Coaching and Mentoring

A Critical Text

Simon Western

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781848601642, 9781848601635
• eBook ISBN: 9781446289808
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Human Resource Management
• Index: Business

Coaching and Mentoring: A Critical Text is a unique contribution to the field. It traces coaching influences back to pre-modern times showing connections with 'soul healers' of the past, taking a journey through modernity to post-modernity and making links that helps us better understand coaching today. Positioning coaching as working between the ?wounded-self? (of therapeutic culture) and ?celebrated-self? (of the human potential movement), it reveals four discourses that underpin contemporary coaching practice:

1. The Soul Guide Coach: coaching the ?inner-self?, focusing on values, authenticity and identity.

2. The Psy Coach: coaching the ?outer-self?, using psychological techniques to focus on personal performance and how we relate to others.

3. The Managerial Coach: coaching the ?role-self?, focusing on work, task, output and productivity.

4. The Network Coach: coaching the ?networked-self?, focusing on the wider networks in which we live and work.

This vital new book brings a fresh and critical perspective on coaching and mentoring, challenging its taken-for-granted assumptions and narratives. It is written by a practitioner-scholar, and develops an exciting vision for coaching today.

Key features:

• Accounts for the diverse influences on contemporary coaching practice
• Reveals how coaching is the new ?post-modern confessional?
• Develops a meta-theory of coaching that acts as a baseline for future developments
• Offers frames of thinking to guide coaching and mentoring practitioners and educators.

Part I

Scoping the Field with a Critical Lens

1	A Critical Theory Approach to Coaching

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Introduction

Why coaching and why now?

Four critical frames to analyse coaching

Frames summary

Conclusion

Suggested reading

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Introduction

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Have you heard the good news about coaching and mentoring?

‘Mentoring empowered me: I gained confidence and a promotion!’

‘I can’t thank my coach enough; coaching transformed my leadership style, and I have become a better husband and father.’

‘Since I started coaching I am much more focused; my team is working more collaboratively, and we over-achieved last quarter’s targets.’

The coaching gospel has been a marketer’s dream and coaching success can be found everywhere – popular magazines, websites, books, journals and through narrative accounts. We hear less about the challenges and limitations, as coaching has focused very successfully on spreading the ‘good news’ – that it changes lives and improves work performance.

Coaching is an exciting new addition to the myriad of ‘helping professions’ and it offers a vibrant and energizing new social space for reflection that claims to lead to change and action. This effervescent and infectious approach has helped coaching grow to become a multimillion dollar business.

Coaching emanates from a number of sources, from psychotherapy to counselling, from positive psychology to ‘new spirituality’, from sports coaching to developmental theory, and finally, from management and consultancy theory and practice. Initially there was a strong resistance in the coaching field to the link with psychotherapy at a time when coaching was trying to differentiate and define itself. Although the theory and practice of coaching clearly drew on psychotherapy, it needed to be seen as separate. Coaching is now emerging into a separate practice, yet its debts to psychotherapy are deep and tenacious. What is interesting now is the shift back towards psychotherapy, particularly in reference to theory (see Chapters 11 and 12). There is currently a ‘second wave’ of coaching taking place, where the moves towards accreditation and professionalization demand theory and professional standards, leading the experts in the field to turn heavily to psychology and psychotherapy. Coaching approaches and theories, such as cognitive behavioural, NLP, solution-focused, non-directive approaches and psychodynamic approaches are amongst a myriad of therapeutic influences that are abundantly found, explicitly or implicitly, in the practice of coaching. Coaching/mentoring reviewed from an ethnographer’s stance is clearly a formulation of Freud’s ‘talking cure’ in the sense that talking is the modus operandi of the coach, and its dominant working method is the conversational and confidential dyad, replicating the therapeutic pairing.

Coaching however is not bound by the ‘old’, but manifests itself in an exciting new hybrid form that is both plural and diverse. But the contemporary danger is that coaching is becoming colonized by the theories and professional codes of psychology, psychotherapy and managerialism, as it attempts to become a ‘legitimate’ professional activity. Coaching opens up a new space, and it is this new space that can lead to important personal and workplace development. Coaching not only offers a new expert ‘helping relationship’ in life experiences and the workplace, it also has the potential to bring new ideas, theories and practices to associated experts in other fields of human relations. Coaching already seems to be influencing counselling as well as being influenced by it. Linda Aspey, Chair, BACP Coaching writes:

Understanding transference, engaging in supervision and working with loss are no longer solely the domain of therapists – many non-therapist coaches are highly trained and skilled in these areas too. And many therapists are working with issues that were once the domain of coaches, using tools and models of motivation, change, leadership and performance that were once not so dominant in our therapeutic work. We are learning from each other. (Aspey, 2011)

This chapter will review coaching in its wider social, historical, economical and political context.

