Published by Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer
– 2000
Chapter 4
Roots and Boundaries of Executive Coaching
Elizabeth and Gifford Pinchot
Develop through Coaching
Executive coaching with clients
from business, government and non-profit workplaces is a young
professional practice that is still forming its identity. Coaches
and coaching practices are just now cataloging the benefits
and limitations of the profession, and working out the professional
guidelines for the delicate relationship of helping across the
boundary between the individual and the employer.
Executive coaching
is born out of the leadership training
movement, yet it shares the viewpoints of the adult development
and human potential movements. The coach is a teacher, but the
subject is the development of the whole person and, in turn,
the development of the whole system.
Dilemma 1: For the Individual and for the
Organization
Executive coaching, like most
of psychotherapy, confers the privilege (and responsibility) of helping people
develop on their own terms - within the constraint of enough success to
keep the workplace solvent and thriving. It is a fine line to walk in workplace
coaching, to focus on the needs and wants of the individual while being
accountable to the health of the system, in this case the organization that
contracts and compensates the coach.
A typical workplace coaching
begins with looking at the client's goals – within and without the
workplace. Next is figuring out how to achieve them with this employer, if
possible, and within the reality of the rest of the client's personal
life. It is personal futurist work, constructing a realistic and satisfying
future rooted in the full panoply of the client's life story and the
world that surrounds him or her.
What could possibly justify the
corporation putting assets into this project? Doesn't work like this
belong at home or church or in some self-improvement workshop? The only
justification for the time and expense is if the coached individual improves
performance, which in turn causes improved performance in the company.
Fortunately, people perform better when they act more in harmony with their
authentic selves. In our own practice, we see that the companies with the best
performance do support the development of the whole person. The people they
develop and retain, now more creative and congruent, support the development of
a better workplace.
Many companies have gotten wise
enough to see their people as their prime resource. It is common practice to
focus time and money on ways to help employees to function more effectively,
and to try to do so without burning them out. Coaching adds further ingredients
to the developmental mix: effectiveness and lowered stress are part of a wider
transformation of the person's work life, of becoming more congruent by
putting into action his or her goals and dreams and values, in work and beyond.
Congruent
Development
|
Company View
|
Successful Coaching
View
|
Successful outcome
|
|
Reduce Stress |
Come from values and personal goals
|
Work life and personal life become congruent
|
|
Remove dysfunctional behaviors
|
Increase behavioral options
|
Client tries new ways of being and new ways of contributing
|
|
Train in new skills & improve performance
|
Client takes on system-wide responsibility and
influence
|
|
Boosting the individual's
personal development, by coaching employees towards congruence and creativity,
can accrue to the bottom line health of the company as a whole. Fortunately,
examples abound.
One of our clients in a
training function was suddenly thrown over his head by a major change in responsibility.
Instead of training middle managers in project management and supervisory
skills he rather suddenly found himself in executive leadership training, which
demanded of him new skills in participatory design, working with senior
leadership and teamwork in a highly political context. Dealing with the senior
management team on leadership style issues required a broader repertoire of
insights, stories, and wisdom.
In this case, as in so many
others, the biggest developmental boost came not from our client receiving
coaching directly on the workplace issues, but from his inner growth work that
spanned both the workplace and his private life.
Our client had been making
significant progress in reframing issues in his intimate relationships. He was
practicing inclusion of his wife and children in making family decisions. He
had come to see his children's bids for independence as positive signs of
growth. He had come to see his wife's very different and somewhat softer
management style as highly effective and appropriate in many of the situations
he and his leadership training participants were facing at work. He had learned
to use the power of gratitude to dissolve conflict. He had discovered that he
didn't have to play the hero himself around the home in order to be loved
and appreciated – that in fact
playing the hero often de-motivated and disempowered others.
When he brought these lessons
back to his work with the leadership team he found the lessons very relevant.
With his help, several members of the leadership team themselves developed a
more participative style. Better leadership began to spread. "Gratitude
is the attitude," became a company mantra. The reward and succession
planning process began to focus less on the heroes who saved the
company's bacon and more on those whose people were most creative and
effective. The result was a significantly more effective organization.
