Emerging Conversations in Coaching and Coaching Psychology

Mary Watts, Ian Florance, Mary Watts, Ian Florance

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781351627924
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Industrial & Organizational Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This rich collection offers new perspectives on the future of coaching and coaching psychology, with insight from a broad range of contributors reflecting a wide variety of viewpoints. It captures the ongoing evolution of coaching practice, inviting contribution to conversations as they unfold.

Mary Watts and Ian Florance skillfully bring together authors from backgrounds in law, finance, education, psychology and HR to examine the nature of change and assess current and future developments. Emerging Conversations in Coaching and Coaching Psychology considers influences from within coaching itself, discussing topics including ethics, diversity, supervision and reflective learning, and from other disciplines, assessing the offerings of psychometric assessment, trauma studies and neuroscience. It also considers the impact of social changes as seen in business, education and leadership, and concludes with a look at the future of coaching.

This book will be of great interest to coaches and trainee coaches interested in changes and developments in the field, who aren't afraid to ask questions and who are open to reflecting on their own assumptions and approaches to practice.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Why are conversations emerging in coaching?

Ian Florance and Mary Watts

The approach this book takes

As its title suggests, this book looks at current issues in coaching; conversations that have emerged fairly recently or which are continuing, having reached no obvious consensus. It is not a post-hoc report of achieved goals, rather an initial planning meeting for a journey. In the spirit of coaching, Emerging Conversations is an invitation to join conversations as they unfold: conversations which are designed to excite and challenge, causing us to question our presuppositions and assumptions and our comfort in ‘knowing’; conversations that stimulate our curiosity, and help us to explore and discover new ways of thinking, doing, and being.

The editors were clear that the book couldn’t be comprehensive. Change in all aspects of life – in coaching as much as anywhere – seems to be accelerating, and certain issues moved on while the book was being written: to give one instance, Carol Braddick was very clear when drafting her chapter on technology that new solutions would appear in between the book’s submission and its publication. The conclusion suggests some areas we have not dealt with. However, to give a very current example, planning for this book started before we had heard of the COVID-19 pandemic; we are doing final preparation as much of Europe goes into a further lockdown pre-Christmas 2020. Mary added the Afterword to reflect this situation during the writing process, but there will be much more to say. Carol Braddick, for instance, has raised how critical technology will be to how coaching responds to the issue, but we await genuine research and survey findings. The key activity in thinking about emerging conversations is to ‘watch this space!’

By their nature, some topics discussed here have attracted less research effort and practical learning than one might expect to see in this type of book. In several cases the underpinning evidence is contradictory. Sarah Corrie’s chapter on research in this book argues why this should be an issue of concern, but a lack of conclusive evidence is the nature of emerging conversations. We therefore asked authors to use references to research and theory where they could, but to be comfortable using the first-person voice and expressing personal views where appropriate. This is therefore a colloquy of voices expressing informed opinion, including occasional warnings against too much certainty. As coaching psychologist Alison Clarke commented in a recent conversation: ‘Research evidence is important but more and more practice can be based on the evidence of what is demonstrably workable’ (Clarke, 2020).

A book about change goes out of date quicker than a book about stasis: if it doesn’t, it probably isn’t about change. This issue affected the content of certain chapters. For instance, it needed some care before naming particular assessments and publishing companies in the chapter on testing: companies regularly go out of business or are taken over. Areas such as technology and diversity, both of which are treated here, are changing under the influence of innovation in one case: of social pressures in the other.

Coaching is a diverse activity, an issue considered in Claudia Filsinger’s chapter. Such diversity is as evident in the backgrounds and experience of the people who practice coaching as of those people who are coached. We hope the reader-ship of this book will reflect this variety of viewpoints and backgrounds but this wish has affected how this book has been planned. For instance, coaches from a business background might not have easy access to large libraries or be comfortable with the framework of academic discourse. Coaches from a charity or public service background might, in turn, be put off by too much business language. While some chapters do address and extend academic arguments, we hope that this does not preclude practitioners finding them interesting. Just as the reader-ship may come from diverse backgrounds, we were keen that the authors should have varied viewpoints. This is reflected in the tone and style of the chapters: some are more informal and light-hearted; others use more academic language and structures.

