Interactional Coaching

Choice-focused Learning at Work

Michael Harvey

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136345500
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Interactional Coaching is a powerful, one-to-one learning approach, used successfully for over fifteen years, that enables executives to make the choices that work for them. Drawing on existential philosophy, psychotherapy and business theory, interactional coaching uses innovative techniques to help clients identify their best possible choices and effectively put them into practice.

Featuring numerous case studies, which integrate theoretical principles with practical tools, Interactional Coaching illustrates:

• coaching for vision and other time-related issues
• coaching in the personal dimension
• coaching interactional strategy and skills
• coaching conflicts and dilemmas
• coaching creativity and communication
• coaching leadership and managerial expertise.

Interactional Coaching is essential reading for anyone interested in a new, comprehensive approach to helping coachees develop the self-knowledge and interpersonal skills necessary for achievement in today's workplace.

Interactional Coaching in Theory and Practice

Introduction to Interactional Coaching: Coaching the Choice Business

Let me introduce you to five people:

• Julia is a banker whose career seems to be going off the rails. ‘I’m a hopeless case,’ she says nervously, ‘I don’t know what I want any more.’ Her manager is concerned that her state of mind may lead to losses for the bank.
• Alan is an experienced IT manager in an international media company who has been passed over for promotion for the third time. ‘They say I don’t have the necessary interpersonal skills but I’m 45. I’m not going to change the way I communicate with people now, am I?’
• Sangita is struggling to make the transition to her new management role in a government agency. She is being asked to make major cost-savings but is unable to come up with a strategy. ‘My job used to be black and white,’ she complains, ‘now it’s all greys. I don’t know how to deal with that.’
• Gerry is a senior consultant who suffers terrible losses in confidence. He feels he’s being exploited by his company but can’t make up his mind if he wants to fight back.
• Lenny is CEO of a music company who is desperate to succeed in his first major leadership role. But the choices he is making about the direction of the company are going down badly with his staff and his management team. The result is that some of his best people are leaving and his place at the top is becoming increasingly precarious.

We’ll meet these clients again in the course of this book: Julia, in some depth, in the next chapter, Sangita in Chapter 9, Gerry in Chapter 11, Alan in Chapter 13 and Lenny in Chapter 16. But for the moment let’s consider what these very different executives have in common. They all seem to be trying to make the best possible choices for themselves, their colleagues and their customers. But the choices they are making are evidently not working. They either don’t know what they want or don’t know how to achieve it, all of which leads to powerful emotions: anxiety, doubt, frustration, anger and even despair. Their situations are critical, for themselves and their organizations, which means that helping them is all the more urgent – welcome to the world of interactional coaching!

Interactional coaching is a new, practical, one-to-one learning approach designed to help executives make the choices that are right for them and achieve what they want at work. As we’ll see, it is an exceptionally adaptable form of coaching that is effective across a wide range of coaching applications and purposes. Developed over 15 years’ work with many different types of executive, it differs from many other models of coaching in three respects. First, it combines extensive business experience with psychological expertise in an integrated approach. Second, it uses an exceptionally wide range of techniques and methods, ranging from open dialogue to strategic development and practical coaching around communication and interpersonal skills. Third, it has a unique theoretical focus around choice, defining human reality as ‘choice-making in interaction’. In this it draws on the powerful, insightful philosophy of life, which is existential thinking, as well as other sources in psychotherapy, psychology and management studies.

In this chapter, we look in more detail at the significance of choice in the workplace and in life and at the concept of the interactional self that underlies this coaching approach. I also want to clarify the goals of interactional coaching and how it differentiates itself from other models of coaching. First, though, let’s examine the role of the modern executive and the way coaching has developed to support it.

Coaching and the Executive Today

To be an executive today is to be in the choice business. One definition of an executive has always been an employee who is empowered to make a range of choices in an organization, as opposed to other employees who make different types of contribution. But the decision-making of contemporary executives is aimed at providing their customers and clients with what they want in the most competitive, interconnected global economy in history. This involves making crucial choices about every aspect of their organization, from strategy to personnel, from product development to marketing and distribution. These choices may well determine the success or failure of an enterprise, so the pressure to get them right is probably greater than ever before.

