Developing Coaching In Organisations: How to Use the Principle Instruments (original) (raw)

Coaching as Dialogue: creating Spaces for (mis)understandings

This paper considers dialogue as the central motif of coaching. Taking a social constructionists perspective it proposes that dialogue is the flow of meaning between human beings as they interact. Dialogue is contrasted to the practice of monologue. In monologue there is "talking at" rather than "talking with". This paper contrasts the practices of a "coachexpert" who specializes in "aboutness" talk with a "coach-custodian" who specialises in within-ness talk. The suggestion is that only in the latter is a coach approaching their practice from the stance that a coachee has capacity to find their own solutions. The essential difference is that the coach-expert focuses on the situation/world while the coach-custodian focuses on the coachee as meaning-maker of their own situation/experience. As Director of Education, Dr Hilary Armstrong contributes to all the activities of the Institute. She oversees curriculum design, training and research as well as the global Community of Practice. She coaches senior executives and their teams and facilitates coach-training programs both externally and in organisations to build and sustain a coaching culture.

Enhancing Coaching Outcomes with Powerful Questions: A Review of the Research Evidence.

IJCRT, 2023

Coaching is becoming increasingly popular in a variety of settings, including personal development, career advancement, and leadership development. One of the most powerful tools that coaches have at their disposal is the use of powerful questions. This paper reviews the research evidence on how the use of powerful questions can enhance coaching outcomes. The findings suggest that powerful questions can help coaches establish rapport with clients, increase clients' self-awareness, improve clients' problem-solving abilities, and facilitate clients' goal-setting and action planning. Furthermore, the paper discusses some of the limitations and challenges of using powerful questions in coaching and provides recommendations for future research

Coaching shouldn't be non-directive – or even directive: really responding to needs

Development and Learning in Organizations, 2008

any articles about coaching posit particular stances about the coach's role. Some see it as a non-directive activity. The client (learner) is encouraged to talk about issues and to find their own solutions to problems via a dialogue with the coach. Many of these approaches are based on models of non-directive counseling. An alternative model is that the coach is there to tell the person how to improve. Sport is used as the analogy and such organizational coaches imagine that sports coaches spend their time telling the player how to play. (The best sports coaches are usually much more subtleand we can come on to that later.) Many managers take their coaching role to mean telling a person how, for instance, to make a presentation or manage a project. They are not likely to articulate their style as directive but non-directive coaches are likely to see this approach as being too directive.

Using Clean Language to explore the subjectivity of coachees’ experience and outcomes

International Coaching Psychology Review, 2015

Objectives: This paper aims to contribute methodologically and substantively to understanding how coachees experience and evaluate coaching. First, we explore the use of ‘Clean Language’ as a phenomenological approach to coaching research, including the eliciting and analysing of data into findings and insights for coaches and coach trainers (Tosey et al., 2014, p.630). Second, we explore the nature of events, effects, evaluations and outcomes reported by coachees after a single coaching session. Design: Three coaches accredited in the same coaching methodology each delivered a single session to two randomly allocated coachees. The coachees were subsequently interviewed twice using Clean Language, in person two days after the coaching and by telephone two weeks later. Methodology: The transcribed follow-up interviews were analysed by an expert in Clean Language (the second author), using a form of thematic analysis within a realist/essentialist paradigm (Braun & Clarke, 2006, p.85). Findings: The interviews elicited detailed information on many aspects of coaching without the interviewer introducing any topics. Coachees’ events, effects and evaluations happened during the coaching session, between that session and the first interview, and during the two weeks between the first and second interviews. Coachees emphasised coaches’ style of repeating back, pacing, setting goals and questioning, maintaining the focus of the session, confronting and challenging, as well as their responsiveness (or lack of it). Increased self-awareness was mentioned by all coachees. Outcomes occurring after the session were maintained two weeks later, at which time new outcomes were also reported. Conclusions: Clean Language Interviewing supplements and extends existing methods of phenomenological interviewing and data coding. The study yielded nuanced findings on the coach behaviours that led coachees to give favourable versus unfavourable evaluations, with implications for coaching psychologists with regard in particular to coaches’ ability to calibrate and respond to coachees’ ongoing evaluation of the coaching, the pace of the session and how the timing of coachees’ feedback affects the findings.

Coachee-learning – a Results-based Method for Assessing Coaches

2017

The present paper follows on from the Acuity paper of 2016. Coach interventions are reported that create learning experiences in the coachee. The rationale for the selection of the interventions is based upon: 1) observed levels of coachee’s psychological states and, 2) coachee-learning as expressed by coachee-language (using the REPROCess model), where psychological shift is classified according to the model. Examples link separate coach interventions to specific learning and the perceived level of state-change (as determined by observations of the coachee). The methods here provide a means of training advanced coaches and also, assessment of coaches based on coachee-change, rather than present-day, skills-observation of coaches alone. This paper suggests that further efforts towards the assessment of coaches, based upon what is achieved in the coachee, should be fruitful.

Good question: exploring the experiences of generating questions in coaching

International journal of evidence based coaching and mentoring, 2015

This research uses heuristic inquiry to provide insight into experiences of generating questions in coaching. Eight experienced coaches, recruited as co-researchers, shared their experiences of generating coaching questions via post-coaching reflections and conversational interviews. Thematic analysis of the data identified that coaches noticed a wide range of elements when forming questions. Questions frequently ‘pop’ into the heads of coaches, accompanied by somatic sensations. When asking questions, coaches used prefacing statements for their own or their client’s benefit. Inner dialogue was experienced, often in the form of meta-questioning. This research highlighted three paradoxes that coaches tried to balance while enquiring of their clients. Suggestions for future research are also proposed.

Evidence of competency: Exploring coach, coachee and expert evaluations of coaching

Competency-based coach training and assessment implies that coaching skills andeffectiveness are closely related. But who is best placed to determine 'effectiveness’? While there are some studies comparing coach and coachee evaluations of coaching, none compare a coachee’s evaluation with a coach trainer-assessor’s rating of the coach’s competency in the same encounter. Neither are there studies using coach, coachee and assessor triads. This paper reports on research that examined how closely the evaluations of coachees, expert-assessors and coaches correspond. The research used a novel multi-method approach to triangulation including Clean Language interviewing (CLI) to explore coachees’ experience and evaluation of coaching. Assessor and coachee evaluations of the same coaching session were often at variance, both in terms of descriptive evaluations and numerical ratings. This suggests that compliance — or not — to a coaching methodology does not necessarily guarantee coachee satisfaction. While coach and coachee ratings showed no clear differences, in every triad coaches rated their own coaching considerably better than did the assessor. Practical implications include the need for multiple sources of evidence to establish coach effectiveness and certification standards, the need for coaches to develop calibration skills so they can be more responsive to the coachees’ in-session evaluations, and the usefulness of CLI together with established tools in evaluation research. Keywords: coach competency assessment, evaluation research, coach effectiveness, Clean Language, Meta-Coaching, triangulation, calibration.