Dilemma 2: Way Up
From Already Good
The essence of executive
coaching is helping the client move way up from already good. The people who
come to executive coaches are highly functional, often star performers. And
yet, they also have room for growth, and growth often begins with
dissatisfaction with what is. How do you mix the right degree of admiration for
what the client can do with helping them see what needs to be changed?
Society often perceives
therapists as working in the arena of the dysfunctional; therapists try to fix
that which is not functioning. Such a view can lead to a belief that the client
is "sick." But in coaching we are not therapists; we are peers
working with admirable people who are often highly advanced in their
understanding of themselves and how to get the most out of who they are. Our
clients are certainly not sick: instead they are exceptional people eagerly
striving to continually develop themselves–way up from already good. And
the coach is there to facilitate and help.
Coaching
can be seen as a kind of personalized training - a precise, tailor-made
intervention. Yet even that distinction is misleading, because the most
important aspect of coaching is that we aim to increase the executive's
intelligent control and responsibility - to release
the expression of their highest talents and deepest strength of character
rather than to add knowledge or fix something that is wrong. The core of this work is the
client becoming more congruent, true to themselves, and thus more engaged and
effective in both work and personal life.
Dilemma 3: Changing the Individual, Changing the System
In addition to our background as executive coaches, trainers,
consultants, psychotherapists, and entrepreneurs (a typical sort of resume for
coaches), we are also unabashed systems theorists. So, many ideas from systems
theory permeate our work. Thus, we work from two perspectives in coaching: that
of the individual client and that of workplace environment or business system.
We see each client both as an individual and as a part of a particular context,
immersed in a particular set of relationships. Is our executive coaching client
shaped by the character of his or her workplace, or is the organization shaped
by the character of the executive? Both perspectives are useful, and the
interplay of individual and system is the dynamic the individual is struggling
to resolve.
The next story shows how the need to deal with barriers that were in the
way of our client's success caused us to expand the boundaries within
which an executive coach normally operates. For our assignment to be
successful, we found we had to bring in another person whose role was
complementary to that of the coach – a facilitator with a distinctly
different set of boundaries and operating procedures. One of us retained the
role of primary coach, which the other acted as a facilitator of the larger
system. In large organizational transformations, it is often necessary to work
at the micro or individual level and as the macro or system level at the same
time.
One of our clients was CEO of an
unusually structured service organization. Several members of the board of
directors had themselves formerly held the CEO post in the organization and all
of them felt an unusual sense of involvement with the idealistic goals and fate
of the business. The board, and even other shareholders, frequently meddled in
the business, often bypassing the CEO by telling her staff what to do and how
to do it. Our CEO disliked their inappropriate meddling in the business, but
she needed their support, their continuing investment, and ultimately their
continued choice of her for job. She had been sent in to control costs and turn
around a business that had been losing money for several years. She had
excellent financial and business management skills and a deep spiritual path
that aligned with the idealistic nature of the business and its owners.
She was most comfortable with the
owners and directors, spending time with them at retreats and socially, and had
not spent much time with the staff outside formal meetings. With the board, she
found herself falling into reinforcing their prejudices by complaining about
her employees, rather than protecting them and asking help in developing them.
She had the support of the board, but was not pleased with her own performance.
She faced a growing dissatisfaction from the staff who were not responding well
to rather obvious cost control necessities. Morale among many of her employees
was bad enough to affect the quality of customer service and the efficiency
with which it was provided. She often felt frustrated and lonely.
We came to this coaching job
through the president of the board, who was not satisfied with the CEO's
leadership or the structure of the organization. He was concerned that the
organization was losing money and that the staff seemed to have low morale and
a "victim / downtrodden worker" world view and responsibility
level. He asked one of us to coach the CEO and see what could be done to
improve her leadership style, especially encouraging more employee
participation, initiative, and entrepreneurial focus.
She knew the coach had been sent
in because things were not going well. At first she presented the situation to
us \as one of poor organizational design and confused directions emanating from
the board. Both were clearly true. The CEO also felt let down by the employees,
both in their responsibility level and in their non-support of her efforts on
their behalf. And it was true that before she came to fix it they were
disillusioned of all management.
