Advanced Coaching Practice

Inspiring Change in Others

Christian van Nieuwerburgh, David Love

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781526421241, 9781526421234
• eBook ISBN: 9781526454669
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Highly respected coaches Christian van Nieuwerburgh and David Love help you to develop your coaching practice, bridging the gap between beginner and advanced coach. You'll have access to 15 videos that illustrate and analyse the book's key themes, helping you to extend your learning and enhance your reflective practice, allowing you a rare extra insight into the coaching conversation.  

This is a must-read for trainees at the later stages of a coaching qualification, and experienced practitioners looking to broaden and develop their practice.

1 The Complexity of Advanced Coaching Practice

Coaching is a complex craft. When it works successfully for the coachee, it involves a set of sophisticated interactions which take place between two people engaged in a time-bound relationship. While the formal conversation takes place, a parallel series of thoughts and interconnections are arising separately for both coach and coachee. Each person has her own thought processes about the conversation and emotions associated with those thoughts. In addition, the interaction with the other person will be triggering further thoughts and emotions. Some of this internal complexity surfaces overtly into the coaching conversation. Some of it makes its way into the conversation through ‘leakage’. Some thoughts and emotions will remain hidden to the other party altogether.

At its core, coaching is based on a set of relatively straightforward and easily learned skills (van Nieuwerburgh, 2017). At the same time, the most effective coaching takes these capabilities to their highest level, and then moves beyond them into territory that is focused on sustaining strong, meaningful and productive relationships. The coach must employ these high-level skills, manage her own thoughts and emotions and notice nuanced subtleties in how the coachee ‘is’ in the room. Mary Beth O’Neill (2007) has argued that effective coaches must demonstrate ‘fearless compassion’. This is understood as having the confidence, presence and ability to focus on what needs to be challenged in order for the coachee to grow while ‘holding’ her in the safe and secure place that enables that exploration and growth to occur. Given that executive coaching is focused on improving the effectiveness of leaders, managers and other professionals in their work roles, the complexity of what is happening between coach and coachee is further complicated by the need to take into account organisational and wider systemic contexts.

In this book, we explore what makes coaching successful, and crucially, how coaches need to be to achieve that success. A useful place to start thinking is the trajectory coaches follow in gaining and honing their capabilities. Professional bodies in the coaching field have each established useful competency frameworks. For example, the ICF model includes a self-assessment process that encourages coaches to reflect on their current level of capability. While competency frameworks can be helpful, they are designed to provide a standard for coach behaviour and therefore can feel fixed. By their nature, such frameworks are less able to accommodate differences in style, approach and practice. In other words, competency-based frameworks are useful to establish whether a coach meets agreed professional standards but are not suited for assessing the complexity of advanced practice. It is difficult to capture and assess the ongoing and individualised growth that coaches experience as they become increasingly proficient. Peter Hawkins and Nick Smith (2013) make a valuable contribution to this debate by identifying a set of developmental levels that coaches move through as their capability grows.

Table 1.1

Source: Adapted from Hawkins & Smith, 2006: 139

Table 1.1 shows the steps of development of a coach. In the first stage, the coach’s focus is on herself and she is primarily concerned about making the coaching process work while thinking about which models might be most effective. The second stage is characterised by an interest in the coachee with the intention of helping her to identify an action plan. The coaching process becomes a major consideration at stage three. The coach’s attention turns to how the conversational process is affecting the relationship. The final stage involves the coach becoming much more aware of the context in which the coachee operates. The coach starts to reflect on how the coaching connects to other processes in the outside world. Viewed in this way, it becomes clear that part of a coach’s development is building confidence in her own skill so that she is better able to attend to the needs of the coachee and her context.

As the focus of this book is on advanced coaching practice, we think it is helpful to explore the concept of developmental stages in a way that incorporates the complexity rather than take a linear perspective. The challenge is finding a way of discussing coach learning and growth without being limited to stages of development. Our intention, therefore, is to identify what we believe are the main elements of coach learning and growth. We will present this as an organic and dynamic process (see Figure 1.1) that includes phases as well as an appreciation that proficiency may be individual and the recognition that development does not always manifest itself in clearly identifiable and synchronised steps.

