Becoming a Coach with Nami Ishihara: Navigating Belbin Team Roles & Intercultural Communication

And these meetings would go on for hours. It was just really long and terrible and boring.

I don't want to generalize, but I'm going to generalize.

But people have to feel safe enough to do that.

Nami chose an image of an unsteady river flowing over mossy rocks. For her this was a metaphor of her unsteady path, living abroad and working different roles in management consulting and in academia.

Finally coming to terms with the fact that she failed, or at least stopped, her PhD, and then taking ownership of her own story and going her own path towards group facilitation as a profession.

Because fundamentally, being a facilitator is not something that I chose from the beginning. It's something I kind of fell into. It wasn't a path that I set for myself and said, okay, I'm going to be this.

And then I've moved around a lot. So every time I've had to move I had to adapt my practice to where I was moving. So I think that is the river part: being able to adapt, and also being thrown into different situations.

Long story short, I was born in Japan. My parents are both Japanese. My father worked for a Japanese company that had offices in the US, and we lived in the US for eight years when I was growing up as a child. I have always felt part of me Japanese, part of me American.

And I went to school in both countries, moving back and forth. As I pursued my studies, I became interested in the Middle East.

I've often been a kind of cultural bridge between my parents or my friends. After a lot of different life events, I started to work with groups, facilitating their workshops and retreats, helping groups make decisions together and also plan effectively.

When I started doing that work, I think my upbringing of living in different places really influenced my outlook as a facilitator. I think being a bridge is one of the threads throughout my life.

Looking at these two systems and ways of education, how did you perceive that?

When our family moved back to Japan, I had this strange sensation that I could understand what people were saying, but I couldn't really understand what was going on.

Wanting to fit in, but not really wanting to fit in. I remember that being a big struggle in junior high and high school.

It was called han, which is groups of maybe four or five kids.

That is certainly one element. Although it always seemed a little too simplistic to divide cultures in terms of individualist or group. Back in those days, 20, 30 years ago, people really thought in binary terms: you're either American or Japanese, or you're Western, Eastern, Oriental.

I take issue with that, because I found a lot of elements in American society where it is actually very conformist. Japanese society does tend to be more group oriented, but at the same time

there is room for individual expression.

So I did a master's in political science and then went on to do a PhD. But in the middle of my PhD I had some major life changes. My husband found a good career move for him.

We decided to move to Vientiane, Laos. I thought, maybe if I move to another country it might help me overcome this block.

And in hindsight, maybe I was trying to escape my troubles. So we moved to Laos as a family. But then I found myself in a very far away country, with no work because I had to stop teaching.

Two really young children, in a totally different country, and no idea what to do. So this was my first crisis. It was like a life crisis.

And I think if someone asked me, what was your first step to becoming a facilitator, I would probably say the first step was to quit my PhD. For practical reasons I needed to finish that chapter and say, okay, I'm not going to pursue this path anymore. Until then I was constantly thinking, maybe I can go back to it, maybe I'll try to find a job in a related field. And I was doing short term consultancies, like two or three months.

But they were not exactly what I wanted to be doing. So when I decided to completely quit, it was difficult, because I had to admit to myself that it was not right for me, and that yes, I made some bad choices.

I had some responsibility. And I felt guilty, because there were many people who sponsored me and I felt like I was letting people down. So that was really hard.

But I said, okay, I'm going to close that door. And then other doors started to open.

Did you experience it like that? Or does it only look like that when you look back at it, and it looked very different in the moment?

You failed at something. And I didn't want to think of myself as a failure. But the reality is, yes, I stopped the PhD, so I failed in that. And at the same time I think it was brave. It was brave of me to say that. And I kept getting questions from people.

Why did you quit? Are you going to go back? And I say, nope, no.

Why are you doing this? And of course I didn't have any other prospects, which was worse. It's like being unemployed. And then also the identity issue of, you're just a stay at home mom, you're a trailing spouse, you're just following your husband.

All that kind of labeling that I put on myself, and that I think people also put on me, that I was very aware of.

Many were spouses of men working in different organizations. When I first met them, to be honest, I thought, people looked at them as just housewives.

The reality was very different. I met women mostly older than me by decades, 10, 20 years older, who had taken care of many children, who had managed multiple moves across continents, and who had lived in a lot of tough situations in different countries in Africa or the Middle East, not safe countries.

And they were very brave, and they did what they could. I really respected their lives.

