Executive Coaching

Systems-Psychodynamic Perspective

Halina Brunning

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780367324377
• eBook ISBN: 9780429913389
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie in der Psychologie

Executive Coaching focuses on the coaching applications of systemic-psychodynamic theory in the context of organizational life that is both goal-orientated and held in a managerial/leadership context.

Part I
Towards an Ecology of Systems-Psychodynamic Coaching

Chapter One
What is the difference and what makes the difference? A comparative study of psychodynamic and non-psychodynamic approaches to executive coaching

Vega Zagier Roberts and Michael Jarrett

Executive coaching is a burgeoning industry. A recent survey undertaken by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development of its thousands of members revealed that up to 95% of firms were using some kind of coaching or mentoring, at a cost of at least £15 million per year. The growth rate is staggering. According to a report in The Economist, the Hay Group HR consultancy reported that executive coaching is growing at about 40% a year (Economist, 2002). In the corporate world, executives are using coaching to manage the pressures and loneliness at the top, increased competitive stress, and greater expectations from external 30 bodies such as regulators and analysts. Hogan, Curphy, and Hogan (1994) found that over 60% of CEOs were failing in terms of not meeting their objectives. The average length of CEO tenure has halved and shareholders expect more. The situation in the public sector is similar. Thus, it is not surprising that the drive for workplace development has increased as executives seek ways to enhance performance, make the transition across roles, and manage their own sense of dis-ease and potential derailment.

A quick tap of the words “executive coaching” into a typical search engine will yield about a million sites. Coaching and consulting practices make a variety of claims and attempt to distinguish themselves from one another in a very competitive market. Each has a method or process that offers “new” opportunities for executive development. The purpose of this chapter is to look a little deeper into these claims of distinctiveness: what are the differences among the various approaches, and what makes the difference for the clients? It is based on in-depth interviews with very experienced coaches¹ representing some of the major “schools” of executive coaching, all working in or trained by organizations regarded as leaders in the field, as well as interviews of clients, both direct clients of coaches we had interviewed and corporate purchasers of coaching. (See Acknowledgements.)

One interesting finding was how little practitioners knew about others’ practices, even within their own “school”, let alone outside it. What little they thought they knew about each other was often grossly inaccurate. For example, many psychodynamically orientated practitioners believed that coaches of other persuasions provided mainly advice, training, and “quick fixes”, with little longterm impact on development. Coaches from other perspectives thought that coaches using a psychodynamic approach were “touchy-feely”, engaging in an endless pursuit of insight at the expense of tangible results. The authors have each had formal training in both systems psychodynamics (role consultancy) and non-psychodynamic approaches to coaching: this chapter was prompted by a mixture of curiosity about the real differences between these, and by a wish to dispel some popular misperceptions.

Why do people seek a coach?

Clients undertake coaching for a variety of reasons. Box 1 lists the most prevalent “presenting requests” as reported by our sample of both clients and coaches. We have grouped these into three categories: perceived problems at work, specific developmental goals, and broader developmental aims.

Sometimes the reason for seeking a coach does not quite fit in any of these three categories, while including elements of each. The client may well have particular issues to work on, but above all feels the need for “space to think”, which they find difficult to

Box 1. Examples of clients' presenting issues

Problems

• Difficult relationships—most often with one’s boss, but also with peers, hard-to-manage subordinates, stakeholders; conflict in teams.
• General unhappiness at work, stress, impaired job satisfaction.
• A perceived deficit, often identified in 360 degree feedback or appraisal;²
• implementing a change process to which there is resistance.

Specific goals

• To increase outputs—land bigger contracts, sell more.
• To improve personal skills—listening, emotional intelligence,³ making presentations.
• To improve organization skills—political, partnership working, strategy, tendering.
• To position oneself for promotion.

Broader developmental aims

• Following promotion—“to grow into my role, own it, feel good in it and good at it”.
• “Raising one’s game” (corporate language)—for people who are performing well but feel they have capacities they are not fully mobilizing.
• To understand self and/or others better.
• To increase one’s repertoire—new ways of thinking about and tackling work challenges.

safeguard within their pressured everyday routine. The coach is seen as someone objective, outside the workplace, who will both challenge and support them in thinking about aspects of their situation which the constant pressures for action have pushed out of view.

One might speculate that one driving factor in the increased uptake of coaching is the decrease of one-to-one support and containment in the workplace. As managers are increasingly driven to achieve bottom-line results, the containment function of leadership gives way to task and target-focused line management/supervision. Space to think—to listen to oneself and to be listened to by another—and support for individual development are sought elsewhere.

The origins of executive coaching

From sports

The 1980s saw the introduction of the term “executive coaching” in the UK through a small band of people including John Whitmore, Graham Alexander, and their associates, who started as sports coaches using the Inner Game approach invented by Timothy Gallwey in the USA. Traditionally, sports coaches had observed athletes and then instructed them, for example, in how to move more efficiently. However, Gallwey, drawing on his experience of Zen and meditation, found it was far more effective to enable people to become more aware of their internal state. In his best-selling book The Inner Game of Tennis (1986) he proposed that the opponent in one’s head, the internal critic, is far more formidable than the opponent on the tennis court. By silencing this internal critic and thus reducing the internal obstacles to their performance, the player releases their natural ability and their performance can increase enormously without technical instruction from the coach. Gallwey subsequently extended this approach to other sports, including some he was not expert at, and then—at the invitation of his corporate tennis-playing clients—into the world of work. His work gave rise to the GROW model, described later in this chapter, which became a cornerstone of executive coaching.