Gradually she became trusting enough to talk about the opportunity she
had for learning and improvement in several areas. She learned that we could on
her side even when we saw opportunities for her to be more effective. Our
client had the necessary analytic skills in business management, but came to
see that she needed to work on deepening her engagement with employees as their
inspirational leader and defender. She began to hold to a clear and inspiring
picture of where the organization was headed, a courageous action given the
strength of the board's involvement. She had to protect employees from
board members who told individual employees what to do, thereby sabotaging the
plans, coherent vision and structure of the organization. Rather than let the
board launch random projects, she asked employees to say, "Good idea.
I'll suggest it at the next management meeting." This was difficult
for her because she was afraid to offend board members, a justified concern
given that short tenures of the CEOs who preceded her. Two things became clear
to us. One, the CEO had a lot to learn about implementing the kind of
participative leadership that actually suited her deep commitment to her
spiritual path. Second, the
organizational dysfunction was largely the consequence of factors beyond her
control. We discussed the option of her quitting. Here we put to use part of
the ethical boundaries inherent in client-centered therapy. What the client
wishes to achieve in the areas of worldly success, emotional experience and
spiritual growth is up to the client. Our job is merely to get them to see that
there may be more productive options in the way with which they approach their
goals. The hiring organization must accept that if the client's best
interest is to leave, the coach will not stand in the way.
The client decided that she could
learn more by staying on the job and trying to handle the situation, rather
than by leaving during a crisis. She knew her job would continue to be painful,
but she felt she was growing new capabilities and understandings at a rapid
pace.
As we pondered how to proceed,
boundary conflicts arose. As the
CEO's coach, we could no longer talk with the board chair about the
CEO's fitness to serve. Our coaching conversations had created a
privileged communication that superceded our role as organizational consultants
to the board. Fortunately our work
took us in a direction where the client's interests and the
organization's interest coincided: finding a way to restore employee
morale. If we focused the reborn employee energy on creating enough new
business to establish profitability, the company's interests would also
be served.
In this case, like many
situations in family therapy, coaching the client to change was inadequate to
change the situation. We applied a basic boundary precept from fields as
diverse as family therapy and organizational change: "Get the whole
system in the room!"
Each member of the groups making
up the system, including the owners and directors, needed to learn about the
larger system, so they could channel their good intentions into effective
action for the benefit of the whole. With coaching help, the CEO orchestrated a
series of small and large group interventions that built understanding and
respect between the groups, and also established common visions and goals for
the organization as a whole. She became the synthesizer of a challengingly
unwieldy organization, improved the nature of the board's contributions,
and grew to meet the challenges of effective leadership in a very difficult
situation.
The best coaches we know have
business consulting or organizational leadership experience as well as
experience in psychotherapy and human development. They move seamlessly between
asking good questions about the business issues and delving into issues of the
leadership style and the psychological impact of their client's actions
on others.
Coaching in the workplace must serve the larger system while serving the
individual who is presented to the coach for help. Family therapy has decades
of experience walking this line between the individual and their family and
society. Practitioners have developed the skills to protect the freedom and
dignity and personal development of the individual (even adolescents!) while
also supporting the other members in having better lives.
In family systems jargon, the client who arrives for help is referred to
as the "identified patient," identified by the family or group as
needing help; the term implies that the entire family is the group to be
helped, whether directly or indirectly through the "IP." In many
instances, whatever failings brought the IP into therapy can be looked at as a
symptom of the group, rather than of the individual, whose behavior is for
better or worse a response to the situation, or even a backhanded attempt to
change it.
For the coaching profession, the reminder of shared responsibility must
be sterner: there is no identified patient – just good people, doing their
best, encountering their growth needs, and trying to contribute.
Dilemma 4: Integrating Work and the Rest of Life
Today's organizations cannot be run by the tough workaholic
individualists of yesterday's executive pantheon. Workaholics, for
instance, don't learn the gentler skills needed to motivate people to
work across boundaries. Rapid change and the takeover of many routine tasks by
computers has left a workplace in which most of what people do is innovate,
integrate, motivate and care. We need executives who can liberate and lead the
people. Rather than being threatened by their best subordinates, they relish liberated
people bringing their full commitment and abilities into a more collaborative
and democratic workplace. By having success and happiness in their lives as a
whole, executives are better equipped to help their employees develop more
wholeness.