Academia is a quite narrow, very specialized field where everyone is like each other.

People tend to be similar. You go into academia, you're competing over the same grants, you're writing papers and you're critiquing each other. It's a pretty narrow scope of people, and a specific kind of intelligence is valued. It's very verbal.

It's very cerebral. It's critique based. So it was that kind of world that I was in. And then going from that to meeting a very wide range of people. Just very different kinds of people than I was used to.

It really made me realize that the world is actually wider than what I know.

What do they find challenging? Who are they? What do they care about? And being a mother helps. I'm not saying you have to be a mom to connect with other moms, but it helps to have kids and to experience that. So since then, when I moved to different places, I don't feel that intimidated talking to people who come from very different backgrounds.

I just talk with them as they are, as people, and I assume that they're interesting. I assume that their lives are very interesting.

If you think that you know it all, and I have to admit I do have this tendency, like, I think I know it, I know what you're going to say. But we have to have that curiosity. It's so important.

It can be to make a decision, a plan, or maybe to improve the way they're working together. Whatever they want to achieve, a facilitator is someone who helps guide the process. It is a focus on the group dynamics and the group conversations. I regard my job as helping those conversations go deeper, be more meaningful, go more smoothly, making sure that they arrive where they want to go.

And coaching, I'm not a coach, but I know many colleagues who have also trained as a coach. Coaching is more individual. I know there are also coaches who work with groups, so more group coaching. And there is a certain degree of overlap.

But that said, there is certainly a different set of skills, and maybe the competencies are pretty different too.

I became the project manager. I was helping organize volunteers, helping raise money.

And these meetings would go on for hours. It was just really long and terrible and boring. There was a lot of under the table fighting, political trafficking, all these things.

And this is a volunteer group, but these were pretty serious conflicts going on in there. I just couldn't stand it. I thought, okay, I love what we're doing, but I hate the meetings. And at a certain point I thought, I want to become the president so I can change the meetings.

There are certain rules, like you have to say a certain thing to raise a motion. But the point is that people have to follow these steps, and if you don't follow them it's not valid. There is a lot of emphasis on this procedural aspect and not so much on the conversation or the real discussion.

So the real discussion was not happening. Maybe that's what's happening in our politics today. There was a lot of posturing and a lot of positioning, but not a lot of, let's explore this together, or what could be a different way of looking at it, or are we really considering other points of view?

Let's hear from other people who are not part of this, let's cast a wider net, and not just take a vote. How about we consider the issues a little bit more before we take things to a vote.

So there were a lot of things about the decision making that really bothered me, that I wanted to change.

The regular members were talking and they were coming to a decision about something really important. And then this lady walks in, she's from another project, and she says, I don't know why you guys are all spending this money on this one person, one child. Wouldn't the money be better spent if it were more evenly distributed, so that you can help a larger number of people rather than putting it all on one person?

Why are we arbitrarily choosing this? And then the room just went up. Everybody created this whole uproar. And I remember thinking,

as an outsider who had just come in as a new member, she has a point, actually. But they shot her down. She didn't even have any time to go further.

But I thought, that's an example, especially if you have several members in there who have power, or who are especially passionate, or who are invested in an issue.

People tend to follow the opinions of those who are stronger or more powerful, or who have the louder voices. And I saw it in action: the drive towards consensus, when other options aren't considered, when there's no space for that discussion, doesn't always lead to the best decision.

I remember seeing that and experiencing that. And then later on, when I learned about different techniques for helping groups make decisions together, usually the emphasis is on the building consensus part. It is an important part. But I'm always reminded of that incident, and of the value of having that dissent, of that person or those people in the room who don't agree or who have a different viewpoint. Even if the viewpoint is wrong, even if the viewpoint is an old way of thinking, there's value in it. Because if that person can have the space to speak freely, then it gives another person the courage to say, actually, I have another idea. It opens up the space.

I took one point from this book, which is that successful teams know how to argue well, and do argue.

How do you make that happen as a facilitator?

people don't like to be openly confrontational. But we all know that conflict, or disagreements, different opinions, allowing people to feel free to express those differences, ultimately leads to a stronger, better decision.

So it's actually better. But people have to feel safe enough to do that. There are some practical things you can do. One, give people time and space to write, to write on paper first before calling on people.

