Why at Harthill we believe coaches urgently need to pay attention to their own and their clients’ Vertical Development.

Global society and the organisations working within that system are going through a period of exponential and existential shift.

Humanity is constantly evolving new ways of understanding the three key domains of being – what we at Harthill call the ‘I’, ’We’ and ‘It’. The domains of self, community and system. We are challenged by our need to recognise and celebrate diversity and divergence. We are exploring new understandings of identity and self designation. We are evolving from a top-down institutional collective to a peer distributed collective. We are uncertain about our future relationship with technology and Artificial Intelligence.

At many, many levels our lives, relationships and organisations are becoming more complex. And because of this we believe that to adequately hold space for our clients as they successfully navigate this increasing complexity, those of us who coach can benefit immensely from learning to see ourselves, the world and our practice through different eyes.

To pay attention to our own, and to our clients’ Vertical Development.

The journey towards a new sort of Accreditation

After almost three years of research, consultation, experimentation, conversation and planning we have seen something emerge in our thinking that we feel can, along with several other similar initiatives, be of service to the wider field of coaching.

Not as a replacement for what already is, but as another lens that can be brought to the craft; another viewpoint to offer to our clients. A new coaching modality.

We call it Vertically Developmental Coaching, and we’ve unpacked it a bit below.

Key Elements of Vertically Developmental Work

For their work to be truly Transformative, a coach needs to evolve a much deeper and expanded view of their craft. In our developmental work with coaches we seek to help them nurture and build greater capacity to create for their clients (both individual and team) a truly generative space within which their inquiry yields a more expansive space of insight, wisdom and understanding, In order to do this we seek to help coaches develop five additional core areas of practice.