The focus of the coaching conversation is to help the client work toward achieving their desired outcomes. It is in this process, where coach and client reflect on the client’s experience, that the potential for learning and action emerges. Business coaching has been defined in many different ways, but is essentially a one-on-one collaborative partnership designed to develop the client’s performance and potential, personally and professionally, in alignment with the goals and values of the organization. Business coaching should be aligned strategically with the overall values and objectives of an organization.
However, an important question is raised for executives: if goals are to be motivationally achieved, are they also aligned with the individual’s values, beliefs, and feelings? Often organizations merely pay lip service to organizational values, and don’t necessarily create them as a synthesis of the core individual values that make up the culture of the organization. Ethical dilemmas can arise during the coaching process if the executive needs to make difficult choices that are incompatible with their own value system.
Goals, Motivation, and Performance
If you wish to help your clients improve their behavior and performance, it is useful to understand the psychology behind adult behavior, goals, and motivation. Alfred Adler, who worked with Sigmund Freud for ten years, reasoned that adult behavior is purposeful and goal-directed, and that life goals provide individual motivation. He focused on personal values, beliefs, attitudes, goals, and interests, and recommended that adults engage in the therapeutic process and reinvent their futures using techniques such as “acting as if,” role-playing, and goal setting. All these tools are utilized and recognized by well-qualified business coaches worldwide.
Motivational theories primarily focus on the individual’s needs and motivations. I have typically worked with coaching clients to help them understand more fully their intrinsic motivators (internal drivers such as values, beliefs, and feelings), and how to use extrinsic motivators (external drivers such as relationships, bonuses, environment, and titles) to motivate their teams. If an individual’s goals are not in alignment with their own internal, intrinsic drivers, there will be difficulties for them in achieving those goals.
In an International Coach Federation study (ICF, 2008a), Campbell confirmed that coaches often assume clients are aware of their values, but within the confines of the study this appeared to be incorrect. The clients interviewed indicated they were not aware of their values, and that acquiring a process of awareness and reflection led them to become more aware of their emotions, their values, and the need to clarify their goals. Whitmore (2002) supports this and states that the goal of the coach is to build awareness, responsibility, and self-belief.
The coach’s intervention and questions help the client to discover their own intrinsic drivers or motivators, and allow both coach and client to identify whether the client’s personal, professional, and organizational goals are in alignment.
Adult and Experiential Learning
Adult learning theory has influenced coaching from the start: the goal of adult learning is to achieve a balance between work and personal life. In the same way, most business coach-client relationships involve an integration of personal and systems work. Personal work is intended to help the client develop the mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual competence to achieve their desired goals; systems work may be found within a partnership, marriage, family, organizational team, or matrix structure.
Another powerful influence on goal-setting in coaching is experiential learning because it emphasizes a client’s individual, subjective experience. In this process, coach and client probe the essence of an experience to understand its significance and to determine any learning that can be gained from it. The importance of experiential learning is that coach and client use the business coaching conversation to actively reconstruct the client’s experience, with a focus on setting goals that are aligned with the client’s intrinsic drivers, i.e., values, beliefs, and feelings.
Other considerations may be language, social class, gender, ethnic background, and the individual’s style of learning. In learning from experience, it is useful to understand which barriers prevent the client from learning. Often it is a matter of developing self-reflective skills as much as self-management skills. What clients learn from their experience can transform their perceptions, their limiting and liberating assumptions, their way of interpreting the world – and their ability to achieve results.
Types of Goals
The coach is responsible for ensuring that goal-setting conversations get the best results. O’Neill (2000) differentiates between two kinds of client goals, business and personal, and links the coaching effort to a business result, highlighting and prioritizing the business areas that need attention. Business goals are about achieving external results; personal goals are what the leader has to do differently in the way they conduct themselves in order to get the business results they envision.
Yalom (1980) talks about two types of goals: content (what is to be accomplished) and process (how the coach wants to be in a session). However, he also describes the importance of setting concrete attainable goals – goals that the client has personally defined, and which increase their sense of responsibility for their own individual change.
Developmental Goal-setting
If the client is to learn how to learn, they need to cultivate self-awareness through reflection on their experience, values, intrinsic drivers, the impact of these on others, the environment, and their own future goals. This process is often implicit in the coaching relationship through the process of questions and actions that develop critical reflection and practice. As a coach, you will be asking questions to help clients reflect, review, and gain useable knowledge from their experience. A useful structure for your work with business executives is along the continuum of a development pipeline developed by David Peterson (2009). Your questions and challenges in your coaching sessions can help your clients reflect in five areas:
Business coaching places great emphasis on clarifying and achieving goals. Often within the complexity of the organizational environment, the client’s overarching goals may be set by a more senior power; where that senior individual may have different worldviews, paradigms, and limiting or empowering assumptions. It is crucial that the client have a “living sense” of what their goal may be. In other words, goals must be aligned with the values of the individual as much as with those of the organization if they are to be achieved. This article is adapted from “Goals and Goal-Setting” by Sunny Stout Rostron (COMENSANews, February 2010 (www.comensa.org.za).
This article first appeared in Business Coaching Worldwide (June Issue 2010, Volume 6, Issue 2).
Griffiths, K. E, and Campbell, M. A. (2008). Regulating the Regulators: Paving the Way for International, Evidence-Based Coaching Standards. International Journal of Evidence-Based Coaching and Mentoring, 6(1):19-31.
