The Coaches' Handbook

The Complete Practitioner Guide for Professional Coaches

Jonathan Passmore, Jonathan Passmore

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000202991
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Gestione delle risorse umane
• Index: Business

This comprehensive practitioner guide provides an accessible evidenced based approach aimed at those new to coaching and who may be undertaking coach training for a certificate in coaching or professional credentials or accreditation with the AC, ICF, EMCC, CMI or ILM. The book will also be useful for those who want to enhance their coaching skills.

The Coaches Handbook is edited by Jonathan Passmore, an internationally respected expert and executive coach, with chapters from leading coaching practitioners from across the world. The book is divided into seven sections. Section one examines the nature of coaching, its boundaries, the business case for coaching and how organisations can build a coaching culture. Section two focuses on deepening our self-understanding and understanding our clients, the non-violent communications mindset and the coaching relationship. Section three focuses on the key skills needed for coaching including goal setting, powerful questions, active listening, using direct communications and the role of silence, emotions and challenge in coaching. Section four offers a range of coaching approaches including behavioural, person-centred, solution-focused, psychodynamic, neuroscience, narrative, positive psychology, out-door eco-coaching, team coaching, careers coaching and integrated coaching. Section five focuses on fundamental issues in coaching such as ethics and contracting and evaluation. Section six explores continuous professional development, reflection and the role of supervision, as well as how to establish your coaching business. The final section contains a host of coaching tools which practitioners can use to broaden their practice.

Unique in its scope, this key text will be essential reading for coaches, academics and students of coaching. It is an important text for anyone seeking to understand the best practice approaches that can be applied to their coaching practice, including human resources, learning and development and management professionals, and executives in a coaching role.

Section 1

Coaching context

1 Coaching defined and explored

Jonathan Passmore

Introduction

Before we can start to coach, we need to understand what coaching is, and what it is not. However, one challenge coaching practitioners face is that there is no universally agreed-upon definition of coaching. In this chapter, we argue that while understanding the origins of coaching and a variety of its different definitions, most coaches need to think for themselves and discern what coaching is in their context, organisation or culture. First, we explore a range of commonly used definitions and consider the roots of coaching. Then we will compare coaching with other popular organisation interventions such as mentoring, performance management, appraisals and 1–1’s as well as discussing counselling and occupational health, before closing by encouraging coaches to develop their own elevator pitch to describe what they do and how they do it.

What is coaching?

Answering this question is both simple and complex. Coaching has been around for three or more decades and most people have an idea of what coaching is. This has been helped by the fact that most writers have broadly similar views. While there has been broad agreement over these years, different writers, professional bodies and practitioners have emphasised different aspects of coaching in their definitions.

But why should we be interested in discussing a definition? There are several good reasons why starting with a definition is a very good place to start. Firstly, if you are providing a service to clients, individuals or organisations, the coach needs to be able to explain what they are offering. Having a clear elevator pitch to articulate what you do is vital for all coaches. A second reason is that if you are learning about a topic, knowing what is or is not enables you to establish boundaries for what you need to learn and what knowledge is not part of the topic. A third reason is for research; we need to define what we are doing, to ensure what we are doing is X, rather than Y, and thus establish that it is X, rather than Y that leads to positive outcome. The following analogy illustrates this point. Both French fries and bananas are yellow and oblong. However, if we eat too much of one of these, we are likely to put on weight and, over time, increase our chances of coronary heart disease. Understanding the difference between the two can help us to make better choices based on their likely effect on the human body.

The roots of coaching?

In her review of the history of coaching, Leni Wildflower notes that the roots of coaching have spread far and wide (2010). Wildflower highlights several important strands that have shaped and influenced coaches for good, as well as ill. One strand is the human potential movement. This arose out of the counterculture movements in the USA during the 1960s. At its heart was a belief that the development of human potential was far greater than we had recognised and humans had within them a capacity for self-development which can unleash greater happiness, creativity and fulfilment. These ideas were picked up by Michael Murphy, the founder of Esalen Institute in the 1960s, who provided a physical space for thinkers and practitioners to come together. This in turn influenced the work of John Whitmore and Tim Gallwey, as well as Thomas Leonard and Laura Whitworth (Brock, 2009; Brock, 2012).