Asking them to express something, or asking people to write anonymously. Maybe using an app like Slido or Mentimeter, using it online so that nobody knows. Or, if you're in a group that is hierarchical, where there are managers and non-managers and people doing different roles, I might divide people up so that people at the same level are together. Rather than have the boss and the subordinates in one group, I might separate the management from the group and have them discuss amongst themselves, if that hierarchy is a factor.

Another technique, maybe you've heard of one, two, four, all. It's this gradual progression of sharing or expressing your thoughts, first as an individual.

So you have a few minutes to reflect and think by yourself before you hear what other people are thinking. You first have a chance to formulate your ideas on your own, and then maybe you share with another person, in pairs, so it feels a little bit safer than having to share it in a group. And then once you get the confidence, oh okay, I'm not the only person who thinks this, you have the chance to modify a little bit, or maybe you get a different idea from the other person, and then you can move on to share that idea with a larger group of people, let's say four people or six.

So that's another technique that a lot of facilitators use.

For her, that was qualification enough. And I was so clueless. Probably the person hiring me wasn't particularly picky about facilitation. In the beginning I didn't know that there was even such a thing as facilitation. I was like, what is a facilitator? What does a facilitator do? I didn't even know.

They wanted to play some team building games. So I just searched team building games on the internet. I put on my teacher hat, I guess. And then gradually I started doing a bit of research. What is facilitation? What are the tools? What are some of the techniques? I was very lucky, because I had this volunteer group that I could work with.

And experiment on. So I tried out a lot of these techniques that I was reading about with this group. I also gathered a group of friends who were interested in facilitation, and we started a study group. Because in Laos at the time there was obviously no school and no training course that we could take.

I bought a few books, made photocopies, and we went through them chapter by chapter. That also helped.

And that was the defining moment for me, to be in a room full of facilitators. Really an amazing experience.

And then when I went to this conference I met other facilitators from Singapore, from Australia, from all different parts of the world, and they each had different paths. Some people worked within a bigger organization as an internal facilitator. Some people came from the agile world, which is really interesting too.

Other people came from an education background, they were using facilitation as educators, and then also people who do graphic recording and graphic facilitation. And this group was just very welcoming and friendly, and very curious and open, learning from each other.

So I really thought, I want to be part of this. And I heard about this certification that they were doing. I thought, okay, if I'm going to make facilitation my career, I want to be able to call myself a facilitator. So I want to try to get this certification.

And that's when I started to intentionally try to learn more about facilitation and get more training in it.

But then, when I moved to Washington DC with my family because my husband got another job, it was totally different, because the market is much bigger.

There are a lot more facilitators, consultants, coaches, people doing similar types of work. And when I would mention, oh, I'm a facilitator, I want to do group facilitation, they would say, well, what kind of clients, what kind of issues? Because at that point I didn't really have a specialty.

I said, well, different kinds, and quickly realized that this is not enough. I needed to have a niche. And for a while I thought, okay, what can I do? Because of my background, it's probably to do something about intercultural work, helping groups of people from different backgrounds talk to each other, and something about building teams, because that was what I was really passionate about.

So the idea of focusing on teamwork I started developing in the US. And the happy part, I have always thought that being happy is a condition for success, not the other way around. Happy in the sense of really doing meaningful work, doing things for others.

Happy as in fulfilled, and happy as in our relationships.

Okay, how can we do this together? It's that spark, or that sense of, we're doing something that's about more than just me.

And then when people asked you, okay, what is it that we can get from you, you started to make teams really your thing.

It's more about the observable clusters of behaviors, as they say, of how you contribute and how you are on a team. Because I deal with teamwork, I find that it gives people a language to talk about their own strengths and contributions, and how they like to work, their preferred work styles, in a language that is not judgmental, because there's no right or wrong, better or worse.

It's just your type. And I also like the fact that you're usually not one type, you're a mixture. Usually you have one or two dominant or strong roles, and you have a few weaker roles that you don't like to do and that you're not that good at.

For example, there's one role that's called a shaper, someone who is very driven and can drive the team to get results. They're the ones saying, come on, we need to do this, driving towards results. That can be a very positive thing. But the flip side is that they could be, unintentionally or intentionally, hurting people's feelings, or ignoring people who have different ideas.

So if you think about it, every strength is also a potential weakness.

And then there is also this idea that we are adaptable. So in a different context you might have to stretch yourself a little bit to fill a role if there's nobody else doing that role. For example, someone who's checking the details, dotting the i's, making sure that the document is well prepared and there are no spelling mistakes.

