This case study provides critical insights into how coaching creates value in an organization.
Phillips, J. J. (2012) Coaching for Business Impact: Creating Value, Including ROI, Through Executive Coaching. In Phillips, P. P. and Phillips, J. J. Measuring the Success of Coaching. ATD Press, pp., 183 – 201.
One of the joys of writing this column is that it gives me the excuse to pause and reflect upon my recent learning about research and practice and to consider how it may be of interest to you, my readers. Over the last month or so I have been particularly taken by what it means to be a master practitioner and how research can help us attain that level of practice. It started with my recent move to Middlesex University (England) as Director of Programs for their Professional Doctorate Program. The candidates in this program undertake a doctorate in and through their own practice. Unlike the conventional doctorate where the focus is on academic knowledge, this doctorate’s focus is on practice itself, including all the messiness of real life and context. Within my new role, I have the opportunity to work with senior practitioners from a range of professions and talk with their professors and senior academics. It is fascinating to note that we are all intrigued by the question, “What makes mastery?”
All of us are struck by the great similarities between different disciplines–it seems that the process is the same, although the technical knowledge may be vastly different. For example, I had the delight of working with Dr. Susan Melrose, a professor of the performing arts, and I loved her perspective–to quote: “Disciplinary mastery is always relational: it is undertaken somewhere, by and for someone, with reference to (and thereby rearticulating the terms of) one or another disciplinary tradition”–this has a resonance for me when thinking about coaching. As we meet with our clients we are co-constructing a ‘performance’ with them. As we seek to probe what mastery really looks like and how it can be acquired, we are in the same realm as the performer seeking to construct a depiction of Hamlet or Sleeping Beauty which communicates and explores anew some aspect of what it means to be human.
The question of mastery has real power for coaching when we consider where we are as a profession. If we are to construct the boundaries of what constitutes our body of knowledge and practice, we need to be able to articulate in a clear manner what it means to be a master practitioner in our field. Here we differ from a performance artist in that we need to differentiate ourselves from other related disciplines. The academic requirements, i.e., the amount of stuff we need to know, are relatively straightforward. They are not easy, but they are straightforward. There may be differences in the focus of some courses depending upon the preference of the professors teaching them–but the amount and depth of study are monitored by the university accreditation boards and audited against the standard of a current body of knowledge in the area. However, with all due respect, we know that passing a master’s degree is not indicative of mastery in a profession. A master’s degree identifies that you have the required technical knowledge, NOT that you have the required professional knowledge and skills. For this we need to develop–through practice–the professional know-how and ‘gut feel’ indicative of a seasoned practitioner. This is the elusive but necessary ingredient of mastery.
So what might it be? The literature shows us a variety of perspectives and comes up with ‘practice wisdom’ and ‘expert intuition,’ both of which try to identify the process by which a practitioner produces a decision or constructs a flexible innovative intervention within the context they find themselves, i.e., their particular client or situation. It is relational, as Susan Melrose says. Let us take a moment to reflect: When was the last time you surprised yourself in practice and thought, “I wonder where that came from? Why did I do that? It worked but where did I get it from?” Probably quite recently! Your expert intuition was in full flight. You probably rationalized your decision or design AFTER the event, but it arrived like magic at the time. As Schön1 would have said, you were ‘knowing in action.’
We are starting, as researchers, to get some sense of what is happening in practice wisdom so we can help practitioners attain the holy grail of mastery. It is not appropriate to call it ‘intuition’ –expert or not–as this is a catchall phrase suggesting it is innate and without rational basis. My own view is that we are working with a kaleidoscope (I thank one of my students, Steve Wigzell, for this metaphor), each color contributing to the pattern is one aspect of what we are bringing to the interaction. For instance, we will bring technical knowledge from various disciplines: learning theory, change management, etc., but also our knowledge of context, the pragmatics in operation, our own values and beliefs, our experience in similar situations, etc. All these and more are part of the color spectrum we have in our kaleidoscope. For each client and situation, we rotate the kaleidoscope again to produce a pattern unique and specific to that client and situation.
The creation of each new pattern has to happen fast and effortlessly ‘in the moment’ through ‘reflection in action,’ and, as such, is the result of using images, examples, and understandings achieved through practice. A person’s performance nearly always uses several kinds of knowledge (technical, experiential, etc.) in some integrated form and is influenced by both context and feelings.
What recent research has shown is that the transition from novice to competent practitioner can happen when one or two areas of work are mastered. The transition from competent to master practitioner needs the practitioner to not only be using a broad and deep knowledge base, but also to be actively creating knowledge by applying their expertise in new arenas. To create new knowledge, experts must be well versed in the problems and methodologies of the field in which they work and actively engaged in problem finding. These experts are posing questions and instituting investigations that push the boundaries of their work.
So there we have it–if you want to develop expertise and be a Master Practitioner, you must be a problem finder and hence a researcher!
Enjoy your problem finding!
This article first appeared in Business Coaching Worldwide (October Issue 2010, Volume 6, Issue 3).
1 D. Schön, The Reflective Practitioner (Basic Books: New York, 1983) An old one but a good one and well worth a read
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 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.
Summary
All of us are running faster and faster as technology shreds our attention. We have confused speed and urgency with impact and productivity. Information overload and fractured attention cost the US economy at least $900 billion a year.1
We desperately need to take back control by learning to stop, reflect, and focus. The discipline of paying attention has an immediate impact on performance and accelerates learning. In this article, I outline how and where to focus in order to learn critical leadership skills, and describe how reflection and mindfulness combine to form a powerful coaching model.
