attend when faced with a nice selection of possibilities. In this way, our event is living longer, has greater impact and embraces the profession on several levels among our coaches
- Follow up and feedback is essential and a great asset to our speakers. Learning from it and acting consequently adds much value to both our profession and organization
2018 is a special year for us as the ICF Hungary Charter Chapter celebrated its 10th birthday! We learned, developed and enriched a lot on the way. Just as with our clients, we want action and can reach great things by doing our tasks, walking the talk. There is no question that our annual ICW Coach Conference has enriched our chapter and can be a useful measuring tool for us, outlining the path ahead for us to go.
This year we decided to take a moment and stop, look back on these 10 fruitful, hardworking years and embrace the many colors our chapter, our members, our stories and our entire profession represent. So, the topic of 2018 is “Diversity in Coaching/es – Clients – Organizations we work with.”
This is also a great opportunity for us to say thank you to our former presidents, board members, colleagues and partners—without whom none of this would have been possible. So, we invited the key figures of our history and development to share their knowledge and experience, showing us how to build a thriving profession. Since we have more characters than we could possibly pack into one day, the rest of the year is also dedicated to these professionals and role models.
Most importantly we want to say thank you to our members for their devotion, loyalty and sacrifice of their volunteering activity. We want to give them presents—besides the high standard of the event—useful coaching gadgets branded with the ICF logo, a subscription to a professional magazine and, of course, cake and champagne.
Our chapter also plans to launch several programs around the magic number 10, starting with our conference, including a 10K run with ICF Coaches (body and soul), pro bono sessions for our members with 10 supervisors, and 10 mentors introducing their way of mentoring for credentialing.
While we definitely take our work and profession very seriously, we also know that gamification, finding the time for fun, and connecting with each other just for the sake of it is among the most important attributes for our fellow coach colleagues who want to join a community like ICF.