Since 1999, IECL has been inspiring and developing leaders and organisations through coaching across Australia and the Asia Pacific region.We deliver tailored programs to facilitate increased performance in your business.
The interviewee this week is Dr. David Guo.
Dr. David Guo is the APAC R&D and TS&D director for Coating Materials of the Dow Chemical Company. Prior to this role, David held various R&D leadership positions with Dow, including Dow APAC Customer Innovation Center director, as well as R&D/TS&D director for Nippon Unicar Company (a Dow JV) based in Kawasaki, Japan. At Dow, David has been very passioned and has an excellent track record in identifying and developing talents. Many of the young talents worked under him became successful leaders themselves.
Prior to joining Dow in 2008, David worked for Rogers Corporation in Connecticut, US, for ten years where he was a R&D group leader and a principal engineer. David received a Ph.D. degree in Chemical Engineering from Michigan Technological University in conjuncture with Michigan Molecular Institute (MMI) in 1996. Following his graduate studies, he also completed a post-doctoral assignment and later served as a technical staff member at MMI.
1. How do others think about or describe you?
We try to live our life following our hearts. At least this is what I have been trying to do.
At work, I like to be a person who people trust and account for, a person who inspire and sometimes challenge others to perform their best, and a person who others see as a fair leader.
Outside work to my family and my friends, I do my best to be responsible and sincere. In my son’s eyes, their father should not have had any regret with the way they were raised.
2. What are the 3 biggest achievements during your work or life?
I have lived a well-balanced life between career and family. For career, I have never been a very ambitious person chasing high career targets, yet I am doing alright with my career and, most importantly, I enjoy what I do. To family, I spend most of my spare time with them, and have raised two boys through top universities who are doing well professionally.
I am lucky and proud for making right moves at some junctures of my life. The most rewarding one was the one made in 2008 when I decided to quit a successful job, sold the house and everything in it, abandoned a comfortable life in a beautiful town in New England of US, and came back to China. It has been such a joyful ride since both for me and my family.
I have long ago found a way to positively live my life. Years ago, one of my close family members got critically ill. For almost one year, the patient spent each day fighting for the life. I was closely involving taking care of the person.
At beginning, the stress was unbearable as you did not know what would come tomorrow. Until one day I learned how to 「live the present」 from a book I read. In the book, it said each of us has a way to decide how do we want to 「live」 each day: happy or miserable. What we need to do is each morning, when we open our eyes, we tell ourselves that I want to have a happy day today, and I will not be bothered by trivial things and I will not worry things I can’t control.
I used this approach to take me through a tough period of time. I have ever since to try to live this way. This approach has become my philosophy to life, and it makes me more easily appreciate each moment we live.
3. Use 3 words to describe IECL.
Surprised– Before I came to IECL Level 1 class, I thought I knew something about coaching, and I was only come here to learn them in a more systematic way. I was so wrong. I was so surprised on how little I knew about coaching before.
Resourceful – Even it was only 3 days in Level 1 program, I learned so much about organizational coaching. I was deeply impressed by the whole experience, including the format of the program, the professionalism of instructors and staff members, and the quality of my classmates.
Inspiring– It is very inspiring to be part of the organizational coaching where I can use all the skills I learned to help people and bring the bests out of them.
4.How have others benefitted from your coaching? Describe the situation…
I just started the coaching practice recently with a dozen of coaching sessions. My own skills have been improved with each session taken place.
At the beginning, I mostly followed the questions in each of the GROW stages. In later sessions, I was able to explore strengths of my counterparts, and then tried to use strength based coaching approach in some occasions.
In addition, I also tried to blend challenges into each session to make my counterparts to work harder sometimes.
Feedbacks from my counterparts have been positive – felt the sessions enabled them to think differently, set right goals, and come up options that they never thought before.
For instance, one of my counterparts came to the session, and when asked what were her goals, she told me that she would like to improve communication skills as she felt that she did not know whether her work was cared by stake holders.
By going through structured conversations, we found out that what she really needed were to get her work focus aligned to stakeholders』 priorities, and then to manage stakeholders properly. At the end of the session, some clear actions were resulted from the session.
My counterpart was very excited about the outcome and said that those actions would make her direction much clearer.
5. Do you have a "Best Question" as a coaching tool?
Coaching is a structured conversation, and questioning is the essential part of the conversation. I actually have many favored questions.
If I have to pick one, I think 「What else?」 would be at least one of my 「Best」 questions.
I normally take this question to ask my counterparts, and sometimes to challenge them to stretch themselves with their thinking.
I found many times that the truths or real root causes come out from a series of 「What else」 explorations.
6. What is the biggest difficulty in your coaching? How to overcome this?
I am still early in coaching practice. In few occasions, I found it was difficult to get the conversation moving productively. In a couple of sessions, I found it was quite challenging to keep the conversation within the topics or to drill out anything under the surface.
In these occasions, my counterparts would either not very focused to answer questions or not push themselves hard enough to think/explore things under the surface. Coming out from these 2 sessions, I felt I did not help my counterparts to fully uncover potentials within themselves.
To overcome this type of situation, in following sessions, I learned to build some stress into the conversation by throwing some challenging questions, so they had to think hard to drill down their thoughts.
I also found to explore some strengths of the counterparts, and apply strength based coaching approach could get counterparts motivated to cooperate better, thus led to more quality outcomes.
7. During your previous coaching experiences, what is the most impressive thing to you?
In my life, I interact with people in many roles – a leader, mentor, advisor, friend, parent, etc. Many times, when I help people with their issues, I do it based my knowledge, my experience and my wisdom on the situation, i.e., I need to 「know what I am talking about」.
In coaching, I leaned, as we were showed during the workshop, a coach does not have to know the 「content」 of the matter. Instead, a coach can rely on the process, i.e., the structured conversation to help the counterpart to come out the solutions by their own.
This is what impressing me the most about coaching.
8.In which aspect(s) can you help IECL?
I attended August 2020 IECL Level 1 class after one of my colleagues shared to me about IECL program. I am glad that I attended it and I benefited greatly. I will be sharing my experience about IECL to others.
I will also encourage some who show interests to attend one of future IECL classes.
In addition, I will be interested in and look forward to opportunities to be part of future IECL coach programs.
9.What is your expectation for IECL?
My short experience with IECL since August 2020 Level 1 class has been very inspiring and fulfilling. I am looking forward to the next level. I can’t wait for the Level 2 class in December 2020 to get new skills and thus be able to more effectively help others.
Meanwhile, I am counting on IECL to be a platform for me to continue sharpen my skills in organizational coaching.
10. How do you manage your strengths and resources in your life?
In strength based coaching, we try to work with our counterparts to identify their strengths and then work together to see how to use strengths more consciously for success.
This is the same approach I have taken in my life and work. I will do more and more consciously.
11. How do you combine your own hobbies with coaching?
In the last 11 years, over 80% of my days start with a 5KM run followed by 20 - 30min yoga. I enjoy this habit as it really gets me energized to start the day.
Over the time, the habit became one of my hobbies, and I found it helps to reduce the stresses and keeps me approach things in a positive manner.
Being energetic and taking positive approach will definitely help me in coaching and helping others.
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