Some of the pressure on today’s executives stems from the free market revolution of the 1980s. This period deregulated many traditional industries, privatized others and downsized middle management, making the private sector more competitive and the public sector more marketorientated (Leimon et al., 2005). A major effect of this was that, for many, ‘work’ was transformed into ‘performance’. Suddenly a much wider range of managerial competences and interpersonal skills was required by executives than the more sedate, hierarchical organizations of the past had demanded. Work as performance implies a change in the concept of time. For example, the long-term ‘job for life’ culture of many twentieth-century firms, where seniority was a major criterion of status, has given way to the short-term, job-switching culture of today, where you are only as good as your last performance review. Executives, once seen as bureaucrats or semi-anonymous cogs in a corporate machine, are now performers, on stage, in full view, pushed and pushing to be at their very best and evaluated by a host of performance-management systems that determine rewards and punishment. And when economic boom gives way to recession, the stakes get even higher and the consequences of poor performance become more serious.

At the same time, much of the modern pressure to achieve comes from executives themselves. They are well aware of the responsibility they have to themselves to make the best of the opportunities with which they are presented. In general, they also recognize the responsibilities to their employers, colleagues, customers and their families and friends that their roles involve. Executives now also have a huge range of choices to make about their careers and lifestyles. Whereas their parents may have had one job in one career, today’s executives could be looking at several jobs in several careers, searching for a way to balance the exhilarating but furious demands of work with the possibilities of life, family and leisure.

Over the past two decades, the practice of executive coaching has developed in order to help executives deal with this vast new array of choices, pressures and opportunities. Virtually unknown in the 1980s, executive coaching is now a multibillion dollar, worldwide industry practised by tens of thousands of coaches and used by over 80% of organizations in the UK (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, 2010). Agile, multipurpose, capable of changing its content and structure to deal with many different applications, it has developed out of sources as diverse as management consultancy, sports coaching and psychotherapy to become an extraordinarily effective form of workplace learning.

Practicality, client-focus and adaptability are also at the heart of interactional coaching. Its aim is to help clients like Julia, Gerry, Alan, Sangita and Lenny to make the choices that are right for them in the unique situations in which they find themselves. It is a practical approach that draws strength from its theoretical focus on the centrality of choice-making not only in work but also in every aspect of life, so it will be useful to look at this in a little more depth. For interactional coaching, the person is a complex, interactional self encountering the world through different stages of choice, from strategizing to action. In other words, it is not only executives who are in the choice business, we all are.

The Choice Focus

‘To be is to choose oneself’, wrote Jean-Paul Sartre (1958: 440). This statement forms the starting point for the interactional approach. In some ways, it may seem obvious that the big decisions we make in our lives determine our identity. One of the founders of existential thinking, Soren Kierkegaard (1992), pointed out over a century and a half ago that our choices about what job we take or who we live with are crucial to who we are, which is why these choices are often so difficult to make. In our era of unprecedented choice this is even more true, as we routinely make decisions about our work, lifestyle, religion, politics, sexuality and even physical appearance that would have been unthinkable to previous generations.

For existential-phenomenological philosophy, from which interactional coaching draws a good deal of its theoretical inspiration, the idea of choice goes even further. It implies that as humans we have no set nature or essence, as defined by religion, science or society. We are who we choose to be and exist in a continuous act of choosing. As Sartre (1958: 463) put it: ‘We choose the world … by choosing ourselves.’

This doesn’t mean that we have a totally free choice. We make our choices out of the materials that have been given to us in the past and in the present, such as culture, family and even biological constitution. These givens are not in our control but what we make of them is. Nor does our existence as choice-makers mean that every choice we make is conscious in the sense of a clear, rational weighing up of the pros and cons. On the contrary, choices can often be made emotionally or in the heat of action. Some choices we are fully aware of, some we are half-aware of and others we are hardly aware of at all. Indeed, it is often the choices we make without fully knowing it that are the most crucial in shaping our lives.

Choice is essentially a perception of difference, or an interaction of possibilities, which is why Sartre (1958: 462) said that ‘choice and consciousness are one and the same thing’. Our ability as humans to perceive, feel and imagine differences, and to reflect on them, creates the new possibilities and new interactions that are a feature of our constantly changing worlds. One of the most powerful of these interactions is the relationship between what we want and what we don’t want. Desire is already a kind of choice, a weighing up of possibilities that we may have little control over, but as we start to focus more intensively on the competition between desires, choice becomes a more conscious act of interpretation. We have started with a possibility and ended with a conclusion, a choice about the meaning of something. We turn through these interpretations continuously, perhaps hundreds of times in an hour.