If there's nobody on the team doing that, it might not be your number one preferred role, but it might be something you could stretch and do.

but now we are in a situation where we want to launch this new product and we really need to make sure it's getting out right, because we want to print 500 pieces of it. Then I can stretch to do this detailed work, even though it's not my number one preference.

I ask the group to do something together. Let's say I give them instructions and say, okay, you're going to draw a picture of something that represents what you have in common.

And then you always find that there's always somebody who's like, okay, let's do this idea, or who translates the ideas into action. So in any team effort there is a similar set of, you can call them roles, or behaviors, or you can call them strengths, a combination of strengths that are required for any team endeavor.

And it's pretty universal if you think about it. And usually one person could fill multiple roles, strengths or roles, and you'll find that happening a lot. It's this idea that we are flexible to a point. You can be flexible to a point, but we are most successful when we are playing to our strengths.

So you have what you think of yourself, and then you have what other people think of you. At the workshop, as a facilitator, I would share the results. You get to see if there's a difference between how you see your own contributions on the team and what the other team members see.

And that's a very, very important aspect of it.

How do I ask these other people? Do I send them a survey invite?

There's almost no point in doing it just for yourself. You really need to have the external observers for it to be a complete profile.

We also talk about your strengths. Are you exhibiting those behaviors in that team? And if so, what aspects would you like to become better at, or emphasize more? So there's a personal aspect, but there's also the relationship with the team aspect.

So part one would be reading, thinking, reflecting on your personal strengths and maybe the gap between how you see yourself and how others see you. And then part two would be, let's draw a picture of what roles or what strengths we have in our team. When we look at the collective picture, what strengths do we have on the team?

Where are the gaps?

It's usually something very simple, like, do you notice a gap between the strength that you mentioned and the way that others see you?

What could be the possible reasons behind it? Because it takes a little bit of time just to look at the results and understand them and wrap your head around them.

In my case, a lot of my responsibilities as the leader of the nonprofit group were, I thought, external relationship work. We call it connections: finding opportunities externally and bringing those opportunities back.

I thought I was doing that. I thought I was doing a lot of coordinator work, coordinating roles, coordinating jobs. And then how other people saw me: they saw me as quite detail oriented and quite specialist, having a very deep knowledge about one subject. Which was quite surprising for me.

So other people were not seeing what I was doing. That's one example.

For example, I can continue to do what I think is important, but improve my communication.

I can say, listen, this is what I'm doing, this is what I'm good at, and I want to do this more, and I want to get your understanding. That's one option. Another option is to be honest with myself and say,

this is something that I'm doing, but actually I'm not that into it, I'm not that enthusiastic about it. So maybe I should just ask Susan, she's more suited to it and she would probably do better at it than I am, so I can shift some of the responsibility to her. And instead I do more of the fact checking, taking care of the details, doing the completer finisher role, which is one of the other roles.

And then I could own my detail orientedness more. That way I'd be spending more time doing something that I'm stronger at anyway.

It's a choice. It's opening up.

Probably there is some level of transparency already, but especially when maybe not every team member is super self aware, I guess it can also be really powerful to cultivate this common language of having this role and that role. And now I will always ask you for help when it comes to detail orientation, fact checking.

attributes which sometimes they don't have. They're strong in other ways, and there are many different ways to be a leader in a team.

And it opens up the discussion for that. I've been in many instances where groups will say, huh, the most junior person is actually the shaper role, they're the driver or the motivator. And the team leader doesn't have to be that shaper, they could delegate more.

They could be stronger in other roles. So it allows the team to have that discussion about who do we go to when, for example, we need to put ideas into reality? Who do we go to when we need to set up a system to do things, to make things orderly? Or who do we go to when we need some out of the box, creative ideas?

Who's good at that?

I experienced this myself when I was doing a mindfulness based strengths practice course, and the realization of, ah, this is how other people see me versus this is how I see myself,

was a very powerful experience. This is exactly the tool we are building right now at metaFox. And if you want to try it out, go to metaFox.eu/strengths. And back to our conversation.

Then in the workshop room we have these peer to peer conversations about our results, self perception versus perception of others. And then in part two, you said we take a step back from our own results and look at the entire team results and the composition of our team. How exactly do you do that in the session room?

