Relational Coaching

Journeys Towards Mastering One-To-One Learning

Erik de Haan, Sue Stewart

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780470724286
• eBook ISBN: 9781119995494
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

Manfred Kets de Vries, Professor of Leadership Development, INSEAD:
"The author takes us on an exciting journey to explain what coaching is all about, providing us with a roadmap that is second to none. Anyone interested in better understanding what coaching is all about, would do well to have a serious look at this book."

David Megginson, Professor of Human Resources Development, Sheffield Hallam University:
"From a vivid personal story just before the first chapter to the fascinating mass of data in the appendices, this book is a captivating read about the concrete particulars of coaching and the theoretical perspectives we can use to make sense of them. Erik de Haan makes a case for relational coaching and prescribes clearly what his research and the tradition within which it is embedded can tell practitioners in the field."

Bruce E. Wampold, Professor of Counseling Psychology, University of Wisconsin:
"I am thrilled that there is a coaching book that emphasizes the coachee and the relationship. In Relational Coaching, Erik de Haan places the emerging profession on a strong foundation that emphasizes the interpersonal aspects of the endeavour."

Relational Coaching is a radically different way of looking at coaching that puts the relationship, from the perspective of the coachee, at the centre. Exploring both age-old tradition and reliable studies in recent decades, Relational Coaching gives the modern executive coach ten commandments to help improve his or her practice. The book demonstrates how each of these commandments is underpinned by sound quantitative research.

The book begins by giving a complete overview of the profession and the latest developments in coaching. The second part of the book presents new quantitative and qualitative research into effects and experiences of coaching. Part three contains an introduction to the activities that make a good coach and the mechanisms used to verify coaches' understanding of their profession. Other topics covered include training, accreditation, supervision and recommended literature.

Part I

The Ways of Coaching

Introduction: the paths towards coaching

At the age of 18 I took a gap year and travelled solo round Germany and France, working and living in Berlin, the Pyrenees and Paris. My aims were to improve the language skills I hadn’t properly mastered at school, and to lead a ‘working’ life before spending the next few years in academia. I also wanted to pin down exactly what it was I was going to specialise in. My first two aims were more or less achieved, but I didn’t actually devote much thought to the third, and at the end of the year signed up for physics, the same subject that had attracted my lukewarm interest a year before.

Most of my year out went well and in fact flew by, but there was one moment when I really did lose my way, a moment which in retrospect is indicative of how I often feel as a coach. I was heading from the Pyrenees to Paris and decided to walk to Carcassonne for the first few days, then hitch-hike from there. All I had with me on this hike was a road map of the whole country, on a scale of one to a million. But I wasn’t worried because I intended to keep to roads and beaten tracks. One day, however, while hiking through the foothills of the mountains, I must have had a bout of over-confidence, when I decided to leave the road I was on and head straight north in a short-cut towards another local road. I ended up in a wooded area with a maze of tiny paths and denser and denser undergrowth. This was the infamous French maquis, which sheltered many a resistance fighter during the Occupation, so becoming a byword for the Resistance.

As the scrub got thicker it became harder to follow some of the paths, and the ones I was on seemed to have been made by creatures smaller than a human being, so frequently did they disappear beneath low bushes. Because I couldn’t see any way through it, I decided just to walk up towards the highest point, where I would undoubtedly get a better overall picture. This strategy seemed to work well at first, because there came a point when the scrub died out. I found myself just below the summit of an elongated hill that I could easily climb. Everything seemed to be becoming clear, but the opposite was in fact the case. The hill, covered with grass and low bushes, turned out to be around a kilometre long, perhaps a hundred metres wide, and surrounded on all sides by dense vegetation. I could see a long way from the top, as I’d hoped, but what I saw caused me to break out in a cold sweat. An endless succession of similar hills and valleys stretched out before me, all arranged more or less in parallel and with no sign of buildings or roads, let alone wind direction. At least, not to an inexperienced hiker such as myself. Closer by, there was only a jumble of crisscrossing paths, used for horse-riding judging by the hoofprints and other evidence. It was late in the afternoon, I had no idea where to head next and was quickly losing sight of where I’d come from. I was able to walk to and fro over the bare back of the hill, but that made absolutely no difference to my current predicament. My throat closed up, I felt feverish, my breathing quickened and I felt almost compelled to cry out. Because no one would hear me, I didn’t, as far as I recall. In the end I did the only thing I could think of: dive into the undergrowth somewhere at random and walk down in what felt like a straight line, for better or worse, looking for some form of habitation.

