Standing before moving
23rd Nov ‘23
You can wait for ages for one great article on the benefit of coaching to come along, and then two arrive at once!
The first was Bukky Yusuf's lovely piece in Schools Week on the vital need for leaders to do the 'inner work' required for effective leadership, and how the lack of any focus on this in current training programmes presents a challenge for leaders when under pressure.
Why 'vital'?
Because to lead effectively, you have to learn to stand still before you can move forward, and that involves coming to an understanding of how all that you are as a leader plays into your behaviours and decisions and actions. What is the source of your thinking and action? What experiences shaped your mindset and influence the way you act under different conditions? What does this mean for your leadership?
Deborah Rowland's research on leadership demonstrates clearly that the development of a capacity to engage with one's inner world need to come before the development of what she calls the 'outer skills' of action taking. Being comes before doing. Indeed, those leaders who had worked on their capacity to:
tune into the emotional climate of self, others and the wider system in order to perceive reality more accurately,
stay focused on what's going on in the present moment without being distracted by their own or other people's unconscious responses,
notice, acknowledge and include everything that requires attention; even the difficult and disturbing stuff, and
slow down the period between experiencing something and responding to it, so the response is intentional
... were more effective in leading complex change. The work they had done to figure out who they are in the world and what their leadership is for were better at their jobs because of it.
This figuring out is the very essence of great coaching. It's certainly what I have in mind as I work with my coaching clients to co-create a space in which this inner work can be done ... where we can coordinate the dance of gesture and response that characterises a developmental connection.
'Dance? What's Gibbs on about now?' I hear you ask (particularly those who know me and my two flat left feet!).
Well, this is how successful coaching is described in the second article, a research review in Coaching Today by Erik de Haan, Director of the Hult Ashridge Centre for Executive Coaching and Professor of Organisation Development & Coaching at VU University, Amsterdam.
Now I'm not a big fan of how academic research criteria tends to reduce the qualitative, expansive and context-specific impact of coaching down to generalised and and bite-sized measurables, but since there is an understandable desire for evidence of efficacy to justify expenditure, then let's at least make sure the research is solid. And de Haan's meta-analysis of 40 Randomised Control Trial-based studies into the effectiveness of executive coaching is certainly that.
But what did he find?
Firstly, external coaching from a qualified professional is more effective than 'internal' coaching. Secondly, the effect of coaching is independent of the number of sessions, though frequency may have an impact. Thirdly, the client's agency or freedom of choice is important ... freedom to choose whether to take up coaching, freedom in terms of which coach to work with, and freedom about whether or not attend. This relates to the fourth point that stood out for me in the piece, which is that "good coaching seems to be a process of mutual and reciprocal influence"; that the co-creation of the programme, its cadence and its focus is an important driver of its effectiveness. This is the dance!
These last two points really resonated with me at the moment. I was challenged again recently by the need by a commissioner to demonstrate that a coaching session followed a particular path or model, but that's just not how I work. I don't (and won't) use a particular model in my coaching work because it's always seemed to me that they are designed more for the benefit of the coach than the client. What right do I have to limit and restrict how a client thinks, or define how I'm going to coach them before we know what's required?
What de Haan says about freedom is intriguing to me, particularly in relation to the impact of technology or third-party accountability on coaching outcomes. When this freedom is present, important things can emerge for learning. Here's an example ...
When I contract with a client, we book all of the sessions at the outset, and commit to these prior to payment. I send invitations to each session at the time, but not reminders. Occasionally people will miss a session, but a recent headteacher client missed sessions three (forgot), four (forgot) and five (clash but forgot to rearrange) of her six! As you might expect, we reflected on this in the final session, and in particular on how something she'd said at the beginning of session one about not making time for herself or her growth in work had been animated in the tentative commitment she made to the programme, alongside a dependency on others to organise her. We wondered whether or not this would have been available for learning had I sent reminders, or whether she'd have felt more compelled to engage had she been involved in the commission rather than being directed to take coaching by her Trust. It was good stuff. We got a lot done. But probably not as much as we might have done in the full programme.