Why do human disciplines change?

The previous section begs questions. Is coaching really changing? If it is, why? Is all this change actually impacting practical issues in coaching or are we experiencing a storm in an academic journal teacup?!

It’s generally accepted that coaching is a flourishing practice – growing in size and value. To take one rather old estimate at random, Ann Scoular quotes a 2003 article in the Economist as estimating that coaching was worth $1 billion, a figure which was doubling every 24 months (Scoular, 2011, 1) There are some issues that worry practitioners (the number of unqualified people delivering coaching, for instance) but a gradual move to professionalisation is seen as one possible solution to this. Mary Watts discusses this in the context of coaching ethics. One can argue that coaching method is standardising on certain foundations. These include acronymic models (such as GROW); unconditional positive regard; specific communication tools (active listening, open questioning, reframing etc) and specific insights gathered from psychology, analysis, therapy, sports and techniques like neuro-linguistic programming. But there are unanswered questions and perhaps the most fundamental is finding evidence backing the claims made for coaching’s effectiveness. Simmy Groves and Adrian Furnham discuss this in a very useful paper (Groves and Furnham, 2016). Jonathan Passmore and Yi-Ling Lai raised the issue more recently: ‘The evidence for investment in coaching interventions will continue to be a major concern for scholars in relevant domains as well as for organisational stakeholders… more rigorous research is required to inform practice’ (Passmore and Lai, 2019, 80). Rob Briner’s paper raises very useful questions about coaching’s effectiveness from an outside perspective (Briner, 2012)

Many business thinkers and practising business leaders understand that the moment of greatest success is exactly the point where you need to start changing a human institution: a commercial business, a sports team or even a discipline. In his book Always Change a Winning Team (Robertson, 2007), Peter Robertson uses the S curve – a model whose shape describes the growth and inevitable decline of natural systems such as prairies and species – to describe why this is. Robertson applies the model to human institutions – which he typifies as particular kinds of natural systems – and shows that they start declining precisely at the point where their growth has reached its fullest extent. However, unlike purely natural systems, human institutions can be remade: just before they reach the point of greatest growth they need to rethink or reimagine their future and ‘jump’ to a new S curve. This is a simplification of a detailed and stringent argument. But it seems the S curve can be applied to coaching as a human activity. Put simply, coaching is flourishing: it is precisely now that we should be focusing on a vision for its future and rethinking it.

How did coaching get to this point?

At the risk of over-simplifying, there seem to be three strongly linked accounts of how coaching got to where it is now: a point at which it may need to question itself.

Coaching is a natural human activity

People throughout recorded history have coached, and present-day coaching is just a professionalisation of what we naturally do. Examples offered to back up this thesis almost invariably mention Plato’s dialogues as early examples of someone using questioning to facilitate truth-finding in someone else. Philosophers are often used as examples, as are the arts. Drama and cinema often use this technique. A chapter in The Trainee Coach Handbook (Watts, Bor, and Florance, 2020) on the coaching relationship uses the character of Natasha from Tolstoy’s War and Peace to illustrate coaching (Schnell, Searle, and Stoneman, 2020). Spiritual movements have long traditions of coaching type techniques (Buddhist koans, Christian parables and the text of the Talmud are obvious examples)

It is hard to argue with this account, but it’s worth pointing out that many examples used to illustrate this idea seem to reduce coaching to the act of asking open questions. This is just one of the many techniques in the coaching skill set. Nonetheless, the human race does seem to have practised forms of coaching for millennia and we still use it, without so identifying it, in relationships, hobbies and work. We recognise it when it occurs, even if we don’t always give it a name.

Coaching sources in the 1960s counterculture

Leni Wildflower (Wildflower, 2013) gives a fascinating account of the countercultural – and sometimes abusive – roots of coaching, starting with bestsellers such as How to Win Friends and Influence People, first published in 1936 (see Wildflower, 2013, 6–8), and moving through the practice of certain cults and new age movements. Werner Erhardt’s est is a prime example. It was active under that name from 1971 to 1984. Leni Wildflower’s book gives a good description of est, its relation to other movements and its influence on coaching (Wildflower, 2013, 30–37) These streams solidified in the activities (occasionally antics) of the psychologists who developed aspects of humanist psychology and the human potential movement.