One classic example of a
development opportunity and challenge for the coach is the high achievement
young executive whose strengths suggest that he or she be groomed for very
senior leadership. In the view of his or her management, this highly productive
and talented person is also hampered by weaknesses in personal communication
style or human relationship skills. The corporation would like to see such
weaknesses surgically removed and necessary relationship skills added to this
bright and competent super-executive.
These individuals are often
described as very hard working and determined to do whatever is necessary to
contribute and succeed regardless of the personal cost. It is hoped that with
the right evaluations, training or mentoring they will make whatever changes
are necessary to be a more functional manager and human being. The obvious
approach is to teach them skills like communication, sensitivity to others and
the varieties of human motivation. But this approach may run into the fact that
they are already driven, already controlling themselves with elaborate sets of
rules and beliefs about what kind of behaviors will win them approval. Even
when conceptually well grounded, more rules on how to behave may not produce a
warmer, more productive and more broadly creative manager.
Often in these cases, the
executive is expressing readiness for a deeper change. After a rapid series of
promotions and outward successes they are saying, "Is this all there is
to it?" Hear this as the beginning of a perceptual shift from "how
do I change myself to win the next rung on the ladder" to "how do I
get in touch with my deeper self and express the power of my values and my
whole self in my work."
When a client is reaching out
for deeper meaning can be a good time for him or her to release more of the
"true self" that has been papered over by the demands of the
"false self" which was created to please others. Our true selves,
in fact, have the built in compassion and ability to see others that will
naturally guide us towards developing better human relationship skills. When our words and music go together, when we can
bring our heart and head and values to work, when we can be ourselves in all
aspects of our lives, we are congruent. (For more on this framework, read Alice
Miller's The Drama of the Gifted Child.)
The Cost of Not Coaching
One of our clients, the VP of HR at a large computer company, told us
this story:
George was one of their most
effective intrapreneurs. He had launched an impressive string of successful new
products. Both his technical and his business judgement were excellent. He was
marked at an early age for succession to very senior management positions and
became a young vice president.
As George took on responsibility
as part of the team guiding the entire company, his eager beaver "just do
it" personality became a liability. He was impatient with consensual
processes and sometimes tactless in his defense of good ideas. Of course this
was just the flip side of the entrepreneurial personality that made him so
valuable.
A mutual frustration developed.
George was frustrated by what he saw as the agonizingly slow pace and lack of
courage displayed by the leadership team. The rest of the team was frustrated
by George's impulsiveness and emotionalism when he did not get his way in
defending innovative projects.
The VP of Human Resources put it
this way:
"It is
clear to me now that if George had had a coach then, he would be a very senior
member of our leadership team today. A coach could have helped him see how to
be more effective by presenting himself in a way that didn't rub other
members of the team the wrong way. And we could use his impeccable business
judgement and strategic vision working for us instead of the start-ups that
have made him and his new investors very rich."
As this story demonstrates, the cost of not coaching promising talent
can be immense.
Tools and Limits for Coaching
Although coaching is not psychotherapy, psychological counselors have
learned many lessons that can be of great help to coaches. The progressive
branches of psychotherapy have long been working on tools for bringing the
whole person, with their heart, into their life and work. They have moved from
fixing what is wrong to bringing out the extraordinary. "Whole
people" bring a kind of magic into the systems they are leading. The
challenge for the profession of coaching is to continue to find better ways to
inspire personal development and improve performance in individuals and thus
their organizations, while always respecting the individual's freedom and
right to direct and control their own destiny.
Coaches without extensive
training in psychotherapy may not be prepared to intervene in a client's
deep personality issues, nor is the workplace necessarily the proper venue to
do so. Coaches are helping people to see how they can be more effective and to
have the courage to go through the practice period when new behaviors are
awkward. They are not delivering deep therapy, nor are they offering friendship
or romance. Coaches must be vigilant in limiting work with the client to
appropriate coaching objectives and interventions. The coaching profession is
particularly in need of professional guidelines and limits, to stay within the
bounds of appropriate workplace support while still addressing the
client's personal development. The discussions to create and improve
these guidelines will open inquiries into how our work promotes and embodies
basic civil rights in the workplace, for instance, and how each member of an
organization can combine more democratic ways of working with collaborative
responsibility. In this chapter, we hope to open these questions, not close
them.
