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To fulfil this aim, COMENSA needed three things:
Why are we doing this
To understand the whole process of Membership Standards and Criteria, it's important to create a frame around this process relating to the role of professional bodies, the purpose of COMENSA and issues around accreditation and membership standards. This is outlined in the sections below.
The role of professional associations
Professional and regulatory bodies play three roles (Harvey & Mason, 1995):
- First, they are set up to safeguard the public interest. This is what gives them their legitimacy.
- Second, professional bodies also represent the interest of the professional practitioners and here they act as a professional association or trade union (including legitimating restrictive practices), or as a learned society contributing to continuous professional development.
- Third, the professional or regulatory body represents its own self-interest: the organisations act to maintain their own privileged and powerful position as a controlling body. This is where control, legitimated by public interest becomes confounded by control based on self-interest.
The credibility of a Professional association is extremely affected by the performance or non-performance thereof of the functions outlined above. The third function usually has an inverse relationship to credibility- with the increase in focus on self-interest usually having an adverse impact on the credibility of a professional association. COMENSA has - to date - charted a course carefully designed to steer clear of the promotion of self-interest in any form and at any level in order to maintain credibility. These professional bodies perform the above functions by the licensing professionals, and may additionally set standards as well as examinations of competence and enforce adherence to an ethical code of practice.
The purpose of COMENSA
COMENSA's Mission is to support professional practice and a learning culture in coaching and mentoring through standards and ethics.
THE UNDERPINNING ELEMENTS IN THE COMENSA CONSTITUTION THAT INFORM THIS WORK
Assumption of inclusivity
COMENSA subscribes to the principle of Inclusivity, as an umbrella coaching and mentoring body, it therefore aims to promote all types of coaching and mentoring endeavours. As a result COMENSA will always take into consideration this reality in promoting standards of practice as well as ethical practice. This is the approach that the Portfolio Committee has taken in the recent process of consultation around a more rigorous Framework of Member Criteria and Standards of Competence, and our members' input helped stretch our imagination to see those areas that we had neglected. Since the process is always a work in progress, we depend constantly on our members' input to make this work.
Accreditation versus Membership assumptions
Currently the COMENSA constitution does not allow COMENSA to accredit members. It does, however, uphold certain membership ethical and competence standards towards which members have to adhere.
What's the difference?
Membership standards and criteria are the benchmark standards that the coaches and mentors have to meet to be members of COMENSA and to be considered as credible practitioners in the specific category within which they register. Effectively they are the "price for admission" into the association. This has the benefit of creating credibility for both the members and the association. They answer the question "what kind of people are members of COMENSA", regardless of how they got there.
The broad definitions of accreditation, on the other hand, based on the Merriam-Webster on-line dictionary are the following:
1) To give official authorization to, or approval of:
a) To provide with credentials; especially: to send (an envoy) with letters of authorization
b) To recognize or vouch for as conforming with a standard
c) To recognize (an educational institution) as maintaining standards that qualify the graduates for admission to higher or more specialized institutions or for professional practice
2) To consider or recognize as outstanding
3) Attribute, credit
a) To ascribe or attribute to (usually fol. by with): He was accredited with having said it.
b) To attribute or ascribe; consider as belonging: an invention accredited to Edison.
Based on the above, it could be said that COMENSA DOES accredit members to a certain extent according to definition 1b; however this is questionable since prior to 2007 we have not really had standards of competence against which to assess members. We have, however, since 2007, been able to "vouch" that members meet certain ETHICAL standards, but have not been able to vouch that members conform to a certain standard of COMPETENCE. We definitely are not yet in a position to Accredit in line with definition 1a and 1c.
An accreditation process (definition 1a-c) assumes benchmark standards are in place and the member is then taken on a process to support a member to meet those standards and then "bless" the member as meeting those standards.
The difference between the two in the context of COMENSA is that some of our members will approach us already fulfilling certain standards of criteria (beyond just paying their membership fees). Membership of COMENSA then means that the member meets these standards and criteria as set out elsewhere in the COMENSA Standards of Professional Competence Framework, dated 10/02/2006 (definition 1b)- these relate to
Some members might however approach us only meeting certain MINIMUM standards and may want to improve their paths of membership towards higher membership categories. For this to happen a member will take specific routes to achieve this, this may be through a process of accreditation either using experiential learning or a formal qualification and structured coaching process (definition 1a and 1c). This category of members will most likely than not deal directly with COMENSA to fulfil this purpose, but may deal with an external institution or an ETQA which will be using the COMENSA Membership Criteria and Standards of Competence as a benchmark in its 1a and 1c accreditation processes.
Some of our members are training institutions as well and in considering the membership standards of practice, it was important to take that into consideration. The membership standards of criteria as presented in this document also represent the criteria that the coaching institutions should commit to promote to practitioner coaches.
The draft of the new Member Criteria and Standards of Competence Framework was presented to the COMENSA Executive Committee for review at the end of November 2009. Set out in this document are these benchmark membership standards and criteria, sharing an integrated model of how ethical standards, competence standards, continuous professional development and supervision all integrate to fulfill COMENSA's purpose to increase the credibility of its members in the eyes of the buyers of coaching and mentoring. The framework will be published for review by all members during the first few months of 2010 for comment and feedback in time for ratification at the May 2010 AGM in Gauteng.
The Ethical Standards - as work that has already been fulfilled by the Ethics Portfolio Committee - are excluded from this document but should be seen as part of a whole programme of Membership Criteria and Standards of Competence Framework.
The work that is currently taking place with the Supervision Portfolio Committee is also separate but related to the overall Membership Criteria and Standards of Competence Framework as completing a detailed part of a whole programme.
(Source: Positioning Document on Membership Criteria and Standards of Competence, supplied by Ivan Justus on behalf of the COMENSA Member Criteria and Standards of Competence Portfolio Committee 20/11/2009)
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