Executive Coaching
Why have a Coach?
It seems to be a given of modern life that people with a coach are more successful than those without. Coaches selling their services (including EgoPetram) will tell you it works.
There are plenty of other websites where you can find renowned coaches producing statistics purporting to prove that having a coach is a good thing.
In 2013, The Journal of Positive Psychology published an article titled “Does Coaching Work? A meta-analysis of the effects of coaching on individual level outcomes in an organisational context”. The authors (led by Tim Tim Theeboom) concluded that:
Despite its limitations, the current meta-analysis indicates that coaching can be effectively used as an intervention in organizations.
So the academic world and the business world has concluded that having the right coach is effective in improving performance.
What is Coaching?
Sir John Whitmore in his seminal book “Coaching for Performance” put it this way:
Coaching is unlocking people’s potential to maximize their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them.
Any individual has natural learning ability. To learn an individual needs to unlock that ability from within in a way that works for them.
Socrates is reported to have said:
to talk every day about virtue and the other things about which you hear me talking and examining myself and others is the greatest good to man, and that the unexamined life is not worth living
Coaching is enabling the individual to examine their own thoughts.
There are myriad coaching “models” that provide a structure to a coaching session. Whitmore advocated his GROW model, Myles Downey expanded this to TGROW, there is Peter Hawkins’ CLEAR, Roy MacDonald’s DRIVE, the variously attributed CREATE model and many more. The common thread is that they all offer a structure within which the individual being coached can organise and focus their thinking.
Nancy Kline in her 2002 book “Time to Think”, enumerates ten components that, together, allow the individual being coached the time and environment in which to think and arrive at their solution. The words she uses for her ten components are Attention, Equality, Ease, Encouragement, Feelings, Information, Difference, Incisive Questions and Place.
Others talk of active listening, challenging assumptions and removing barriers but always the focus is on helping the individual being coached to come to a solution that works for them, given their skills, experience, background, and motivation.
Sir John Whitmore’s definition of coaching, and the many other similar definitions that have arisen since, necessarily lack clarity due to their brevity. Jonathan Passmore, University of Reading and Annette Fillery-Travis, University of Wales in their 2011 paper “A critical review of executive coaching research: A decade of progress and what’s to come”, offered the following, more process driven definition:
a Socratic based dialogue between a facilitator (coach) and a participant (client) where the majority of interventions used by the facilitator are open questions which are aimed at stimulating the self-awareness and personal responsibility of the participant
This is, possibly, overly academic in its language; an alternative might be to modify Sir John Whitmore’s definition as follows:
Coaching is unlocking people’s potential to maximize their own performance. The coach provides a framework and environment in which an individual can identify and implement for themselves the steps to achieve their goals.
Coach, Mentor, Teacher – all the same?
Where coaching is helping an individual to examine their own thinking and actions with a view to modifying them to make progress towards a goal, teaching is defined as:
a.The imparting of instruction; the occupation or function of a teacher. b. that which is taught; a thing taught, doctrine instruction precept.
Teaching is, in reality the polar opposite of coaching. The teacher tells the pupil how they, the teacher, would address a problem with no regard to the solution that might resonate best with the pupil.
In the academic world, modern teachers are encouraged to develop an “Active Learning” environment. This is one in which teachers provide the environment and opportunities for students to build knowledge and understanding of a subject for themselves.
Academic studies have identified evidence that an active learning environment is more effective than a traditional instruction based approach.
Creating an Active Learning Environment is more of a coaching based approach but still requires the teacher to have the knowledge and experience to be able to satisfy the students need for information about both the theory and application of a particular topic.
This balance of a coaching approach supported by knowledge and experience is a good definition of mentoring.
In Greek mythology, Mentor was the son of Alcimus who appeared in the Homer’s “The Odyssey”. In old age, he was a close friend of Odysseus, who placed Mentor in responsibility of his son Telemachus, while the hero was away fighting at the Trojan War.
A mentor has thus become an experienced and trusted counsellor.
Coach, Mentor, Teacher – they are stages on a continuum but they are not synonymous.