start@JMU | Coaching for newly appointed professors
Background
You are a newly appointed professor and are in a phase of reorientation and/or changing role into your first independent or new professorship at JMU? You therefore have requests you would like to discuss and talk about in a coaching? We would like to offer the platform for it. Strictly confidential and exactly in line with your individual needs. You are perfectly free to prioritize and decide without any guidelines which questions and/or challenges you want to address.
The coaching takes place between you and your coach and is always confidential. There will be no reporting back to the university at any time as regards the contents. We therefore attach great importance to cooperating only with external coaches acting completely freely and independently from the university. The talks usually do not take place in rooms of the university either, but in a location outside the campus you are free to decide on.
Your coach accompanies you with activating your resources and potentials in order to develop custom-fit solutions for your requests. Various coaching tools set an effective framework for your individual reflexion and search process. You are provided with impulses for observing your behaviour more precisely, for understanding it, and for changing it if need be. You set the objectives, define the steps necessary for reaching them, test them in practice, and readapt them in the coaching.
Quite often the path is as instructive as reaching the goal itself.
Typical reasons for a coaching of newly appointed professors
In a coaching for newly appointed professors you can
- clarify the professional goals in your new role.
- target your owns claims and aims in a realistic way.
- work on the challenges of your daily job routine.
- broach the demands and expectations of your colleagues within the context of supervising and leadership.
- analyse conflict and problem situations.
- critically reflect on role expectations and find a constructive way of dealing with them.
- continuously pursue your personal development concerns.
Procedure
STEP 1: You accept a professorship, come to JMU and our Welcome Centre supports you in this process. As soon as you have arrived, a member of our Academic Staff Development Office contacts and asks you to arrange a personal meeting to get to know each other.
STEP 2: At a first personal meeting, we set forth what kind of support JMU can give you subsequently. With that we also give you detailed information on the coaching programme start@JMU. If you are interested, we jointly devise topics you would like to deal with in a coaching.
STEP 3: Based on the information from the first meeting we seek a competent external coach for you and bring you into contact. If both sides feel that working together will run smoothly, you start the coaching.
STEP 4: The coaching process itself will be shaped by you in a completely autonomous and individual way. You decide, when and where you meet and, together with your coach, define the subjects and the aims that are important for you. This process and its contents are kept strictly confidential between you and your coach. At no time information about it will flow back to the university.
STEP 5: At the end of the process we would like you to tell us that the coaching has (for the time being) been finished, and we would like to know, if the goals you strove for have been reached during the coaching, resp. if further coaching is required and, if so, what kind of.