From systems-psychodynamics consultancy and group relations training

One-to-one consultation to managers and executives was already taking place, however, before the Inner Game coaches appeared on the scene, although it was not yet called executive coaching. From the late 1950s The Christian Teamwork Trust, which evolved into The Grubb Institute in 1969, was providing consultancy to organizations as well as group relations training and other kinds of training events to develop participants’ understanding of organizational behaviour and dynamics. From this emerged Organizational Role Analysis (ORA), a method for working with individual managers and leaders to enable them to take up their roles more effectively (Reed, 1976; Reed & Bazalgette, 2006). Interestingly, the Grubb Institute did use the word “coaching” in the 1980s, not for their work with executives but in a project undertaken with school-leavers. These young people were matched with older people who “coached” them about working life, “on the model of a football coach who helps others develop skills” (Bazalgette, 2003). ORA has been adapted by many practitioners of systems-psychodynamics-based organizational consultancy, who variously refer to their work with individuals as “organizational role consultancy” or simply “role consultancy”, and more lately—largely for marketing pur-poses—as executive coaching.

From individual therapy

A more recent development has been the movement of psychotherapists from working with patients to consulting to individual organizational clients. In the health service, clinical psychologists and psychotherapists are often invited to provide occasional internal consultancy, applying their understanding of individual and interpersonal difficulties to problems in teams, or to contribute to service development. They also provide external consultancy to institutions such as schools, social care agencies, residential units, and the like. In many cases, this consultancy role has come to include coaching. Therapists in private practice are also increasingly interested in providing coaching, in part driven by the need to find alternative ways of deploying their skills as long-term therapy wanes in popularity. As Peltier puts it, “The ‘talking cure’ . .. is too slow, too personal, it provides no guarantees, and it lacks the punch and focus demanded by those in the fast lane” (Peltier, 2001, p. xvi). These coaches may or may not continue to practise as therapists, and come from a wide range of backgrounds, including psychoanalytic, behavioural and cognitive–behavioural, Rogerian, and Gestalt therapy among others.

Definitions and aims of executive coaching, and underlying values

This chapter, and indeed this book, is about “executive coaching”. While this term is often used to refer to the coaching of the “top” people in an organization, we are using it in the broader sense of consulting to individuals on their executive functions, that is, the requirement on them to plan and take actions to fulfil the aims of their organizations. This said, however, it is worth noting that much of the financial investment into coaching is made by and for top executives, where enhancing performance is likely to have most impact. Marshall Goldsmith, a leading American executive coach points out that

the marginal gain for helping a highly successful person move from the top five percent to the top one percent may be greater (to the organization) than the gain from helping the average performer move from the top 50 percent to the top 20 percent. This is especially true with high-potential leaders who represent one of the greatest sources of value for the organization of the future. [Goldsmith, 2003, p. 16]

Coaches of corporate leaders are typically paid between 10 and 15% of the client’s annual salary, further evidence of the high level of expectation that coaching will yield high leverage.

The discussion of definitions and aims that follows is confined to coaching focused on workplace issues. We have not included life coaching that claims to work more “in the round” and addresses any aspect of life that clients wish to bring. Neither have we included mentoring, a term often used interchangeably with coaching, but which has its origin in Greek mythology⁴ to refer to “a guide, a wise and faithful counsellor” (Brewer’s Dictionary, 1952). Mentoring in the workplace generally involves pairing people with someone “older and wiser”, further along their own career path, who passes down their knowledge and experience.

Gallwey defined coaching as unlocking a person’s potential to maximize their own performance, helping them to learn rather than teaching them. Other leading writers on coaching (Downey, 2003; Landsberg, 1996; Whitmore, 2002) use similar definitions, although the emphasis on the different components varies. This was also true of the coaches we interviewed, as the quotes in Box 2 illustrate.

Thus, there is broad agreement that coaching is a two-way developmental process that enhances performance, and in which the coach’s role is primarily facilitative, enabling clients to find their own solutions rather than providing answers. The main variations in defining the aims of coaching are to be found in where individual

Box 2. Aims of coaching—what the coaches said

• “A means for clients to access more of their own resources.”
• “Increasing awareness of oppressive patterns so the clien...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABOUT THE EDITOR AND CONTRIBUTORS
• FOREWORD
• INTRODUCTION
• PART I: TOWARDS AN ECOLOGY OF SYSTEMS-PSYCHODYNAMIC COACHING
• PART II: THE ANATOMY OF SYSTEMS-PSYCHODYNAMIC COACHING
• PART III: APPLICATIONS OF SYSTEMS-PSYCHODYNAMIC COACHING
• PART IV: A DIRECTORY OF RESOURCES
• INDEX