International Coach Federation (ICF). (2008a). Core Competencies. Lexington, KY: ICF.
International Coach Federation (ICF). (2008b). ICF Code of Ethics. Lexington, KY: ICF.
O’Neill, M. B. (2000). Coaching with Backbone and Heart: A Systems Approach to Engaging Leaders with Their Challenges. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
Peterson, D. (2009). Executive Coaching, A Critical Review and Recommendation for Advancing the Practice (in S. Zedeck (Ed.) Handbook of Industrial and Organizational Psychology. Washington DC: American Psychological Association.
Stout Rostron, S. (2009). Business Coaching International, Transforming Individuals and Organizations. London: Karnac.
Whitmore, J. (2002). Coaching for Performance: Growing People, Performance and Purpose. London: Nicholas Brealey.
Yalom, I. D. (1980). Existential Psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books.
Dr. Sunny Stout Rostron, DProf, MA is an executive coach and consultant with a wide range of experience in leadership and management development, business strategy and executive coaching. The author of six books, including Business Coaching Wisdom and Practice: Unlocking the Secrets of Business Coaching (2009), Sunny is Director of the Manthano Institute of Learning (Pty) Ltd and founding president of COMENSA (Coaches and Mentors of South Africa).
We in the UK are finally emerging from a rather long and cold winter. The sun is showing up before we arrive at the office and overall there is a renewed spring in the step of my fellow commuters on the 6.40 a.m. train to London. The coming of spring also heralds the start of the conference season and I am sitting here preparing to give a keynote next week and wondering what my audience will find most exciting in the recent coaching research.
On reflection, my most stimulating reading this year has not been in coaching at all but in our related disciplines. The learning and development literature has always provided rich pickings in the past and psychology is a constant source of insight, but there are other literatures which have some rich contributions to make to our practice. One field in particular has been mentioned by every doctoral student I have interviewed this year: neuroscience, the study of the brain and its influence on the mind.
My first reaction to the evolving area of neuroleadership was one of scepticism: “Oh no, not another bandwagon claiming to be the answer to life, the universe, and coaching.” However, upon mentioning neuroleadership on a researcher discussion board, I was met with such an extreme and mixed reaction that my interest was immediately raised. Yes, there is always a temptation to flock to any new area that by its very name implies ‘scientific credibility,’ but how does it extend our understanding? The researcher in me was awakened and I started to ask “What’s going on here?”
A little context is useful to start with: Neuroscience has been an important area of medical inquiry since the first trepanning ‘operations’ in early civilizations. Its discoveries have informed medical and therapeutic interventions for centuries. The tools it had at its disposal were fairly blunt (sorry for the pun!) and required elegant research on injured or diseased brains to come as far as it has. The results have had impacts not only in therapy but in the learning and development arena. Good training designs have used neuroscientific research to provide optimum learning environments for their participants. The real explosion in interest in recent years has come from the development of noninvasive probes for assessing brain function. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging and related spectrometries have allowed a glimpse into the brain as it works. This dramatic improvement in the ‘probe’ has illuminated a whole new area of work-that of the functioning of the healthy brain in real time as it deals with stress, emotions, and everything life has to throw at it. The result is an upsurge in researchers choosing to work in the field and a burst of creative activity in identifying applications. Neuroleadership and neuromarketing are but two. Research is starting to map the physiological bases of many of our human behaviors and preferences.
This explosion in activity and creativity is occurring at the intersection between two disciplines: neuroscience and leadership. As social learning theorist Etienne Wenger1 reminds us, it is at the ‘interface’ between two communities that creativity can be unleashed, but also where there is most discord as new paradigms emerge. There will always be detractors from both sides of the interface who feel that those working at the intersection are not doing justice to their original discipline and that multidisciplinary work is somehow of less worth.
There has been good reason for such caution in the past when there has not been a full collaboration between researchers from both sides and a new program or model is launched without being validated by research. Often, the interpretation of the research has been inappropriate to the new application and ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing’ has proved to be true.
So we as researchers need to keep a critical eye on what is happening, as there is a temptation to be blinded by the unfamiliar science and to let our enthusiasm run away with itself. Luckily, I have some background in Magnetic Resonance Imaging and have been able to read the literature from both sides of the neuroleadership interface. The field looks promising and I look forward to seeing how it will develop.
But how can we critically engage with this type of multidisciplinary work in the future so we as a profession don’t go down a blind alley, but maintain appropriate standards of evidence?
Interrogating my own criteria, I have come up with the following points:
This isn’t an exhaustive list but one to prompt your own reflections. Have fun at the neuroscience-leadership interface, but let’s keep it real and relevant.
This article first appeared in Business Coaching Worldwide (June Issue 2010, Volume 6, Issue 2).
David Rock has been the major leader in neuroleadership and his book with Linda Page is highly readable and relevant:
Rock, D. and Page, L. Coaching with the Brain in Mind: Foundations for Practice (Wiley: NJ, 2009).
1Wenger, E., Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Dr. Annette Fillery-Travis is a senior researcher and education coach with the Professional Development Foundation. The author of more than 60 research articles and studies, her recent book The Case for Coaching, presenting a literature review with research case studies and interviews from over 20 organizations on coaching efficacy, was published in 2006 by CIPD, UK.