And then we look at it together and I ask them, not knowing that this is your team, just looking at the distribution of where the people are, what would you guess about this team? Because sometimes you'll have teams where a lot of people are clustered in just a few roles or strengths, and then you'll see teams where one role is missing, nobody's doing that. And often there's a light bulb moment where they'll say, oh, that's why we've been having these challenges with our team. Because either we don't have the person doing that role, or there are too many people doing the role, or maybe the way the team leader manages their tasks

doesn't play to their strengths, for example.

Not everybody has to be a team player. You can make a different kind of contribution.

Not just the technical capabilities, but what kind of team strengths are they looking to fill? That could be one conversation. But in general, first you look at the personal strengths, and the gap between self perception and other perception.

And then part two would be looking at the team. What mix of roles do we have? Where are the gaps? How do we fill them? What does this say about how we work together? What are the areas we want to improve and how do we improve them? We have that discussion, and then probably action steps. Okay, number one, number two, what can we do?

And this is what the team comes up with by themselves.

Let's stay there for a minute and shed light on it. If you sell a Belbin workshop to a team, do you sell the entire Belbin experience and the team is just paying you, or do they also get an invoice from the Belbin organization for using the methodology?

It's pretty straightforward. I just add the cost to my fee.

But there are a lot of other assessment methods out there that use different methodology or different systems. I prefer systems where I can control how I sell the workshop. So actually, I don't think I've ever sold a workshop as a Belbin workshop.

How did you get through your first paid journeys, and how did you manage to get access to this sort of customer group?

People there have a lot more experience than I have. There are lots of consultants, very excellent, very high level people. But then I thought, okay, what's my niche? What's my background that I could leverage? And for me it happened to be, and this is also my personal preference, that I seem to connect better with mission driven, how should I say, non-governmental or mission driven organizations, groups of people who really believe in the mission of the organization.

And also groups that have people coming from very different backgrounds, cultures or nationalities, because I can relate to them and they can relate to me. That's been a constant for me, the common denominator.

Even now I'm not really sure if I know how to charge, but I know how long things take me. For example, if I'm organizing, facilitating and designing a retreat, let's say a two day retreat, I know that it takes me minimum twice as long as the retreat itself.

Realistically, 2.5 times the number of days. And then after that, if they want me to write a report, it takes me another half a day or one day, depending on the kind of report they want. So I know roughly how long it takes me. And then I ask around, what's the rate? Different organizations will have different criteria for how much the day rate is.

I try to ask around. You never really know. Sometimes they say a price and then you don't hear back from them. Or sometimes they get back to me very quickly and say sure, and then I think, oh, maybe I could have charged a little bit more.

Especially when I'm in a new place, I have to ask around, because there's a range and then there's a market.

But sometimes, if I'm applying for a request for proposals, they will have a specific specification, where they expect you to write the number of working hours or days that you will spend on this project. In that case I will give an estimate of how long it will take.

And then another consideration is the market, where am I based. Based in Indonesia the rate is very different from being based in Washington DC. So I can't charge the same fee that I was charging in Washington DC. I have to be realistic, because the market is different. If the daily rate is anywhere from 800 to 1,500 US dollars in the US, let's say 1,000

that you want to charge for a day, in Indonesia it would be like a third of that.

That is basically the sort of journey we would go on.

The other one I hear often is, everybody's doing their own thing, their own project or work, and there's no sense of them working as a team or as a group. And we want to get to know what other people are doing and maybe explore opportunities for more.

I guess that's collaboration.

So maybe going to Bali or Singapore, exploring.

The shortest retreat I've done is just a day. And I tell them it can be in Jakarta, or if not your office, you can rent a nice room somewhere. You don't have to go and spend a whole day traveling.

But it's nice to be in a different environment.

Maybe get out of the city a little bit.

There was a time when I was thinking, I want to become 100 percent process only, only doing a specific type of facilitation. But actually it's not very feasible.

And even the most successful facilitators, I've noticed, or I've heard, don't necessarily do facilitation all the time. So I'm thinking a lot about that, about being flexible, and how I take the skills and experience that I have and market them in a way that will be attractive.

And use a kind of language that people will understand about what value I provide. I think this is the same for everybody.

And the only thing left for me to say is, thanks Nami for this heart to heart conversation. Thanks to Justin from the metaFox team for turning our two and a half hour long talk into this episode. And if you like it, send it to another coach or follow the Making of a Coach. I'm excited to join the next journey on the Making of a Coach next time, on your favorite podcast app.

Hear you then.