Mindshifting
Linda is a senior executive who started her career as an administrative assistant. Her first role was in a branch office of a multinational financial services company. She was a fast learner with a great deal of energy and the ability to get things done. She was steadily given greater responsibility. She began managing the administrative staff in her office, and then took on the compliance and office management functions as well. Her drive and service orientation got the attention of the district manager, who picked her to run these functions for the region. After just a few years she was promoted to headquarters to run administration, compliance, and office management nationally.
I met Linda shortly after she started her role at headquarters. She was scattered during our conversation and would take phone calls and check email every few minutes. She told me she was frustrated and struggling with the huge volume of work. It seemed every employee and compliance issue in the field would bubble up to her because she knew the most and was the best at solving difficult problems. Her days were filled with back-to-back meetings because everyone wanted her time. She began falling behind on deadlines and would often be 20-30 minutes late for meetings. She would apologize profusely, but was not really aware of how destructive her behavior was becoming for her relationships and reputation. As much as she was drowning, she felt like the go-to expert. She enjoyed seeing her own impact and so it was hard for her to delegate real authority to her staff.
As Linda moved from each level to the next, she needed to change where she focused, what she valued, and how she defined her job. These changes can be described as a series of Mindshifts as you go from individual contributor to leader of a large organization. As I coached Linda to step back, reflect, and focus on her behavior, she was able to see how she had become a bottleneck because she was stuck on the first Mindshift, ‘Doing to Leading’ (see chart below). Ultimately she was able to shift her attention from getting things done on her own to developing her team and facilitating their work. Her job was no longer to assemble the budget and double-check it herself; it was to make sure the right people came together so the budget reflected her whole department’s needs and goals.
Linda also became more aware of her impact and better at setting boundaries, including saying ‘no’ to problems that were not hers to solve. This gave her more time to think about how to improve her department’s performance. After a few years she mastered several more Mindshifts and was ready for another opportunity. Linda is now running a rapidly growing business that is central to her company’s future.
Practice: Mindshifting Self-Assessment
There are seven Mindshifts to make as you go from managing yourself to managing organizations.2 Moving from left to right along each dimension requires a change in how you prioritize and evaluate your success. First consider the Doing-to-Leading Mindshift:
Building a Foundation
The Mindshifts can help you map out a development plan to shift along each dimension. However, you first need to take hold of your attention by learning to stop, reflect and focus.
Practice: Stopping the Action
Our minds need regular rest and reflection. Vacations (from the Latin vacare, to empty) are times to put out our mind’s garbage so we can replenish. By temporarily putting aside our daily challenges and allowing ourselves to daydream, we are able to discover new ideas:
Practice: Leveraging Others for Reflection
We need to ask for help making time to think and taking tasks off our plate:
“As a senior executive my time is no longer my own, yet I desperately need time to think. I get my assistant to schedule thinking time and then protect it. I also ask my colleagues to be thinking partners, because as an extravert, I talk to think and synthesize better out loud. It’s about being disciplined and creating choice. We have choice if we exercise it.”
– Nicoa Dunne, former SVP Human Resources, Misys Technology.
Mindfulness
Mindfulness is both a state of mind and an attitude. The state of mind is present-focused awareness, open-mindedness, and acceptance. It takes great practice and willpower to live in the present, rather than ruminating about the past or worrying about the future. In addition, staying open to new ideas can bring up significant anxiety, and accepting reality can challenge our sense of identity. It helps a great deal to cultivate a welcoming, curious, and gentle attitude towards ourselves and our experience. It is the combination of state of mind and attitude that makes mindfulness invaluable.
Studies show that techniques to develop mindfulness enhance a range of positive emotions, emotional stability, and our ability to read social cues. In addition, mindfulness training increases immunological functioning and life expectancy, and reduces depression and chronic pain. When we can accept reality as it is, we become less frustrated by our situation, less fearful it will change, and less depressed about not achieving our fantasies.
We are just starting to appreciate the power that reflection and mindfulness have to facilitate learning. Research by Ellen Langer at Harvard suggests that individuals who apply reflection and mindfulness are able to learn more quickly, problem solve more creatively, and extrapolate their learning more flexibly across settings.3 The more we can tolerate anxiety and discomfort, the more we can take the personal risks we need to learn.
For centuries, spiritual traditions have explored ways to develop reflection and focus. Techniques for cultivating concentration and contemplation are central to the mystical teachings of Judaism, Hinduism, Shamanism, Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity. Buddhist teachers have developed a range of practices for developing mindfulness, often using breathing as an anchor.
Practice: Mindful Breathing
Reflection and focus are fundamental to developing self-awareness, which is the starting point for developing all leadership competencies. Learning everything from communication and emotional intelligence to strategic thinking and team building depends on our ability to examine our behavior and focus our attention.
Strategic Thinking
Once we can self-monitor and breathe mindfully, we open up the possibility of strategic thinking. Strategic thinking is the ability to see the big picture, collect information from disparate sources, and envision the future. Strategic thinking is one of the hardest skills for leaders to develop. It does not require genius, just focus. There are four overlapping elements:
Leaders need to not only manage their own attention, but to capture others’ attention. An inspiring strategic vision does this by aligning us around an energizing set of ideals, and by tapping into our needs, hopes, and dreams.4
“One of the chief imperatives of leadership is to have vision. Vision requires a deep understanding of your business and is inspired by out-of-the-box thinking and imagination. Leaders need to make the time to reflect in peace to let their vision come together.”