In the end I did make my way out and found roads and signposts again, but the existential angst I felt at the top of that hill has stayed with me ever since. It reminds me of a feeling I get during most coaching conversations. Fortunately, the angst experienced during coaching is accompanied by less panic, because it has now happened many times and I know I will always return to an ‘inhabited world’, but it is exactly the same feeling nonetheless.

I believe it is worthwhile to describe that ‘angst’ or anxiety in more detail. I know it isn’t ‘stage fright’ or ‘performance anxiety’ because I know what those feel like. I get them regularly when I have to stand up before a large group of people. Stage fright is accompanied by a surge of adrenalin, butterflies in the stomach, disturbed sleep beforehand and a state of hyper-alertness. And it disappears the moment I get to know the group and the podium and when I start to feel that things are going well. It often leaves me with a sort of ‘hangover’ of irritability and tiredness.

‘Coaching anxiety’ is quite different because it brings none of those symptoms, not even any particular tension before the coachee’s arrival. On the other hand, this anxiety doesn’t decline when I feel that things are going well. It is the pure fear of the unknown, the fear of not knowing what will happen next whilst realising that knowing is impossible.

To continue the parallel drawn above, the ways of coaching can probably best be compared to the jumble of crisscrossing paths in the maquis, or the absence of paths beaten by human beings. We need to find our own way, without a map or outside assistance.

It is this exploration off the beaten track that makes coaching such an unpredictably rich profession, constantly full of surprises. It also explains, for me, why there are so many different ways of coaching, probably as many as there are coaches. Or perhaps even more than the number of practitioners, because each retelling spawns new and different approaches: each time we recount our coaching experiences we cannot help adding new interpretations and ideas, and leaving others out.

In the first part of this book I hope to give an overview of the state of the art of the profession, paying special attention to its fundamentally ‘unexplored’ nature and the various paths and roads proposed by professionals. In Chapter 3 I examine what is known about helping conversations. Precisely because so much is unknown about each coaching conversation, it is good to know that some important results have been achieved in determining the most effective factors in one-to-one conversations. This chapter contains a summary of the findings from decades of quantitative research into effectiveness. Not that such facts, based on the retrospective analysis of thousands of therapeutic relationships, can help with the existential angst itself, because that is different every time and has to do with this relationship and this conversation. But the results of research can certainly give the coach confidence and point him, or her, towards the attitude towards coaching that is most effective. To illustrate this, Chapter 4 lists ‘ten commandments’ for the executive coach based on empirical research in the field of psychotherapy.

In a nutshell, Chapter 1 contains an overview of the entire specialist area of the executive coach. Chapter 2 deals with the history and development of the profession and the current surge of interest in executive coaching. Chapter 3 summarises the meta-analytical studies in psychotherapy which hold lessons for coaches. Finally, Chapter 4 outlines my perspective on the most effective form of coaching, relational coaching.

Chapter 1

From Intake to Intervention: the Outlines of a Profession

The discipline of coaching is currently enjoying a resurgence of interest in the form of new and diverse initiatives on the part of government, industry and consultancies. A potential risk, however, is that the label of ‘coach’, which already has precious little statutory or professional protection, will be further eroded. What exactly does the word ‘coaching’ stand for in the twenty-first century; and what is needed to give coaching the support that its intensive and widespread practice demands, and that can make the discipline an independent and clearly delimited profession?

