Stellenbosch Business School, part of the top performing research-led Stellenbosch University in South Africa, has achieved a significant accreditation for its MPhil Leadership Coaching Programme.
The two-year blended learning course is designed so that participants can study while they work, with practitioners from South Africa and further afield establishing their credentials as a leadership coach.
Following robust assessment and verification by EMCC Global, the programme has now been accredited at the highest Masters EMCC Global Quality Award (EQA) level.
The EMCC Global accreditation assessment team considered the MPhil Leadership Coaching Programme to be an excellent example of a learning and development journey that integrates theory and praxis. Prof Salome van Coller-Peter, Prof Nicky Terblanche and Roger Maitland have ensured that the ongoing development of the programme is designed to meet the needs of the coaching community, with clear progression for learners across six modules that align strongly to the EMCC Global Frameworks for Professional Practice.
An interview with Prof Nicky Terblanche
We were pleased to catch up with faculty member Prof Nicky Terblanche, who told us more about the decision to apply for EMCC Global accreditation, and the drive that colleague Roger Maitland put into the process of accreditation. The MPhil in Leadership Coaching was established in 2010, and increasing enquiries from students looking for international accreditation combined with the practical ease and depth of thinking offered by EMCC Global helped sway the decision to apply. Thanks to this, all previous and future students of the MPhil programme are now able to apply for their own EMCC Global Individual Accreditation automatically, as EMCC Global is already assured of the strength of learning they have received.
Tell us a bit about the programme and why you chose EMCC Global
Our program is based at the business school, a department in the faculty of economic and management science at Stellenbosch University.
At the business school, we offer MBA, the MPhil in leadership coaching, MPhil in future studies, development, finance, lots of programs… but we did not a coaching specific accreditation. and realised our students more and more want to have international accreditation because with online coaching, you can coach anyone in the world
As a university, we actually want to stand completely apart from all, everything and be critical and theoretical and research based, but we have to be practical. So I think EMCC was the best home for us in terms of the combination of not having to change fundamentally what we do, because we are rigorous already, and not forcing us to be a specific way.
Effective practice is very important. For example, you have a better chance of actually, through self awareness, being a better coach than ticking a box of ‘the 10 things that I can do as a coach’.
Your students come from all over the world – tell us about your approach
So we very closely aligned with the UK philosophy of coaching, the way that , we don’t teach a specific method of coaching. We ask people to understand, discover their own way.
Some of our lecturers are well are deeply rooted in African traditionalism, so we bring that in also. The demographic of our classes is quite wonderful. It’s quite representative in a sense of the multiculturalism of South Africa.
And I think that’s a very rich learning experience. Students are not only learning content and the new skill, but learning from highly experienced, very successful peers from different cultures.
It’s a, it’s a very rich learning. It’s a beautiful scaffolding and a support for in general, for how you grow as a person. That’s really quite beautiful. That’s the power of coaching.
What do your students go on to do?
We do also find many people do the course and don’t necessarily go into becoming a professional coach. Some of them work in corporate and they want to, manage coaching within their organisations. And this program equips them beautifully with the knowledge and understanding. There are also a growing number of internal coaches.
How is the course structured?
The course is a two year programme. The first year has four modules, and the second year there are two modules.
The first module is fundamentals of coaching, literally what is coaching, basic models. We have something very effective in that first week where we ask groups of the students to do book reviews on coaching, coaching books, and then they have to extract from their specific coaching models in terms of the input throughput output, which is a very standard coaching approach.
And then they learn so much about the structure of coaching. We cover things like ethics and coaching, supervision, all of those basics, questioning, listening, then each module also consists of an assignment. So there’s a written assignment, they have to go and define a problem, find a coaching model that might work for that and practice it and write it up.
Then they also do peer coaching in quads or triads, they have to coach each other. They must receive coaching from a professional coach and do coaching and take part in supervision groups, five of them during the year.
The second module is business coaching. Because we’re a business school, we focus specifically on organisational context. An organisation could be for profit, NGO, education, health, and so on, and we then look at the challenges or the issues that coaches would have to help the clients think about in the workplace.
The third module is leadership coaching, where we focus on the leader in the organisation, their context. We also bring in Ubuntu coaching, which is a an African concept. We have lecturers that specialise in those.
And then the fourth module is advanced coaching techniques, which is team coaching, with a bit of artificial intelligence technology, brought into the game.
At the beginning of the second year, which is in the fifth module, there is an assessment in front of a panel, and first present the learning throughout the previous year, the model they’ve developed, how they did it, theoretical underpinnings, and then you actually coach for 45 minutes.
So after that beginning of the second year, you have a coaching, you have a stamp of approval that you can coach. It includes the 45 hours of giving coaching, which is on your way to getting the 90 hours required for EMCC Global Individual Accreditation. And then the second year, you work only on your research projects.
Students are assigned a research supervisor and they do a 75 to 80 page dissertation on a topic following an empirical research process, where they define a problem by reading up on the knowledge gap, collect qualitative data by interviewing people and quantitative by sending surveys, analyze it, write it all up and present findings.
Students find the research quite rewarding. And we have a very, structured approach to research, which we borrowed from the MBA program in our business school, where we take people through a series of assignments that lead up to the final dissertation.
More details: https://www.stellenboschbusiness.ac.za/programmes/mphil-leadership-coaching