Collaborative Change Model
The most important contribution of the psychotherapy model to coaching
is the fact that people can cause their own positive change, in their inner
worlds as well as outer, and often can do better with a little help. George
Kelly, a great teacher of clinical psychology and personality theory, talks
about psychotherapy as a collaborative venture that begins with finding where
the individual's quest has bogged down and getting it going again. Given
the rather short timeframes and greater space between meetings that often
characterizes some phases in executive coaching, it is fortunate that people do
most of the work themselves.
Secure Base for Change
Because it deals at a deep level of a person's being, executive
coaching, like psychotherapy, begins with creating a safe space in which the
client can begin to direct their own change process - discover their own
goals and better ways to achieve them.
We don't like it, but
sometimes we coaches are brought in as a last resort, just before a high
potential employee is regretfully fired. This is a particularly difficult
situation because it does not fit the "making the better the best they can
be" paradigm that defines coaching. If there is any hint that the
employee is on the way out, we carefully check that we are not being called in
as part of a process of firing someone, which is definitely outside our scope
of work. Sometimes we need to educate our client's boss that we will
never reveal what we learn in sessions to the client's bosses, no matter
how useful our knowledge might be to the decision to retain or fire.
In one such case, the
client's employment was so near the edge that we refused to
begin without a guarantee that the client had at least six months to show
improved performance. In this comparative security, at least free
to learn and grow, the client opened himself to a wide feedback request that
included thoughtful write-ups and conversations with former staff as well as
current employees. He began making changes, learning to delegate more fully and
listen before offering his solution.
Our client's explanation
for his freedom to grow and change was the supportive character of all the
interventions and help he received. He knew from the beginning that the coach
was on his side, and he and the coach made a point of seeing that his key
colleagues supported his new actions and initiatives. In this safe context he
first succeeded at his existing job and then in moving on to what he really
wanted to do.
Let Others Possess Their Experience
For clients to let go of their current pattern of behavior, someone
needs to confirm the truth and validity of their current perceptions and
feelings. Someone must accept what is, so they can stop defending their
viewpoints long enough to see clearly what else is happening and how they are
reacting to it. A typical example is the executive of color who needs
confirmation that discrimination exists in order to let go of excessive concern
about it and get on with succeeding despite the unfair obstacles. Someone needs
to acknowledge the client's discomfort or humiliation so they can get
beyond their feelings to improving the situation. Often the first task of the
therapist, and the coach as well, begins with this confirmation of the
client's experience and predicament. This shared understanding of the
client's experience is the first step toward creating a safe base from
which to explore new options.
As helping professionals, we have needed to outgrow a deep compulsion to
fiddle with others' experience. Coaching - like good psychotherapy or
good parenting - must have at its base a trust in the client's
experience, a willingness to witness it and accept it rather than change it.
Confirmation in coaching and therapy alike has its basis in returning
control to the client. When we create a safe relationship for the client to own
their own experience, and speak about it, we create an open system rather than
a closed one. As they come to understand that they are not imagining their
suffering, that it is in fact reasonable to be discontented in their situation,
they gain the certainty they need to make changes in themselves and their
situation. Some maxims we use to remember this kind of client respect:
Optimal Challenge
Development for young and old is enhanced by the appropriate level of
challenge and contradiction, especially in a relatively safe and supportive
context as a good coach and good company can foster. Sometimes the situation
the client is in has plenty of challenge and "optimal frustration"
to spur the learning without much help from the coach. Other times the coach
must inject some artful challenge, a bit riskier intervention for the coach
than just confirming the client's view of the world so they have the
courage to act on it.
With an optimal level of challenge, clients will widen their
perspective, and leave their comfort zone: learn new things, try to things,
listen with an open mind, admit and learn from mistakes and successes, become
comfortable with change, learn to be more open and authentic. The client can
gradually see the opportunities and learnings in the challenge, a big step
toward their taking effective action.
Who is Setting the Goals
The client, not the coach or the boss, controls the goals for the change
process. One of our mentors, Robert Kegan, stated this best in his book The
Evolving Self: "Among
the many things from which a practitioner's clients need protection is
the practitioner's hopes for the client's future, however benign
and sympathetic these hopes may be." This is a harsh specific in the
general rule that we strive to recognize and honor our clients'
distinctness. It is the client's own hopes and goals that provide the
ongoing boundaries around our collaborative endeavor.