A second strand was sports coaching, which emerged from the use of coaching in debating societies within universities at the turn of the century. The earliest records date back to the 1910s and 1920s with the work of Trueblood (1911) and Huston (1924), who report the use of coaching as a tool to improve debating performance. These ideas were picked up by university sports teams who started applying the ideas to baseball and American football (Griffiths, 1926).

A third strand identified by Wildflower is the work of the therapists, Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung Fritz and Laura Perls, who argued that development or change could be realised through exploratory conversations to develop greater self-awareness.

A fourth, often-ignored strand is the small but growing development of coaching in the workplace, which dates back to the 1930s. In a short article, the Detroit-based editor of Factory Management and Maintenance examined the role of worker development (through training and coaching) to improve factory processes (Gordy, 1937). The article noted how coaching could be used to reduce waste in manufacturing. Other articles followed describing the potential of coaching (Bigelow, 1938). While neither Gordy or Bigelow offered a formal definition of coaching, the use of the term suggests that coaching was being used in the workplace before the start of World War II. However, the arrival of the war meant the term seemed to disappear until the 1960s, when it appeared again in a host of different guises.

How does coaching compare with other interventions?

As we saw in the last section, coaching has drawn from a variety of sources, and different cultures have placed different priorities on these different traditions; for example, in Germany the influence from counselling is stronger than in the US, where the human potential movement has been a significant driver in defining and shaping coaching as we know it today. These different traditions have also influenced professional bodies; for example, the ICF, which has grown out of the US tradition, focuses more on ideas drawn from the human potential movement, while the German Coaching federations such as DBVC have been more influenced by ideas from counselling and psychology.

One way of thinking about coaching is to consider it alongside other widely used organisational interventions, such as appraisals, 1–1 and training. A range of similar interventions is illustrated in Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 Coaching boundaries

We think there are both similarities and differences between each of these. By thinking about the similarities and differences we can better understand what coaching is, and what it is not.

One common area of confusion is between coaching, counselling and therapy. Clearly all three types of intervention are usually 1–1 conversations, which are interested in exploring how things might be different from how they are now. However, how they do this is one of the ways they differ. For example, we would suggest that counselling is generally a one-to-one conversation which involves a significant amount of time exploring issues in the past and present. In contrast, coaching, while acknowledging the past and present, encourages a stronger focus on the present and future. In a similar way, therapy often involves a significant focus on the past, with some consideration of the present and future. The types of themes they deal with also differ. One way of thinking about this is what I call the three D’s framework (dream, distress and damage). As coaches we can see these three interventions as traffic lights, as illustrated in Figure 1.2. Coaching focuses a client’s attention towards their dreams: “What do you imagine being different tomorrow and how can you make this a reality?” In these cases, the coach is green to go ahead with coaching. Counselling recognises that we all experience problems in our lives from managing bereavement, relationship breakdown or anxiety at work. In counselling, the focus is on helping clients manage this distress. These types of issues may be coded as amber. In these cases, the coach may proceed with caution. However, in doing so they need to answer three questions: Is the issue within the boundaries of the contract agreed with the client? Am I qualified or trained to help the client with this issue? Do I have sufficient experience of working with this type of issue? In the cases where the coach is not qualified, or the experience or issue is outside of the boundary of coaching, the coach should stop and refer the client to another helping professional. Where the scope of the work is within the experience and training of the coach, and has been contracted for, such as relationship coaching, the coach may proceed. Finally, a few people need more sustained and specialist help to manage deeply traumatic events in their life; mental health issues or habituated behaviours, such as drug or alcohol dependency. Therapy is there to manage the damage that these events or mental health conditions present. In these cases, the coach should always stop and refer to a suitably qualified helping professional.

Figure 1.2 Three D’s model

As you think about other interventions used in the workplace, you might start to think about training, mentoring, annual appraisals, performance management, 1–1 meetings, careers counselling, action learning sets and OD consulting. All of these have some similarities with coaching. Most of these are concerned with supporting or enabling learning and change. Most involve setting goals or objectives. Most use ...