Why Coaching and Why Now?

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The question of why coaching and mentoring have expanded so rapidly and what purpose they serve in the workplace and in our social lives is important to investigate rather than to take for granted. For a long while the contemporary belief was that coaching was simply ‘a good thing’, creating an unchallengeable assumption for coachers and coachees. Now coaching has come under greater scrutiny, situating itself in a wider context where academics are beginning to define it and develop it as a significant and homogeneous practice (Kilburg, 2000; West and Milan, 2001; De Haan, 2008; Garvey et al., 2009; Cox et al., 2010). However, scrutinizing coaching also brings challenges from a critical perspective, as familiar managerial, cognitive/ behaviourist and psychology positions turn to ‘scientific rationalism’ as the tools of modernity to scrutinize practice, asking, ‘Is it efficient?’ This scrutiny arises from workplace demands for coaching to prove its worth, to show a return on investment (ROI). Competing coaching approaches also have an interest in ‘legitimizing’ the field in order to win market share and claim credibility. This has led to a big movement that attempts to prove the efficacy of coaching through evidence-based research. This latter position is very problematic and discussed in depth in Chapter 11. The danger of this approach is to reduce coaching to a functional and instrumental practice (Garvey et al., 2009).

Additionally a critical approach asks, ‘What social and organizational factors have led to the massive investment and take up of one-on-one support in the workplace in the last decade?’ To answer this, we have to look beyond coaching to other social phenomena, and think how work-based coaching relates to the growth in Life-coaching, confessional TV and the constant rise of the ‘therapy culture’ in all aspects of our lives (Furedi, 2003).

New organizations and new modes of work require new theoretical resources and new approaches to manage, lead and organize. Coaching and mentoring has to look outside its borders and that of psychotherapy and sports, on which at present it draws heavily, and use wider theoretical resources and practices. Critical management and organizational theorists offer resources that can be useful to coaching, as they help make sense of how the workplace has changed in the global and hi-tech environment, in particular how cognitive labour has replaced manual labour, and how subjectivity and identity have become an integral aspect of what work means (Rose, 1990; Parker, 1992).

The rise of coaching is clearly linked to this post-industrial, knowledge-based transformation of work and organizations. When working with cognition, emotions, subjectivity and identity, new resources of support and development are necessary – coaching fits this very aptly. However, within this modern period, a critical account of coaching must ask if the practice is merely a sticking plaster to keep ‘emotionally battered’ employees, suffering epidemic levels of workplace stress, in productive roles. Is coaching being used as a tool to sustain an ever problematic and dysfunctional system that requires re-thinking rather than sustaining? Or alternatively is coaching providing a vital reflective space in which individuals can be more humane, thoughtful, creative and strategic at work: a space where critical perspectives are allowed to be aired, where questioning and creativity are encouraged, in order to find innovative ways of moving forward?

Coaching is sliding towards an institutionalization and professionalization whereby individual coaches and companies will become limited in their scope under the guise of ‘good practice’ and safe regulations. Sherman and Freas (2004), in their paper ‘The Wild West of Executive Coaching’, make the point that without more work on a theory of coaching, any standards and universal regulations are little more than barriers to entry set up by institutions wanting to profit and control the business:

... until a body of knowledge about coaching wins acceptance, we’ll remain skeptical of current efforts to introduce universal standards and high barriers for entry. For now clients will best serve their needs by evaluating coaches individually. (2004: 5)

The meta-theory proposed in Chapter 12 works towards forming this body of knowledge, bringing together the disparate and competing theories and discourses into a more cohesive field of study.

Coaching: the built-in resistance to critical reflection

The oppressed have an interest in explanatory knowledge of the structures that oppress them. But their oppressors do not need to have that explanatory knowledge and it might be better for them if they do not. The sort of knowledge they need to have is best not called knowledge, but rather information or even data, and that is about how to manipulate events and circumstances and discourses. (Bhaskar, 2010: 107)

Bhaskar’s comments reflect the trend in executive coaching, managerial and HR circles for coaching research to focus on outcomes and ROI data collection. Alternative research would be useful on explanatory knowledge about the structures of the workplace and how coaching can intervene to help improve work.

