IOC Member Highlights Teresa Ramos

[So when it comes to your jump from technology into coaching, how did that happen?]

Yeah, it's not the most obvious one, is it? My background is in technology, but it was always abroad. So even though I'm Spanish and I studied here, I moved to the UK and to Germany. I was working abroad for 22 years, always in technology. When I came back to Spain to work in technology the culture shock was so big.

I was struggling so much with the Spanish culture because even though I'm Spanish, I had never worked here. They got me a coach and my experience with coaching helped me realize, that's what I want to do.

I want to help people be happier at work and be more productive. My going into coaching was part of my desire to help people not to struggle as I was struggling.

[What type of struggles do you often work with, with your clients?]

The kind of questions are, what do I want to do now? What makes sense for me? What would give me a sense of feeling of fulfillment and a sense of purpose?

I do a lot of intercultural coaching. So people moving countries and working with different cultures and wanting to settle in and make the best of the new opportunity in the different country. I do a lot of work with people in technology because coming from technology, we tend to have a particular way of communicating.

I do a lot of working with women and that work includes being more credible, getting ready for the next promotion, having executive presence, and how do you deal with being the only woman in the room. Which is something that happens very often, especially in technology.

[What are some of the unique challenges that the woman your coach are facing?]

One of the main issues, particularly for women, is what is my own leadership style? When you're a man, you can always look up to somebody and say, I want to be like him. When you're a woman, it's very difficult if you don't have a role model.

So who is your role model? What kind of leadership style do you want to have? What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? How do you want to work? I do work a lot on finding and developing your own leadership style.

[How has the Institute of Coaching as an organization impacted your coaching career so far?]

Coaching can be a very lonely job because although you work with clients, you're on your own. So the IOC has given me a sense of community, a sense that there are people I can go to. There are people I can talk to who would understand my challenges. I feel very much at home.

[How do you see technology and coaching in integrating?]

I think that technology is everywhere in our lives and it's going to be even more so in the future. Now, with the big boom of A.I., if we want to become better coaches, we need to embrace A.I.. The question is not whether or not we embrace A.I. The question is to what degree do we want to embrace A.I.?

A.I. can function as a scheduling tool, so I can organize meetings faster and more efficiently. It can take notes from the meetings. It can even be helping you in your sessions. A.I. has been in our lives for a long time. It's only now that we are becoming more aware of it because of the big boom with ChatGPT.

[What are your thoughts for coaches who might be nervous about A.I.? How would you suggest they learn how to integrate it to a degree that they feel comfortable with?]

We all feel nervous with technology and we all feel nervous with things that we don't know. When we start playing a game that we have never played before, we are nervous and excited. So my advice is playful curiosity, play with it. And then the next question would be, How do I play with it? How do I get to play with it?

If you know somebody who can teach you how to start Chatgpt. Get them to sit with you and have half an hour, how to register, get your own account and start writing. And once you have that, then you go into YouTube and there are thousands of videos just telling you what you can do with it.

You need to give it some time. It's not like you're going to learn everything about A.I. in 5 minutes, but you're going to learn about how to write simple commands. That's good enough to be curious.

Be curious about what you can do with A.I. and what it can do for you. Our clients are going to be using A.I.. So how are you going to be able to coach them if you are scared of what they are doing? ?

[What is an Agile leadership or how do you coach a team to be agile?]

Agile is a methodology that comes out of technology, out of software development. The type of technology that is hitting everybody now, was hitting technology 20 years ago.

Some software guys got together and were talking about how they could be more effective in the world. Technology was and is moving really fast, with change happening faster and faster and our world is getting more and more complex.

That was the birth of Agile. How can we do our job without wasting time? This philosophy is about how can you adapt to change, how can we be effective and efficient, even in a very complex and changing environment.

The principles of Agile are about how you work with people, how you interact, and how as a team we can be very effective. The challenge with this style of working and this style of leadership is that it is totally opposite to the way of traditional command and control.

But when you want to implement agile principles into companies, you've got to work with leaders and executives who have invested all their lives in the typical model of leadership now having to change completely. Having to enable teams to make decisions, self-organize independently. It's very difficult for leaders to make this change in their thinking style.

[What is a step as a coach that you make to prepare leaders to make this big adjustment?]

I think in my view and in my experience, it's a problem with what is your identity and how do you add value? Because your identity as a leader, if you have been working for 20, 30 years to climb the corporate ladder, your identity is, you are the person who solves problems. You are the person who makes decisions.

You are the person who is right and you are the person who tells everybody what's what to do. Agile leadership says, you are not the person. You are the person who enables your team to do all this.

You have to build on collective intelligence. If you have a team of ten people, ten heads and ten brains are going to be more powerful than one head and one brain. Even though as a leader you can be very intelligent, very bright.

So I help leaders create a new identity. Who are you going to be as a leader now that you're the one who empowers your team, who creates an organization that can organize itself, that is empowered, that makes decisions? You are the one who enables that. Who are you? What's your identity?

And then we get back again to the point of role models. It's important that we have agile leaders who can serve as role models for future leaders. Who are you going to be a leader and how are you going to add value to the company and to the organization? ?

[What is your favorite part right now about coaching?]

I love when you first meet a client and sometimes they come to you …and I'm just thinking of a new client I had a couple of weeks ago. And she came to me and she was really, really struggling and she said, “Do you think you can help me get this right? I don't know what else to do.”

And that moment when somebody comes to you and you say “Okay, you'll be fine. I know you will be fine.” And that's something that as coaches we have this power of believing in people and helping people believe in themselves.

So when somebody comes to you and they say, “Look, I've got this huge problem, I don't know what to do, can you help me?” And you go, “Yes, yes, I can help you. You will find the solution, but I can help you get there.” And you already see that light in their eyes when they go, “Oh, I can get this, I can get these.”

I love that moment when you see the person in front of you thinking, “Oh wow, there is a way out!”

Being able to create the space and to witness somebody do that. I think that's the greatest privilege that we have.

Originally published in Teresa Ramos From Spain | Institute of CoachingInterview with Teresa Ramos, executive coach and Fellow of the Institute of Coaching