It is difficult to protect our clients from our hopes for them, when we
hope so much for the people we want to help. It is inconvenient when we have
been given specific areas of improvement from an outside evaluation of the
client. Nonetheless, to paraphrase Kegan, "In a world where people will
increasingly put themselves in the hands of 'coaches,' it is the
coaches above all who must understand that much of human personality is none of
their business."
The
Involuntary Client
A truism in psychotherapy and in fact in any creative learning endeavor
is that the client has to want to be there and engage fully in the process.
When an employee is "offered" a coach to correct deficiencies,
perhaps after a negative appraisal, it is a question whether the coaching is
really voluntary. Yet it is possible to engage a client who did not beg for
coaching by keeping his or her interests foremost in mind, and gradually yet
vigilantly returning autonomy and control to him or her.
Check
Client and Company Intent
As mentioned above, before we coaches start an assignment, we need to
know if management is covertly attempting to fire a person or even take
testimony from us to support a firing. This work we always refuse, although
outplacement is good work. We need to know the company's full intent, and
how much support they can give to the client. Then we can decide if coaching is
appropriate and if the situation if safe enough for it to work.
In our coaching we also try to identify the individual's needs,
wants and underlying values to compare with those of the organization. It may
feel bold at first to examine the issue of the fit of the coaching client and
their particular workplace role, as if it would be disloyal to the company, but
it serves to highlight the voluntary nature of the employee/employer
relationship. Does the client have a good basis for commitment, the seed of
contributions, to their work and their workplace? Is the fit with the workplace
strong enough for a creative and productive interaction? Does the client want
to stay, or at least try to stay for a while? In our coaching, we often do a
light evaluation on this issue in introductory conversations with the coaching
client and the party who hired us, if different, before we agree to launch into
a larger block of coaching.
Properties in the Relationships, Not Just the People
A major contribution of psychotherapy to coaching is adding to our
meager language of relationships. The philosopher Bertrand Russell reminded us
not to confuse the language of objects and relationships. Object language
dominates much of science (including psychology) and traditional business
thinking. For instance,
"Jane is a manager" is object language, giving us a property of a
person or thing. "Jane and Joe are colleagues" is relational
language, telling us nothing about the people considered separately, but
telling us about something that exists between the people.
Problems arise when we get taken in by the myth that properties which in
fact exist between people are properties of the individual considered
separately. "John is my boss" can imply a lot about John and a lot
about me that may or may not be true.
For instance, "boss" may mean to me someone who has all the
answers (or none) or someone I should defer to (or undercut). It is easy in any
relationship to presume qualities in another that may or may not exist, rather
than taking responsibility for finding out what the other person is really up
to, and what I am contributing to the quality of the relationship. If things
are not going well, I can always ask, without blame, "What am I
co-creating in this relationship," rather than, "What's wrong
with me," or "What's wrong with that other person?"
Although pathology and even evil are out there, it is both educational and
effective to assume that the qualities of one's relationships are
mutually determined, for both the coach and his or her clients. Strengthening
this understanding for our clients can give them fresh perspectives and new
opportunities.
Open
Listening
Every coach, every professional helper's most important task is to
be a good listener, for the obvious reason that there is a gap to be bridged
between the reality held by the client and what we hear through our inevitable
filters. If we listen sensitively, we can begin to piece together how our
client composes himself and his world.
It is a wonder we communicate at all, given our different personal
realities and the human proclivity for having habit and prejudice filter our
view of others. Establishing deep communication between two people with two
distinct models of reality is a bit of a miracle, requiring that we expand the
intersection of our minds, at the same time maintaining our inevitable
separateness of self. To the extent we carry it off, communication is an
evolutionary triumph. As coaches, we continually remind ourselves of the power
we can give to another by just listening, both directly (as our clients benefit
from being heard) and as a model for them to use with others.
Thinking the Best of Others
As professional
helpers we must model responsibility for listening and learning about what is
really going on with our clients, so that they will bring more wisdom to their
relationships. For instance, each of us, from time to time, when we somehow
expect it, will misconstrue another's actions as meaning something
rejecting or derogatory. Many hurts and arguments begin this way. I feel
slighted when I enter a room and an important colleague doesn't look up.