Wildflower’s book makes a compelling case and it seems that Esalen, an influential source of ’60s thinking, is also central to the development of humanist psychology and coaching (see Kripal, 2007 for more information on Esalen).

Coaching as a developing profession in the late 20th century

An interesting and comprehensive source of information for this account (and indeed a range of sources describing the history of coaching) is The Sourcebook of Coaching History (Brock, 2014) though it is somewhat out of date. To choose at random from the key moments Brock’s book documents:

• UK and USA Companies started to offer business coaching and training courses in coaching in the 1980s.
• The inner game work of Gallwey and Whitmore became more widely available at the same time.
• Professional coach associations developed largely in the decade between 1995 and 2005. For instance, The International Coaching Federation was founded in 1995; the Special Group in Coaching Psychology of the British Psychological Society was founded in 2002 at the same time as the Australian equivalent.
• The first coaching psychology course started at the University of Sydney in 2000.

If this account is looked at in more detail, it suggests coaching is in some ways an outcrop of psychology, therapy and analysis. Originally a species of psychology-lite which non-psychologists could practice, it developed its own systems, bodies, practices and, increasingly, methods. One can argue that coaching is a separate profession in all but name, and that latter omission may soon be rectified as calls for professional status grow, a movement implicit and, at times, explicit in this book. But will we end up with two disciplines – coaching and coaching psychology – or do they overlap too much? This raises an important emerging conversation considering the historic, current and potential relationship between psychology and coaching.

Discussion

Rob Briner sums this up: ‘While interactions and relationships that look a bit like coaching have probably been around for as long as there have been human groups and organisations, it is only in the last 30 years that formal coaching appears to have emerged’ (Briner, 2012, 4). Jenny Rogers comments that coaching must be ‘as old as human society’ (Rogers 2016, 7).

These three accounts seem to outline one process: that a natural human tendency to coach was picked up in the Western countercultural revolution of the ’60s and ’70s (when ‘jaw-jaw’ was seen as preferable to ‘war-war’ and the anti-psychiatry movement was in full swing). An evidential base and professional standards were developed because, while the outcomes of early humanistic methods were seen as valuable, some of the methods were deeply questionable. This is not just a serial process: people still coach each other in an informal way; counter-cultural activities rooted in the ’60s and ’70s still flourish in certain environments – for good or ill; and some coaches are post-retirement hobbyists without professional training.

Other ingredients have been added to the coaching dish, particularly in recent years: labour, economic and work theory and practice; the influence of sports management and training, as sport has professionalised and become a global obsession; concerns over the use of drugs in healthcare and the rise of alternatives, including talking cures; the democratisation of debate through social media; the consequent collapse of certain authorities who had the public trust to be able to set rules. The chapter by Andreas Kleinschmidt with Mary Watts in this book discusses some of these issues.

How have these developments shaped coaching? As we have suggested, it is now a very successful, human activity. But it has become complex: with a huge range of influences, drawing on many different disciplines. Jenny Rogers typ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• 1 Introduction: why are conversations emerging in coaching?
• 2 Reflective learning: increasing personal agency through challenge
• 3 New perspectives on how psychometrics and coaching can inform each other
• 4 Developing coaching through research
• 5 The contribution of coaching to mental health care: an emerging specialism for complex times
• 6 The role for coaching in psychological trauma
• 7 Diversity and coaching
• 8 (Neuro)coaching
• 9 Emerging conversations about technology and coaching
• 10 Supervisee-led coaching supervision
• 11 A whole-person approach to leadership and executive coaching
• 12 Coaching in education: supporting the mental health and well-being of pupils and staff
• 13 Coaching is growing up: how a pluralistic perspective might help
• 14 Welcome to our new economy cabin: what new technology and a changing market for coaching will mean for the ethics of the profession
• 15 Conclusion
• Afterword: coaching in a time of crisis
• Index