In a wider sense, choice can be said to underwrite human society, through our laws, morality and politics. Historically, the struggle for political freedom has aimed at giving more people in society greater choices about how they are governed and by whom. The law focuses on the proper exercise of choices within a given legal code and assumes that infringements of this code are freely made choices and as such are liable to punishment. Similarly the notion of individual morality rests on the conviction that we are all responsible for our actions and our choices and that these ultimately may define our value as human beings.

But choice can be a double-edged sword. Because we are free, we have no guarantees about who we are or what is right or wrong in any situation. This leads to anxiety, which Kierkegaard (1980: 61) calls ‘the dizziness of freedom’. Our ability to see that things can always be different is at the heart of our creativity and intellectual power but it can create a perpetual sense of unease. In extreme forms, anxiety can seriously limit what we can achieve. Interactional coaching is often about helping people deal with the fact that some uncertainty is inevitable and, viewed in the right light, can be a positive and productive force in work and life.

The Choice Cycle

Ultimately the choices that have most impact on others and ourselves are those that are turned into actions. In this sense, the destiny of choice is action, although choice has many other states, moods and realities. In order to clarify this process of choosing, interactional coaching uses a three-stage model called the choice cycle. The choice cycle emphasizes that choice-making is a totality, a complex transformation of a possibility into a concrete reality. It can be summed up in three words: possibilizing, probabilizing and actualizing.

The first stage of the choice cycle is the possibilizing stage. This is where one tries to identify the choices that might be applicable in any situation; it is the pre-choice stage where possibility is strongest and options abound. It is also the stage where trying to identify what you want and don’t want is most needed. This can be an exciting or an anxiety-provoking stage, as it has no clearly defined structure.

The second stage is about probabilizing, a narrowing down of possibilities in the light of the human and material resources that are available and what can realistically be achieved or how much risk can be taken. This is the selection stage, where a final decision is made between options and where the challenge of choice can be acute.

The final stage of the choice cycle is about action, without which choosing is empty. Putting the chosen course of action into practice is not necessarily a single action but a series of actions requiring further choices. This implementation phase is the finalization of the cycle.

We’ll see this model at work throughout many of the different purposes of interactional coaching. Regarded as a purely cognitive or emotional process it describes the act of interpretation, a possibility that ends as a conclusion rather than a specific action. In a more complex form, it makes up the Achievement Matrix, a model that helps to illuminate some of the changes that occur in coaching and guide the client towards achieving her goals. This is explained fully in Chapter 4.

The Interactional Self

As we’ve suggested, at the core of the interactional coaching model is the idea that as human beings we are choice-makers in interaction. In part, the interactional self implies that our thoughts, feelings and behaviours are not separable entities but part of a constantly interweaving reality. We are not minds versus bodies, as conventional dualistic thinking suggests, but minds and bodies, thoughts and emotions, contemplation and action. The interactional self also suggests that as humans we have no choice but to create value for ourselves and others. We are our own producers, out of the materials that are to hand, and our greatest creation is ourselves. We can analyse this self-choosing, value-creating process in terms of three types of interaction: our interactions with time, our interactions with ourselves and our interactions with others.

The Self in Time

Let’s start with time, the first of the three dimensions of the interactional self. To say that a person is defined by the way she relates to time, especially the future, may seem strange at first sight. We perhaps think of ourselves as living in a present that comes out of the past, but for existential theory it is truer to say that our present comes out of our future (Heidegger, 1962). We are forward-facing, in part because we are motivated by desires that can only be fulfilled in the future, even if the future is measured in seconds. Throughout our lives we develop goals, ambitions, plans and projects and other trajectories to the future, all of which constitute much of who we are. Some people plan extensively, whereas others will define themselves by their refusal to plan ahead: either way, much of our identity at any point will be coloured by a journey towards an imagined future.

Change the future and we change the meaning of the present and possibly our interpretation of the past. Imagine you are thinking about an exciting project at work: you are enthusiastic, energetic; you are ‘looking forward to’ it. Suddenly you hear that the project has been cancelled: your mood drops, you feel angry, disappointed, even mildly depressed. Perhaps you think of leaving your job. The past year of struggling to get approval for the project now seems a complete waste of time, a betrayal even. Your present, in the sense of your day-to...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Part 1: Interactional coaching in theory and practice
• Part 2: Fundamental coaching purposes
• Part 3: Coaching in the time dimension
• Part 4: Coaching in the self dimension
• Part 5: Coaching in the dimension of others
• Part 6: Coaching leadership and managerial expertise
• Part 7: Other coaching purposes
• Conclusion
• References
• Index