I can feel slighted and hurt, even though the other person is simply engrossed
in a good novel, or a pondering their own problem of the moment. Differing
expectations and assumptions of meaning are particularly difficult in
cross-cultural relationships, a problem in our polyglot US and increasingly a
problem in our mobile and globalized work world. Often our task is to lead our
clients in finding a kinder understanding of others' behavior.
Giving Meaning to the Facts
In the end meanings determine the facts as much as vice versa. The
core technique of coaching is creating a setting in which the client can change
his or her mind. We coaches conduct processes that encourage people to see more
options for viewing reality, and then discover which ways of seeing things will
lead to a happier and more productive life.
George Kelly gave coaching a maxim of hope: "Whatever exists can
be re-construed." To the extent this is true, we have great opportunity
to change, and a coach is able to help others create more options. However,
lest this sound like "Think and grow rich," it is important to note
that we are not alone in creating the meaning of our lives, for our lives are
created in the spaces between others, and us as well as in our relationships to
physical reality. The meaning, the
culture, our accomplishments, and even in some sense our talents, are
co-created with others.
Working at the Edge of Politics
Remembering the importance of
each client's context or environment, and understanding the quality of
external conditions can humanize us, and politicize us. Any coach knows this. A
person is having trouble at work being the best they can be. Yes, it is their
problem, and they have to improve their approach to it, but what is impinging
on them? Health? Nutrition? Family stresses? Money
problems? Poor sleep? Negative co-worker? Unhealthy office? Add to the variety
of concrete environmental factors all the workplace culture issues, and we,
like the client, can begin to see their world as unfair. However, our
assignment can only be to help change those things we can change.
Help Everyone Balance Status and Power
Managing status and power is another basic issue in coaching. Coaches
must address both the perception and the reality of inequalities of status and
power. One of our mentors, the family therapist Virginia Satir, brought these
issues into her consulting practice.
She pointed out the obvious, that we are all born small, and fully
dependent. From this unavoidable beginning, we are, in all cultures, vulnerable
to establishing relationships of excessive and fixed dominance and submission.
Satir taught her tens of thousands of students in the helping professions that
helping people change their relationships to greater equality is a direct way
to reduce pain and suffering, no matter how seemingly psychological the
suffering. Over the long term,
people can outgrow their tendencies to expect and create relationships of
dominance and submission.
It is ironic that people at every level of their organizations feel
powerless before those in the levels above. Coaching can help clients to see
that they are not as powerless as they feel, and also to let go of dominating
behaviors.
Limits of Individualism, Benefits of Service and Altruism
Coaching has this built-in liability: focus on the individual client can
threaten the common good in the workplace. Rampant individualism without
commitment to the common good, says Martin Seligman, produces widespread
depression and meaninglessness. "Our society cannot tolerate for long
these painful by-products of its obsession with itself." Our workplaces
cannot tolerate too much obsession with self, or the depression and
meaninglessness it engenders. Fortunately, workplaces with worthy missions
provide the context for individuals to find purpose and meaning. It is the responsibility of the coach
to help the client achieve personal meaning and more worthwhile purposes at
work, and even in life. At the same time, the client can gradually take on the
responsibility for raising the level of worthwhile purposes available to
everyone in the workplace.
Conclusion
The profession of executive
coaching is built on new concepts of human potential at work. The goal of
coaching is not fixing what is broken, but in discovering new talents and new
ways to use old talents that lead to far greater effectiveness. The goal is to
help people bring their whole selves to work because their true self, an
integration of a wonderful collection of parts, has more capability than any
part or acted out role.
More "fully human"
people are necessary to realize the potential of the more democratic, more
intrapreneurial "learning" organizations demanded by today's
rapidly changing marketplace. Indeed,
the geometric increase in organizational productivity and innovation which is
occurring today rests on the convergence of these two streams, organizational
and human development: organizational innovations favoring freedom, teamwork
and shared mission converging with modern ideas of adult development (freedom
to "grow," high quality relationships, and worthwhile purposes).
These more liberated organizations are the setting that maximizes the
continuous learning and development of their members.
Executive coaching is both person-centered and system-centered - we
are not training or fixing people, but freeing and focusing them to be their
very best. Successful coaching achieves positive change for both the individual
and the system.