– Ramesh Singh, former Management Board Member, UBS Investment Bank
Practice: Eliminating Obstacles to Strategic Thinking
The sheer volume of tasks and transactions we face (and take on) each day is the biggest obstacle to strategic thinking (think back-to-back meetings and never-ending email). The stream of alluring details in front of us pulls our attention and we zoom in. We need to break our attention away and zoom out in order to look ahead and anticipate. Anticipation means predicting the potential consequences of our actions, our impact on others, and changes in the business environment.
When we start to shift our attention and think strategically, we are able to make two critical Mindshifts. We can shift our attention from Personal Accountability (monitoring our own work processes, deadlines, and goals) to Organizational Accountability (measuring the whole organization’s success via profit, efficiency targets, etc.). We are also able to focus less on Task Analysis (figuring out the best way to get things done) and more on Market Analysis (looking at what business to be in and strategies to get there). Making these transitions depends on our refocusing our attention from narrow to wide. We need to open up our minds, leaving aside self-focused questions like, ‘Can I complete this task?’ and moving towards holistic questions like, ‘Where do I want to take my business?’
Emotional Intelligence
Emotional Intelligence (or EI) is the ability to use the information in emotions to make decisions and reach goals. The components of EI are:5
These skills are tremendously important for leaders, and underlie the Mindshift from Self-Awareness (knowing the strengths and weaknesses of your style) to Interpersonal Awareness (managing your emotions and behaviors and their impact on others). Interpersonal Awareness allows you to communicate, negotiate, and influence effectively, as well as build strong relationships and create effective teams.
Practice: Empathy and Emotional Attunement
Adopt the perspective of an anthropologist and study the culture of your organization as if it were an unknown tribe whose language you do not speak. Try to intuit what colleagues are feeling and intending by paying attention to their nonverbal signals. Focus on facial expressions, glances, eye contact, tone of voice, mannerisms, gestures, and posture. With people closer to you, take this a step further by asking them if you are right with your hunches. Though every person’s signals are to some extent unique, the facial and vocal expressions of most feelings are consistent across cultures.6
Notice the impact of your colleagues’ feelings on your own. Tune in to the subtle feelings in your body, particularly in your chest and gut. How do you feel the impact of a colleague’s frustration, expressed in a backhanded compliment or sarcastic comment? Can you feel a twinge in your stomach or do you have some other visceral reaction? Record your observations and hypotheses in a journal. Becoming more attuned in this way provides you with information that allows you to anticipate others’ needs and behavior.
We know that when we are under stress and emotionally raw we are more prone to be reactive, irritable, and insensitive. This is confirmed by research showing that the greater our stress, the less empathy we have.7 So as stress goes up, EI goes down. Conversely, mindfulness training reduces stress and anxiety, and thus is able to counteract the negative effect of stress on EI.8,9
Mindfulness training increases empathy and the ability to read others’ emotions.10 In addition, mindfulness increases compassion and gratitude, along with activity in brain regions associated with positive emotion.11,12 Mindfulness may thus enhance EI via a direct effect on brain function, as well by facilitating our ability to self-monitor and course-correct through greater access to feedback.13,14 When we can accept and ride the waves of our feelings, we can make use of the information contained in emotions rather than avoiding them or overreacting to them.
Mindful Coaching
Combining principles of focus and reflection suggests a model of mindful coaching.
At a macro level, there is a continuous cycle of assessment (seeking understanding) and goal-setting (planning action). This is a common feature of modern coaching and helps clients see pragmatic value because there is progress towards concrete objectives. However, over-focusing on goals and outcomes is a dangerous habit. It can lead clients out of the moment and into frustration and tension where they do not learn. Rather than always checking and worrying about the score, clients need to pay attention to and enjoy the game—in other words, they need to focus on process. Mindful coaching applies intention and attention to this process.
The coach creates a container, a holding environment of mindfulness, within which the client can think, feel, and experience without judgment, and which enables them to gradually reveal and accept themselves.15 The core of this container is silence—an underestimated source in itself, and vital because freedom from interruption and peace of mind are essential for clear and productive thought. The coach also makes the intention to get out of the way by putting aside his or her own ego in the interest of serving the client. This enables active listening where the coach goes beyond what is said to try to understand underlying themes. Focused questions direct the client’s attention toward specific cues inside and around them. These questions shift perspective, challenge assumptions, and open the client up to new possibilities.
“Silence used to make me uncomfortable. Now I welcome it and let it do the heavy lifting. Silence gives my client precious room to reflect. In addition, as I listen from silence and quiet my inner dialogue, I have faith the right questions will emerge. I relax into my body and hold any emotions that come up. I feel into the coaching and trust my gut to gauge what is really going on. I can take more risks and challenge my client. Being fully present with silence gets me to the real issues, to the heart of the matter.”
– Crista Salvatore, Learning & Development, New York Life Insurance Company
In brainstorming, the emphasis is on learning over teaching. The coach is active in providing new ideas, tools, models, and potential solutions. However, the coach is careful not to take over the client’s choice by telling the client what to do. The coach ensures outcomes and results by asking the client to commit to action and execute a plan. The intention needs to come from the client for momentum to continue. The coach helps the client find the motivation to change and the courage to hold themselves accountable.