The coaching fraternity is not predisposed to theory or critical thinking. Coaches on the whole prefer practice to theorizing and philosophy, preferring the simple and straightforward (for example GROW approaches and other acronyms) to the more complex and challenging. Positivistic approaches are preferred to critical and systemic thinking, and an individualistic focus is preferred to social and structural understandings. In the UK, Bristol University’s Critical Research Forum dropped the word ‘critical’ from its title in 2010 owing to it ‘putting coaches off attending’. There are strengths in this pragmatic and positivistic approach, but there are also weaknesses and gaps.

There are in-built resistances to using critical theory to examine coaching:

1 Coaching is about being positive. This is opposed to therapy/counselling, which is about working with dysfunction and pathology.

Counselling managed to supplant therapy by becoming more accessible, and coaching managed to make therapeutic skills available to employees, leaving behind the baggage of dysfunction. However, this positivism linguistically and culturally inscribes the coach/mentor and the client, creating limitations about what can and cannot be said or thought in the coaching arena.

2 Individuals as free agents. Within this positivistic discourse many coaches work on the assumption that individuals act as completely free agents and have the innate power to change themselves. This eliminates critical reflection which situates the individual in a social context, showing how structural and systemic factors impact on the individual.

3 Lack of coherent theory. In spite of the many strengths of coaching and mentoring there is a lack of coherent coaching theory (Garvey et al., 2009) and the lack of a larger body of knowledge that critiques coaching from a broader perspective than focusing on its micropractices. A key aim of this book is to be part of a galvanizing process to partake in a conversation that addresses this lack.

Laing writes:

Most fundamentally a critical theory must be able to place all theories and practices within the scope of a total vision of the ontological structure of being human. (1967: 41)

Coaching and mentoring are ultimately a deeply human exchange, taking place in the economic, political and social core of Western society. The workplace has displaced the church as the main site of community/human exchange. It is here we spend most of our time; it is the workplace that dominates economics and politics and shapes humanity in so many ways. Developing a critical stance will help promote coaching to have a healthy impact on the workplace, and therefore on society as a whole.

Four Critical Frames to Analyse Coaching

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This chapter will now outline the four critical frames used in this book. These four critical frames explain the theoretical approach used to examine the practices of coaching and mentoring in general, and they can also be used in practice. Martin Parker (2002) declares that critical management studies (CMS) have very little impact on what happens in reality:

CMS has had little or no impact on what organisations actually do ... there are some serious and fascinating issues being discussed within CMS, but they tend to stay within the cloistered boundaries of academic work and find little echo outside those who are already converted. (2002: 115–6)

Perhaps this is because many critical academics write from a place that is dislocated from experience and are not engaged as practitioners. Laing’s (1967) critique of psychiatry had a vitality, and did influence practice at micro and macro levels; he writes from personal experience of being a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. The critical frames discussed here also emerge from practice as my work takes me into organizations as a coaching and consulting practitioner. These frames have been used in master’s-level coaching and consulting training programmes, as well as practice for students and within my own coaching work. Taking a critical approach using these frames is a theoretical stance that informs practice, and the frames themselves emerge from this praxis.

The four critical frames are:

• Emancipation

• Depth Analysis

• Looking Awry

• Network Analysis

Emancipation

Ethics, liberation, autonomy and justice: coaching to help create the ‘good society’

This book takes an emancipatory approach as its ethical position. This is an ideological position that I believe should also become central to coaching. If coaching is not an emancipatory project then by default it becomes an instrumental project, whereby coaching serves only to promote greater efficiency, productivity, profit, goals and performance, with little reflection on its wider impact on the social, economic or political sphere. There are many advocates of a non-emancipatory stance, where the main claim for coaching is efficiency and improving return on investment.

If we are to avoid the accumulated problems in the twentieth century that arose from modernity – social inequity, climate change and environmental destruction amongst others – growth, ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Coaching – The Merger of the ‘Wounded Self’ and ‘Celebrated Self’
• Part I: Scoping the Field with a Critical Lens
• Part II: From Friendship to Coaching: A Brief Genealogy of Coaching
• Part III: The Dominant Discourses of Coaching
• Part IV: The Future of Coaching
• Appendix: Analytic-Network Coaching©
• References
• Index