1.1 Coaching: a new trend?

The term coaching may appear fashionable but it has a long history behind it. In Chapter 2 I will look at the history of the word coaching. It is important to realise here that inspiring coaching conversations have been passed down from classical times², in the dialogues of Plato, Cicero’s conversations in Tusculum, and Seneca’s letters to Lucilius for example. The first coach appears in Homer’s Odyssey, where the goddess Pallas Athena assumes the form of Mentor in order to assist adventurous mortals. There is currently a growing interest in this age-old tradition of work-related learning that relies primarily on one-to-one conversations. In those conversations, the coach is focused on facilitating the coachees’ learning and development and tries to take care that the coachees take care of themselves. The aim of coaching is to improve the coachees’ performance by discussing their relationship to certain experiences and issues.

The coach’s intention is to encourage reflection by the coachee, to release hidden strengths and to overcome or eliminate obstacles to further development. The focus is on such topics as:

• how the coachee works with others and makes sense of organisational life;

• how the coachee acts in specific situations, such as those involving managing, negotiating, giving advice or exerting influence;

• how the coachee handles difficult situations, such as with colleagues and clients;

• how the coachee forms judgments and makes decisions.

These topics are linked not only to the coachee’s professional role and the content of the specialist area but also to the person of the coachee and the knowledge and skills at their disposal, the way in which they think and act. Because there is a personal component, it is important for coachees to become aware of their own actions and to consider alternatives. The coach helps in this respect, in the first instance mainly by clarifying the problem. There is often a link between the person who has an issue and the nature of that issue. For example, a given question can be very difficult for one individual to address, while someone else barely registers it or is able to resolve it without difficulty. The degree to which a problem affects us, makes us insecure, causes sleepless nights or intrigues us, says something about the problem, of course, but also something about the person who perceives and ‘owns’ the problem. I distinguish the following possible relationships between ‘problem owner’ and ‘problem’:

1. Some problems are ‘objective’ or technical in nature. For example, if someone is having trouble with certain software packages, this might relate to resistance to information technology, but usually has more to do with a lack of knowledge or skill. Sometimes, therefore, there is simply a need to acquire knowledge or learn a particular skill. Expert advice can provide a solution here.

2. Sometimes, however, acquiring knowledge or learning new behaviour is not enough. There are underlying patterns which suggest that, though this specific problem may be solved, the same problem (possibly in a different form) will reappear the next day. Here it is important to consider not the incident, but the work context and the patterns that led to the incident. This is not always easy, because a feature of such patterns is that they often go unrecognised by the person concerned. Many people have a tendency to define problems as separate from themselves: ‘It’s not my fault; it’s the work environment; it’s my colleagues’. Coaching can provide a solution here.

3. Sometimes issues and problems are so personal that a thorough exploration within the context of work and professional experience is insufficient. An individual’s abilities and limitations underlie the problems at hand. A characteristic aspect of such problems is that they are experienced as much privately as they are at work. Therapy can provide a solution here.

A coaching conversation therefore centres partly on personal performance, but always in the context of practice. In my experience, the scope of coaching issues is more or less as follows:

1. Issues where content is at the centre will often relate to unexpected experiences, for example in drafting proposals and giving advice. These are often put forward in terms of ‘what’ questions: ‘What kind of system should I use here?’.

2. Issues where the actions of the issue holder and the way in which he or she handles a problem are central, are often put forward in terms of ‘how’ questions: ‘Will you, as my coach, help me to decide how to do this, or how to tackle this issue?’.

3. Issues where the very person raising the issue is at the centre are often put forward in terms of ‘what’ questions too: ‘What kind of assignments suit me?’ or ‘What is it about me that makes me come up against this time and again?’. As these are more personal ‘what’ issues, they ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Preface
• Part I - The Ways of Coaching
• Part II - The Ways of Research
• Part III - The Ways of Excellence
• Appendix A - 80 Critical Moments of New Coaches
• Appendix B - 78 Critical Moments of Experienced Coaches
• Appendix C - Case Study: Tamara
• Appendix D - Verbatim Transcript: Ken
• Appendix E - Code of Conduct for Executive Coaches
• Appendix F - Intake Instruments and Checklists
• Literature
• Index