In addition to Strategic Thinking and EI, Mindful Coaching facilitates the development of a broad range of leadership skills and related Mindshifts. For example:
I find that coaching this way creates more sustainable change than do behavioral methods. One reason is that simply turning mindful attention to our thoughts, feelings, and behavior helps undo self-destructive habits. In addition to raising our awareness, giving ourselves and our symptoms “accepting attention” is healing in itself. Mindful Coaching also helps us reflect on our own process as coaches and manage the uncertainty and ambiguity of our role. Not being the expert and giving up control are anxiety producing and are central challenges for new coaches and leaders learning to coach.16
Linda’s sanity, and my own, depended on my staying mindful during our meetings. When she interrupted herself mid-sentence to check her email, I was tempted to do the same. Instead, I monitored my frustration and observed her without judging. Reflecting back to her what I saw and asking questions about its impact helped her pay greater attention and look at herself with more clarity. Over time, she began internalizing my accepting attention and started to cultivate greater mindfulness to contain her restless energy.
Staying focused and mindful is a tremendous challenge. The exercises are not hard to integrate into our daily routine but the skills take a lifetime of practice. It takes great self-discipline to pull out of our constant swirl of activity and information, and we need a high level of awareness to know when to Mindshift. However, once we sense the power of mindfulness, for both our clients and ourselves, we see there is no higher priority.
This article first appeared in Business Coaching Worldwide (October Issue 2010, Volume 6, Issue 3).
1 Basex, Inc., (2010). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basex, accessed 7/22/2010.
2 R. Charan, S. Drotter, and J. Noel, The Leadership Pipeline: How to Build the Leadership-Powered Company (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001).
3 Ellen J. Langer, The Power of Mindful Learning (New York: Perseus Books, 1997).
4 Warren Bennis, Why Leaders Can’t Lead: The Unconscious Conspiracy Continues (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1997).
5 J. D. Mayer, P. Salovey, and D. R. Caruso, “Emotional Intelligence: New Ability or Eclectic Traits?” American Psychologist 63, no. 6 (2008): 503-17.
6 Paul Eckman, “SIOP 2008 Invited Address: Emotional Skills,” The Industrial-Organizational Psychologist 46 (2008): 21-24.
7 Jon Kabat-Zinn, “The Science of Mindfulness,” Speaking of Faith, NPR, New York, NY. 18 April 2009.
8 Ibid., Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness (New York: Delacorte, 1990).
9 Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy, “Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time,” Harvard Business Review 85 (2007).
10 Daniel Goleman, “Finding Happiness: Cajole Your Brain to Lean to the Left,” New York Times 4 Feb. 2003, New York edition, sec. F: 5.
11 Matthieu Ricard, “Change Your Mind Change Your Brain: The Inner Conditions for Authentic Happiness,” Google Tech Talks. Google Headquarters, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA. 15 Mar. 2007.
12 S. L. Shapiro, G. E. Schwartz, and G. Bonner, “Effects of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction on Medical and Premedical Students,” Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 21, no. 6 (1998): 581-599.
13 R. F. Baumeister and T. F. Heatherton, T. F., “Self-Regulation Failure: An Overview,” Psychological Inquiry 7, no. 1 (1996): 1-15.
14 B. Alan Wallace and Shauna L. Shapiro, “Mental Balance and Well-Being: Building Bridges Between Buddhism and Western Psychology,” American Psychologist 61 (2006): 690-701.
15 D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (New York: Routledge Classics, 2005).
16 David Hosmer, “Cascading Coaching: Building a Model of Peer Development,” OD Practitioner 38, no. 3 (2006): 17-20.
Joshua Ehrlich, PhD, is the founder of the Global Leadership Council www.globalleadershipcouncil.com. He is a leading authority on managing in intense environments and advises CEOs on complex organizational challenges. He is an executive coach, supervisor and accreditor of coaches. Josh is the author of MindShifting: Focus for Performance (Steiner Books)
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.
I have recently experienced some of the gifts offered to coaches worldwide to enable them to develop their discipline. These include practitioner research, international conferences, and research grants. My first column for the year discusses the importance of these gifts and how we can make good use of them.
Practitioner Research and Reflective Practice
What do we really know about how coaching works, exactly how well it works, and when it works best? In essence, not much. Our “knowledge” is based mainly on what coaches say they do, or on what they think makes sense-rather than on observation of what they really do, or on research into coaching outcomes experienced by individuals, teams, and organizations. As a coaching practitioner, it is essential to continually research your own practice, ultimately developing your own professional competence through reflective practice.
David Peterson (2009) suggests simple ways to do this. For example, try different techniques in your coaching, i.e., with alternate clients do a background interview that is only one third of your normal interview; see what happens and take notes on what you observe. Secondly, you can generate a list of experimental ideas for your coaching from reading about new techniques, new types of questions, or new processes. Try one new thing every coaching session and record your findings. Thirdly, you can ask your coaching participants what was the most effective thing you (as coach) did in the session, and why was it helpful.
Also ask what was the least effective thing, and why was it not helpful? Record your feedback, looking for patterns, and substitute new processes for the least effective things. Think about participating in coaching research studies, or finding clients from your own practice to participate in such studies. Most importantly, think critically about and read current coaching research, trying to incorporate findings into your own practice.
The general characteristics of practitioner research are that (Fillery-Travis, 2009):
Coaching Conferences
Coaching in Medicine and Leadership
In late September 2009, I attended and spoke at the second International Harvard Coaching Conference on Coaching in Medicine and Leadership. Coaching has emerged as a competency dedicated to helping individuals grow, develop, and meet personal and professional goals while at the same time building personal and professional capacity and resilience. Although every year coaches are servicing a US$1.5 billion market, the most developed market segment is leadership coaching in organizations-less than 20 percent of professional coaches are from the mental health or medical fields. The Harvard conference was therefore a groundbreaking event, with lectures and workshops by world leaders in coaching and coaching research. There were three tracks: Overcoming the Immunity to Change; Coaching in Leadership-Theory and Practice; and Coaching in Health Care-Research and Application.