Figure 1.1 Phases in coach learning and growth

Phase 1: Learning the core skills

People new to the role of coach encounter the core skills of contracting, open questioning, active listening and supportive challenge. In this initial phase, the focus is primarily centred on one’s self. The coach tends to be preoccupied with learning and applying the core skills. At this level, the novice coach is like a learner driver undertaking a number of actions that may feel disjointed at first. In our coaching development and supervision work, we find that using open questions can be experienced as problematic by novice coaches. This results in coaches reverting to using closed or leading questions. For some, it can take a good deal of practice to make the necessary shift, despite an intellectual understanding that open questioning techniques can be more appropriate and powerful.

Similarly, novice coaches can quickly grasp the idea that active listening is important but in practice they can struggle to translate this intellectual understanding into their coaching. This experience can call into question the extent to which they really listen to their colleagues in everyday life. Paying detailed attention to what someone is saying is not always an easy task – especially in busy and dynamic environments. Other people’s words may trigger relevant or seemingly irrelevant thoughts that can be distracting. Alternatively, they might be waiting for their chance to intervene, busily crafting responses to what is being said. For those attempting to listen as coaches, this ‘inner voice’ has the additional role of providing a commentary on the coaching process. It can support the coach’s continual search for the insightful question to ask next. Ironically, of course, the internal chatter can actively disrupt attempts to listen effectively, which in turn reduces the chance that a helpful coaching question will arise from what the coachee is actually saying. Typically, new coaches are introduced to a simple and effective coaching process such as the GROW model (Whitmore, 1992), which provides a very helpful way of structuring and signposting a coaching conversation. The GROW process is easy to remember and deploy, creating a logical series of steps to enable the coachee to explore a topic. The popular acronym stands for Goal, Reality, Options and Will (GROW). However, using the model can elicit another question in the novice coach’s inner dialogue: ‘Where are we now in the GROW process?’

In this phase (learning the core skills), a novice coach may feel that contracting is a formal process that should only occur at the start of a series of coaching sessions. When contracting is undertaken, it can be delivered in a formulaic and transactional way. The novice coach will deploy the core skills of coaching intentionally and consciously. However, creating the appropriate balance of support and challenge can feel artificial to the coach, with the challenge element being given less priority. At this point, it is likely that novice coaches will be introduced to the concept of coaching supervision during their initial development programme. However, until the novice coach has more experience, the benefits of supervision may not be fully appreciated or realised.

Phase 2: Strengthening skills and techniques

Like all crafts, coaching capability only improves with practice. Effective coach development programmes include opportunities to practise from the very start and encourage reflective practice through the use of diaries and journals. Beyond her initial training, the coach practises with real coachees. Through this it is recognised that while the basic features of coaching sessions remain largely the same, no two conversations are alike. A coach may think ‘I’ve come across this issue before…’ but realise that differing contexts and personalities mean that the conversations and outcomes will vary.

With practice the novice coach begins to integrate the core skills, creating stronger coherence between active listening and question generation. She finds her own way of covering the initial contracting so that this part of the process starts to feel more relaxed and natural. Indeed, there is a growing realisation of the importance of ongoing and regular contracting to ensure that the coaching goals remain pertinent and the relationship between the coach and coachee continues to be productive.

In this phase, the coach becomes adept with the GROW process and more confident in its use. Often, it is at this point that the coach becomes increasingly comfortable with moving backwards and forwards through the various stages of the process. Similar to the novice car driver who may have integrated clutch and gear changes into a smooth movement, it can become second nature. With this emerging confidence comes an ability to experiment with the GROW process and implement it flexibly in service of the coachee.

The novice coach may have been introduced to a number of coaching processes in her initial development programme and will practise using different techniques in her coaching. The coach continues to be primarily preoccupied with her own performance and is now making decisions about appropriate coaching processes to use with particular coachees. In our experience, this phase (strengthening skills and techniques) is also characterised by a strong desire to maintain the ‘purity’ of the coaching philosophy. For example, novice coaches may say things like ‘I’m putting on my mentoring hat now’ in order to allow themselves to step outside the coach role to make suggestions, provide personal experience or give advice.

Through practice, the coach improves her ability to craft constructive questions that introduce appropriate challenge into coaching conversations. With increasing hours of practice, the coach’s focus begins to shift from her own preoccupations about the ‘mechanics’ of coaching to the needs and interests of the coachee. At this stage, supervision has become an important aspect of the coach’s development. It is likely that the coach is undertaking facilitated supervision in groups and networking with peers.