ICRF2 London: Measuring Results
In November I participated in the second International Coaching Research Forum (ICRF2) held in London, sponsored by the IES (UK Institute for Employment Studies) and the International Coaching Research Forum (ICRF). ICRF2: Measure for Measure looked specifically at how to design coaching measures and instruments, with the ultimate aim of discovering what makes coaching effective. Researchers from around the world met to discuss three major topic groups: process measures, outcome measures for executive/leadership coaching, and outcome measures for health, wellness, and life coaching. The format for each discussion was:
Critical issues in measurement and methodology were discussed, the biggest concerns relating to:
A final report will be made available on the websites of both the International Coaching Research Forum and COMENSA (Coaches and Mentors of South Africa) early next year. All of the group forums were recorded, and key points from each discussion will be included in the final report.
GCC Rainbow Convention-Cape Town 2010
These recent conferences have implications for all coaches worldwide, and particularly for the work being carried out by the Global Coaching Community (GCC), an international dialogue aimed at furthering the development of coaching. The GCC’s last convention took place in Ireland in July 2008 and produced the momentous Dublin Declaration on Coaching. The declaration was supported by recommendations from the GCC’s ten working groups, and has been endorsed by organizations and individuals representing over 15,000 coaches around the world.
It is now South Africa’s turn to host this pivotal event and help take the dialogue forward, and so the GCC Rainbow Convention will be held in Cape Town during 10-16 October 2010. The convention will showcase the results of pioneering practitioner research being undertaken by “pods” of coaches around South Africa. It will also continue the development work undertaken by the GCC’s ten working groups, as well as host specialist workshops on aspects of coaching practice.
Grants from the Institute of Coaching
Another boost to the professional development of coaching practitioners is an endowment of US$2,000,000 from the Harnisch Foundation to the Institute of Coaching based at Harvard Medical School/McLean Hospital. The Institute is able to translate this generous endowment into grants totaling US$100,000 per year to fund rigorous research into coaching, thereby helping develop the scientific foundation and professional knowledge base of the field.
The Institute offers four types of grant, with deadlines for applications on the first day of February, May, August, and November each year:
Please visit http://www.instituteofcoaching.org/ to learn more about the Institute’s various grants, membership programs, current research, and publications and for information on the recent Harvard Conference. As a Founding Fellow of the Institute of Coaching and a member of its Research Advisory Board, I am keen that all practitioner researchers in coaching are aware of these research grants. It is crucial that we begin to build the body of knowledge on what is working and what still needs work within the discipline of business coaching worldwide.
How Can You Play a Part in the Development of the Field?
Our goal in developing reflective research and enquiry is to make a substantial contribution to the emerging practice of coaching worldwide (Stout Rostron, 2009). Your gift to our emerging discipline is to play a practical part. For example, you can:
Systemic Team Coaching Research Survey
Professor Peter Hawkins, creator of the Seven-Eyed Supervision Model1and founder of the UK Bath Consultancy Group, is currently writing a new book on Systemic Team Coaching to be published by Kogan Page in 2010. He would like this book to best represent what is known and practiced in the field of team coaching. He is asking thought leaders, leading researchers, and senior team coaches to contribute from their experience. All contributions will be fully acknowledged and you will be referenced. Everyone who fills in the questionnaire will also be invited to the book launch in the UK in autumn 2010. Key questions are as follows:
Please email responses to: Professor Peter Hawkins or send to Barrow Castle, Rush Hill, Bath, UK BA2 2QR.
This article first appeared in Business Coaching Worldwide (Feburary Issue 2010, Volume 6, Issue 1).
Fillery-Travis, A. (2009). Practitioner Research Workshop, GCC Rainbow Convention, notes.
Peterson, D. (In press). “Executive Coaching: A Critical Review and Recommendation for Advancing the Practice.” In Handbook of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, edited by S. Zedeck. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
Stout Rostron, S. (2009). Business Coaching Wisdom and Practice: Unlocking the Secrets of Business Coaching. Johannesburg: Knowledge Resources. Available from http://www.kr.co.za/.
Wilkins, N. (2009). “Countdown to the GCC Rainbow Convention!” COMENSAnews, November. Available from http://www.comensa.org.za/.
1Hawkins, P. and Shohet, R. (2007) Supervision in the Helping Professions. United Kingdom: Open University Press.
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).
The U-process is sometimes known as the process of transition, and in the field of coaching this U-process is typically represented in Scharmer’s model of change. In the process of transition, the client can move from anxiety, through happiness, fear, threat, guilt, denial, disillusionment, depression, gradual acceptance, and hostility to moving forward.
The U-process is considered a mid-range change theory with a sense of an emerging future. Scharmer’s process moves the client through different levels of perception and change, with differing levels of action that follow. The three main elements are sensing, presencing, and realizing. These represent the three basic aspects of the U (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Scharmer’s U-Process Model
This process helps the client to work at different levels of perception and change, and allows different levels of action to follow. All three levels are extensions of the learning process. As the coach and client move into the U, sensing is about observing and becoming one with the world; moving to the bottom of the U, presencing is about retreating and reflecting and allowing an inner knowing to emerge; moving out of the U, realizing is about acting swiftly and with a natural flow from the knowledge and understanding that have emerged.
The U-model suggests co-creation between the individual and the collective, i.e., the larger world. It is about the interconnection or integration of the self with the world. At the bottom of the U is the “inner gate” where we drop the baggage of our journey, going through a threshold. The metaphor used here is that of “death of the old self” and “rebirth of the new self”; the client emerges with a different sense of self. On the Web is a lovely dialogue between Wilber and Scharmer where they discuss the seven states and the three movements in this one process (Scharmer, 2003).
Superficial learning and change processes are shorter versions of the U-movement. In using this as a coaching process, the client moves downwards into the base of the U, moving from acting, to thinking, to feeling, to willing. This is to help the client to download with the coach, to let go and discover who they really are, to see from the deepest part of themselves, developing an awareness that is expanded with a shift in intention.
Otto Scharmer (2007), in an executive summary of his new book, Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges, describes the U-process as five movements: co-initiating, co-sensing, presencing, co-creating, and co-evolving. Scharmer describes this as moving “first into intimate connection with the world and to a place of inner knowing that can emerge from within, followed by bringing forth the new, which entails discovering the future by doing.” The following case study demonstrates the five-step process.
Case Study: The Global Convention on Coaching (GCC)
From July 2007 until July 2008, I played a role as Chair of the GCC Working Group, Research Agenda for Development of the Field, and Carol Kauffman took the part of Facilitator. The GCC was originally established to create a collaborative dialogue for all stakeholders in coaching worldwide, with the ultimate aim of professionalizing the industry. Nine initial working groups were formed by the GCC’s Steering Committee to discuss critical issues related to the professionalization of coaching, producing “white papers” on the current realities and possible future scenarios of these issues. These white papers were presented at the GCC’s Dublin convention in July 2008. Using the U-process model, this case study summarizes the working group process of the research agenda, which comprised a 12-month online dialogue, with the addition of monthly telephone conversations.
Figure 2: U-Process Case Study
1. Co-initiation
Co-initiating is about building common intent, stopping and listening to others and to what life calls you to do. In the Working Group for the Research Agenda, the group built common intent by first setting up the group, defining its purpose, and beginning to discuss the dialogue process. It was agreed that the chair and facilitator would invite specific individuals to join the working group, and those members would suggest other individuals who might have a key interest in the research agenda for the field (i.e., the emerging coaching profession). The group began their online dialogue, once all had accepted the invitation and received instructions on how to use the online GCC web forum. It was agreed that there would be three communities working together: the Working Group, the Consultative Body for the Research Agenda, and the Steering Committee, which was responsible for the leadership and management of the other groups.
2. Co-sensing
Observe, Observe, Observe. Go to the places of most potential and listen with your mind and heart wide open. The chair and the facilitator of the working group had to learn to co-facilitate, observing each other’s skill and competence. They had to be willing to listen to each other, noting each other’s style in facilitating an online dialogue. They needed to create the group, and to facilitate the way forward with the group, learning to take constructive criticism and appreciation from each other, guiding the group forward without being prescriptive. Both chair and facilitator agreed to co-chair the process, remaining mentally and emotionally open to each other’s divergent opinions, ways of being, and styles of interpersonal communication, whether working with the group online or by phone.
3. Presencing
Connect to the source of inspiration and will. Go to the place of silence and allow the inner knowing to emerge. Each individual in the process reflected and regularly added their thoughts and feelings to the online forum. Debate, conflict, and agreement emerged—with chair and facilitator taking responsibility to keep the group on track without being prescriptive. The chair and facilitator each had to connect to their own individual source of inspiration and come together as one voice to guide the group.
4. Co-creating
Prototype the new with living examples to explore the future by doing. This entailed harnessing the energy of the working group to draft a current reality document of its online and tele-conference dialogues; this document was revised four times. The group brought in a facilitator for a second consultative body who entered that dialogue at stage 1 (co-initiating), but who, at the same time, entered the working group dialogue at stage 3 (presencing). Trying to move forward with their own working group process, yet move the consultative body from stage 1 to stage 2 (co-initiation to co-sensing), was a complex, parallel process. The chair and facilitator enlisted the help of an editor, Nick Wilkins, to manage the writing process of the white paper during the working group’s co-creation (stage 4).
5. Co-evolving
Embody the new in ecosystems that facilitate seeing and acting from the whole. The final stage of the process was the physical gathering at the Dublin convention. This took place in three stages: pre-convention, convention, and post-convention (post-convention work has just begun). Several months prior to the convention, all nine working groups began to work together online and by telephone to share their own varied stages in the U-process; they learned from each other as they gathered momentum moving toward Dublin, which was to be the culmination of their year-long project. Some groups had lost participants during the 12 months through disagreement; others managed to harness the energy to move through each of the stages together. The three stages were:
This U-process is applicable to large innovation projects where the unfolding takes place over a long time (a year in this instance). The team composition in such projects will change and adapt to some degree after each movement; in the GCC process, the Working Group for the Research Agenda lost and added new members, whereas the Consultative Body was a looser entity with only certain members playing a strong role. This was a process of discovery, exploring the future by doing, thinking, and reflecting. As Scharmer explains, it facilitates an opening via “the tuning of three instruments: the open mind, the open heart, and the open will” (Scharmer, 2007).
At any one time there were three U-process journeys taking place for the research agenda: within the working group, the working group interacting with the consultative body, and the working group interacting with the steering committee.
In Conclusion
Models offer a great sense of structure yet flexibility for the coach practitioner, but remember that simplicity is a prerequisite. In this series, I explore models from an experiential learning premise, as the client always brings his or her experience into the coaching conversation. The client’s experience is underpinned by a range of factors, including gender, race, culture, education, life experience, and personality. In my next article, we will begin to explore the use of four quadrant models.