Phase 3: Focusing on performance

In this phase, the coach feels confident in her competence and has developed sufficient experience to support her sense that she can coach. Up to now, her coaching may have tended to focus on helping coachees to solve problems and to establish action points for the implementation of solutions. Through reflective practice, the coach is becoming adept at empathic listening and is using the detail of what the coachee is saying as the basis for powerful questions.

While the coach will recognise that there is much more to learn, she no longer sees herself as new to coaching and is now capable of using a range of coaching techniques. She has become significantly more concerned with the coachee’s needs, interests and aspirations and pays increasing attention to the organisational factors relevant to the coachee’s agenda. As a result, the coach can be described as client-focused, placing significance on the building and maintenance of constructive coaching relationships. This is a timely development given Erik de Haan’s research (2008), which underlines the importance of the coach–coachee relationship as the key factor in successful coaching.

The coach is also keen to add coaching techniques to her expanding repertoire in order to find novel ways of facilitating the coachee’s thinking and learning. This appetite for new techniques promulgates a further set of choices for the coach. She now has to decide which of her portfolio of processes and techniques to use with a particular coachee, and how to introduce it into the conversation. The coach’s over-riding concern in this phase tends to be about the coachee’s performance so there is more focus on supporting the coachee to identify and commit to action. Underpinning this preoccupation are questions for the coach about how she and the coachee are relating and what is working in the coaching relationship. With increasing experience and a stronger focus on the coachee, the coach’s interest in the impact of difference comes more into the foreground. Noticing how these differences impact her relationship with the coachee and the latter’s relationships with others in her organisation starts to become a resource that can support progress towards the agreed coaching goals. The quality of the coaching alliance will be discussed in supervision. The opportunity to be supervised is valued by the coach and is now a regular part of the coach’s reflective practice. At this stage of her development (focusing on performance), she may be working one-to-one with a coach supervisor.

Phase 4: Gaining proficiency

With increased competence and confidence based on extended experience of coaching, the coach’s attention moves towards the possibility of transformation. She is looking beyond the immediate issues brought to the session by the coachee. Simply addressing these by using a problem-solving approach is no longer considered sufficient. Now she is noticing helpful or unhelpful patterns in the coachee’s thinking, emotions and behaviour that might be having an impact on outcomes. In this phase, the coach is concerned with how the collaborative endeavour transforms the way the coachee thinks, feels and behaves. An ever-growing interest in the specific impacts of diverse personalities, backgrounds, experiences and expertise informs each coaching encounter and the coach is increasingly comfortable with drawing on facets of difference to build the coachee’s personal resources, insights and learning.

The coach pays more attention to noticing how the coachee ‘is’ in the room and points out any observed congruence and discrepancy between, for example, the words being used and body language. She has also become more confident in drawing on the ‘evidence in the room’ to create constructive challenge. Using the realities of the coaching relationship, including her own reactions to the coachee’s thinking, emotions and behaviour, she enables powerful insights in the coachee. The coach is now more comfortable with the ways in which her own personal experience can be a resource for the coachee. She is able to integrate feedback about her own perceptions of the coachee and include stories from her own professional experience into the coaching process. While she may be sensitive in her contracting about bringing these aspects into the conversation, she no longer has need for a ‘mentoring hat’.

Alongside a more holistic, person-centred view of the coachee as an individual, the coach has greater interest in the organisational context of the coachee. This leads to the coach being interested in how the coachee and the organisation affect each other’s performance. The intricate interplay of personal and organ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Acknowledgements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• About the Authors
• Prologue
• Acknowledgements
• Online Resources
• 1 The Complexity of Advanced Coaching Practice
• 2 Being Focused on Process and Prioritising the Relationship
• 3 Being Challenging and Letting Things Go
• 4 Being Fully Present and Attending to the Wider Context
• 5 Being Tenacious and Encouraging Autonomy
• 6 Being Creative and Protecting Trust
• 7 Being Ethical and Staying True to Personal Values
• 8 Being Who You Are and Adapting to Others
• 9 Being Committed to Outcomes and Prioritising Wellbeing
• 10 Being Impartial and Strengthening Hopefulness
• 11 Being
• Epilogue
• References
• Index