Note
This article is adapted from the author’s Business Coaching Wisdom and Practice: Unlocking the Secrets of Business Coaching (2009, Johannesburg: Knowledge Resources). Her book Business Coaching International will be published September 2009 by Karnac, London.
This article first appeared in Business Coaching Worldwide (October Issue 2009, Volume 5, Issue 3).
Global Convention on Coaching (GCC). (2008). Dublin Declaration on Coaching Including Appendices. Global Convention on Coaching. Dublin, 22 August. www.gsaec.org/pdf/Dublin_Declaration_Coaching_Appendices.pdf.
Scharmer, C.O. (2003). Mapping the Integral U: A Conversation between Ken Wilber and Otto Scharmer, Denver, CO, 17 September. Dialog on Leadership. www.dialogonleadership.org/interviews/Wilber.shtml.
Scharmer, C.O. (2007). Addressing the Blind Spot of Our Time: An Executive Summary of the New Book by Otto Scharmer: Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges. http://www.presencing.com/presencing-theoryu/theoryu.shtml.
Senge, P., Scharmer, C.O., Jaworski, J., and Flowers, B.S. (2005). Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations, and Society. London: Nicholas Brealey.
Stout Rostron, S. (2009). Business Coaching Wisdom and Practice: Unlocking the Secrets of Business Coaching. Johannesburg: Knowledge Resources.
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). More about Sunny in the WABC coach directory. Contact Sunny.
Today’s senior leaders face high expectations that go beyond being an expert in one primary line of business, principal role, or segment of the organization. In our fast-moving environment of mergers, acquisitions, divestments, and sell-offs, leaders are asked to come up to speed even more quickly as well as influence an increasing number of stakeholders across their organization in order to be successful. Given this climate, how are these leaders faring? And what can coaches do to help?
In 2008, the Institute of Executive Development and the global coaching alliance Alexcel reported results of a year-long market study designed to examine transitions that senior-most leaders (those executives in the top five percent of their organizations) make and to identify what helps them succeed and what causes them to fail. Participants included approximately 150 executives and talent professionals from more than 100 organizations in 12 countries and 21 industries. Participants took an online survey consisting of 18 multiple choice questions, plus a number of deep-dive interviews, specifically on the subject of internal and external transitions, how many failed, and why they failed. Failure was defined as when the leader failed to meet their organization’s criteria for success by the two-year mark. (This did not mean that all leaders who were considered “failing” were fired or moved out of their roles.)
We found that one in three senior executives hired externally failed to meet their organization’s criteria for successful performance within two years. This is consistent with and perhaps even more optimistic than results from some other studies, particularly those that focused on the entire executive population.
What was even more noteworthy was our finding that one in five senior leaders taking on new roles within their existing organization failed. The clear message here is that what makes a leader successful in one role in the organization will not necessarily continue to drive his or her success in the next role. We echo Marshall Goldsmith’s words (and title of his book), “What got them here won’t get them there.” Organizations must ensure that they offer sufficient help to leaders making internal transitions.
Why did so many of the senior-most leaders fail to make successful transitions? The top two reasons cited by organizations we surveyed were lack of interpersonal skills and lack of personal skills. (Note: Each survey respondent could choose to cite more than one cause of executive failure.) Only 15 percent of respondents said leaders within their organization failed due to lack of technical or business skills. The highest cause of failure was leadership skill deficits, reported by 68 percent of organizations. Another 45 percent of respondents reported failure due to leaders’ poor personal skills, including lack of focus and self-management. The implications are clear: obstacles to success in new roles are primarily due to what many organizations consider “soft” skills, i.e., those that focus on the quality and quantity of relationships that leaders craft and maintain.
So what can companies and executive coaches do to help? We gathered information on what companies are doing and what they deemed effective. Online onboarding and meet-and-greets are helpful for external hires, but clearly not sufficient for senior leaders. With leaders new to a company, mentoring programs and informal networks with other executives were the support modalities perceived as most effective. Customized assimilation plans and executive coaching were also helpful.
For internally transitioning leaders, the supports perceived as most effective were executive coaching and the creation of a customized assimilation plan. This speaks to the importance of creating a network of people that will help leaders differentiate the demands and needs of their old role from those of their new role, and develop more senior-level presence as they move through the leadership pipeline.
What does a customized assimilation program look like? Here is an example from my personal case files:
Mark had been with his organization, a Fortune 100 manufacturing division, for 14 years. He was promoted to a corporate vice president role. In this role (his 12th position in the company), he needed to rapidly form relationships with his new stakeholders, many of whom he knew from afar in his plant manager role but with whom he had never worked closely.
First, we reviewed the 360 evaluation generated for his former position. His strengths included his clear ethics, dependability, ability to collaborate with others, and easygoing manner. His primary leadership challenge was his tendency to be too easygoing with employee communication and feedback; we decided that in his new position, he would focus on giving clear, ongoing feedback (and FeedForward1) to his team and challenge himself to adopt a greater sense of urgency about results.
We crafted an assimilation plan that included an “all-hands” meeting with Mark and two levels of his direct reports. Mark organized and prepared to discuss his thoughts around issues including:
We gathered anonymous information from the team, including:
Then we facilitated dialogue between Mark and the team on these areas. My continued role as coach was to help Mark stay aware of his leadership style, leverage his strengths, and navigate around his potential derailers. He created a contact plan to help him identify and reach out to key stakeholders in his new role. We also developed ways for him to hold himself accountable for ongoing FeedForward to his team, boosting both their performance and engagement scores.
Two years later, Mark continues to be successful in his role. Comparing his previous transitions to this one, he credits the plan with saving at least six month’s worth of wasted time, false starts, and “water-cooler talk.” According to Mark, the work on forming key relationships quickly and creating a platform by which these relationships are maintained and deepened was the most valuable benefit of his assimilation program.
In conclusion, as leaders today must manage more frequent and more complex transitions throughout their careers, it is crucial for organizations and their internal and external coaching resources to take clear steps to help these leaders succeed in their new roles. Making sure that they continue to monitor and develop personal and interpersonal skills is absolutely critical to optimizing performance in new roles, even when they have clear track records of success in their former positions.
Alexcel and the Institute of Executive Development will continue studying what makes senior leadership transitions work and what causes them to fail. We welcome dialogue with organizations and internal coaches who are achieving success in this area, as well as those who are struggling to develop more robust programs for their senior leaders.
This article first appeared in Business Coaching Worldwide (October Issue 2009, Volume 5, Issue 3).
1 This process, developed by Marshall Goldsmith, is a quick and proven method for helping successful people be even more successful. The practice of FeedForward requires a disciplined approach to following up with important stakeholders, which research has shown is the key ingredient to successful change. For more about FeedForward, see “Leadership Is a Contact Sport: The ‘Follow-up Factor’ in Management Development” strategy + business, Marshall Goldsmith and Howard Morgan, Fall 2004.
Patricia Wheeler, PhD, is an executive coach who helps senior leaders transition successfully into bigger roles. She is Managing Partner for the Levin Group and Managing Director of Alexcel.
So far in these columns we have discussed mainly methodological issues in research such as identifying your own perspective and engaging your community. While musing this week on where to go next, I found myself faced with a number of my own research challenges and realized that all of them revolved around research ethics. So I thought it was high time we opened up that can of worms!
As practitioners, we all aspire to work ethically with our clients. We make ourselves aware of codes of ethics and breathe a sigh of relief that we have a clear framework to steer us out of some of coaching’s trickier situations! So, as practitioner researchers, is that enough or do we need a separate ethical framework specific to research?
After all, we do a number of similar things as researchers and as coaches—we uncover an individual’s truth through question and challenge, explore meaning through analysis and synthesis, and may even experiment with new behaviors and design alternatives. In short, the initial stages of most coaching models mirror those of the research cycle, and the skills the coach and researcher bring to interventions are very similar. Surely we can use the same ethical framework for research as for coaching!
The answer to my mind is no—we need to go further for a number of reasons. The main one is the care of your participants. When you undertake any research, you are hoping that your participants will give you their time and engagement to provide you with their perspectives, thoughts, and feelings on the research topic. In return, they get the opportunity to have their voice heard. That’s it! Nothing more.
So the balance of “gifts” between researcher and participants is rather one-sided. You are getting a wealth of information and knowledge from your participants; they are giving you their hopes, considerations, and reflections. They are prompting your thinking, shining a light on issues hitherto uncovered, and generally exposing their opinions/thoughts/feelings to your scrutiny and trusting you with it all. Your participants are going to provide you with the building blocks of the entire study. You are simply asking the questions. As a researcher I am left feeling profoundly grateful!
I owe my participants a debt: to take care of what they have given me and what I do with it. I need to make sure that it is kept secure and, when reporting my study, I need to keep my participants’ safety uppermost in my mind. It is not just putting a tick in a box, but a sincere undertaking that acknowledges the debt of gratitude I owe to my participants, placing the burden of care squarely on my shoulders as the researcher.
Poorly run practitioner research can have devastating effects if we do not keep to a tight ethical framework. One veterinary surgeon I knew, interested in the development of diagnostic skills in young practitioners, designed an inquiry that would have resulted in his sharing his opinion of the skills of a small group of four vets with their boss. It would have been interesting to see who would have been the first vet to sue after being dismissed from their post. A quick rugby tackle by his research supervisor (me!) stopped that design going live, but it threw light on how ethical dilemmas emerge as soon as we start looking.
But it is not all bad news—there is a range of research ethical codes available from the major professional bodies. Best practice, such as a clear contract between you and your participants at the beginning, is also out there in the many books on research practice. But we also need to develop good internal ethical awareness, as no standardized code will cover all eventualities.
One rule of thumb that helps inform me is to consider the information given by a participant (in whatever form) as remaining their property. It is not something the researcher can use as he or she sees fit, but is, instead, a prized possession such as a work of art. An artist remains the spiritual owner of his/her art and the collector simply a custodian of the work. Its value comes from who created it. In a similar way, the participants continue to “own” their data and must give their permission for whatever happens to it. This will mean that we need to check back with our participants to ensure that we are correct in what we have heard from them, that they are amenable to their information being included, and that they give us explicit permission when we want to use quotes from them—even when these are unattributed.
This stance also stops us “giving” our data away to others, even fellow researchers, and this is not a bad thing. Data is bespoke to the study within which it was collected—a product of the question, design, methodology, and instrument used. Rarely is it transferable in its raw form. The outputs of the data analysis can be transferable and of general use, but not the raw data itself.
So keep ethically aware and you are not only taking your participants’ gifts to you seriously, but you are taking your own research and work seriously!
This article first appeared in Business Coaching Worldwide (June Issue 2009, Volume 5, Issue 2).
The British Psychological Society code of research ethics.
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.
