Book Review-Coachbook: A Guide to Organizational Coaching Strategies and Practices

After years of study on organizational change, the need for coaching and how organizations are changed through coaching, Coachbook: A Guide to Organizational Coaching Strategies and Practices was a very welcome framework which I can now use to view the various coaching activities that I and others pursue. It provides a language for understanding how all coaching isn’t created the same.

The Need for Coaching

Coaching is the integration of counseling – which is focused on the heart or emotions of a person – and consulting – which is focused on the head and logic of a person. Coaching recognizes that these are not two disconnected systems which operate in isolation, but are instead a set of systems that interact with one another. (See Thinking, Fast and Slow for more on System 1, emotions, and System 2, reason.) Research has shown that this kind of assistance is frequently useful to the bottom line with positive returns on the investment.

It’s no wonder that the coaching process works. It helps people understand how to work with other people. Despite our more technologically-connected world, most employees “live in solitude, working in emotional isolation as performers, decision-makers, and people who must relate their own personal values with those of their organization.” In short, we’re simultaneously more connected and in touch with one another, while at the same time being more relationally disconnected. (See Alone Together for more about the impact of technology on our ability to connect with one another.)

Positive Not Negative

A differentiating factor for coaching is that its use is less about resolving performance problems and is more frequently used to improve performance. Where counseling is frequently focused on addressing problems and mental illness, coaching is about moving towards healthier behaviors, decisions, and aspirations.

In coaching professional athletes, the professional coach is removing performance barriers – like the famous four-minute mile in running. (You can read more about the four-minute mile in The Rise of Superman.) Professional coaches are rarely remediating poor performers. More frequently, they’re enhancing the performance of professionals that are already successful but want to be more successful. (See Peak for more on the use of coaches to improve performance.)

Coaches of professional athletes typically have an appreciation for those they are coaching because they themselves tried to perform in the sport, and either could only do so for a time or never reached the level of performance that their coachee is reaching. As a result, there is a genuine appreciation for the skill that the coachee has developed. A renowned psychologist Carl Rogers (see A Way of Being for a summary of his lifelong work) suggested that people are more likely to change when they have received positive regard, or appreciation.

Types of Coaching

There are three basic types of coaching, each with their own sub-specialties:

• Behavioral Coaching – Focused on immediate behavior, behavioral coaching solves a specific behavioral problem.
  • Engagement – Helping prepare for a difficult or important interaction
  • Empowerment – Preparation for a difficult and important situation
  • Opportunity – Preparation for a major event in one’s life
• Decisional Coaching – Focusing on a specific decision to be addressed, decisional coaching helps the coachee to understand the various aspects of the decision and the options – including options that might not have been visible.
  • Reflective – Deliberations about opinions, assumptions, and beliefs
  • Instrumented – Learning about one’s preferences and strengths through validated instruments
  • Observational – Greater awareness of one’s actions and their impacts
• Aspirational Coaching – Focusing on key beliefs and bringing them more to life in daily actions, aspirational coaching focuses on improvements rather than removing barriers.
  • Spiritual – Connecting with spiritual thinking and becoming more aware of this often-suppressed component of personality
  • Philosophical – Critical evaluation of frames of reference and perspectives, including how these may be self-limiting
  • Ethical – Evaluation of the values and ethics of oneself and others around
  • Career – Specific career coaching about where one’s career could go

Types of Challenges

Part of applying coaching effectively is to match the kind of coaching to the kind of challenge being faced. Applying aspirational coaching to a puzzle results in a mismatch.

• Puzzles – Everyday issues with solvable answers that often come in a single form. There is a “right” answer.
• Problems – Multiple perspectives generate multiple potential solutions – many of which may work with varying degrees of effectiveness.
• Dilemmas – These types are impervious to a definitive solution. This level typically meets the minimum definition of what Horst Riddle would call “wicked” problems. (See Dialogue Mapping for more.)
• Mysteries – These types of challenges are too complex to understand and are ultimately unknowable. That is, they are particularly thorny wicked problems.

Each of these different types of challenges requires a different kind of coaching strategy to solve. You can’t pretend that every challenge that a coachee is facing is the same, or that the same coaching techniques can move them closer to a solution.

Different Values and Perspectives

One of the general objectives of coaching is to help people appreciate others with different values and perspectives than theirs. In every organization, there are many different people, each of them with their own unique set of values and perspectives. (See Who Am I? and The Normal Personality for Reiss’ 16-factor model of values as an example.) By teaching about the differing values and perspectives that others can have, it’s possible to enhance performance.

In my work, I often hear, “I just can’t understand what they were thinking.” Of course, one possible answer is that they weren’t thinking. (See the Rider-Elephant-Path model in The Happiness Hypothesis for more about what happens when we “don’t think.”) The more frequent answer is that the person doesn’t understand that others hold differing values. For instance, I am not a person that highly values status, and thus I don’t drive a fancy car. This is unthinkable to someone who is high on status. (This value has a risk of “must-be-seen-as,” which I covered in my review of The Anatomy of Peace.)

Coaching Skills

Coaching isn’t a single skill or even discipline. Coaching is a collection of interrelated skills that allow someone to enhance the performance of another. There are five key skills that Coachbook identifies:

• Freeing Communication – This is active listening as discussed in Parent Effectiveness Training and Motivational Interviewing.
• Contextual Knowing – Helping match the theory and model of operation to the situation. (See the implications of context on knowledge in review of The New Edge in Knowledge.)
• Feeling through Action – Helping the coachee act on their feelings.
• Reflective Inquiry – Reviewing the inferences that the client has made to reach their perspective. (See Chris Argyris’ Ladder of inference in my review of Choice Theory.)
• Coaching Leadership – The keys are for the coach themselves to always be learning, to walk with the coachee through their risks, and remember that coaches are servants. (See Servant Leadership for more on being a servant leader.)

While these aren’t an exhaustive set of skills that a coach should have, it’s a good start. If you’re interested in more skills, consider that the skills match for a therapist is very high, so you may find skills like those discussed in The Heart and Soul of Change.

Performance – Alone and Together

We often use training to enhance performance. In fact, most performance enhancement groups inside of organizations are called training departments. However, there are really two radically different kinds of training that these organizations deliver.

The first individual, performance-focused training is technical training. That is, it’s training that helps individual contributors be more effective at their jobs. This training is essential for individual contributors who need to develop sufficient skill to complete their work. However, this individual technical training isn’t enough when it’s necessary to coordinate activities between multiple people.

When working on the performance problems of teams, the solution isn’t technical training. The solution is communication and collaboration training. The performance of teams is highly dependent on the ability of the team to work efficiently with one another – and that requires a different kind of training.

Coaches provide communication and collaboration assistance – if not direct training – in the service of improving overall group performance.

Lifecycle of a Team

There’s a classic model for the progression of teams which goes like this:

• Forming – When the team is established and people are learning what the team is about.
• Storming – The phase where the team develops its customs and norms.
• Norming – Stabilization and deepening of relationships as the group begins to know what to expect from one another.
• Performing – The output phase of the group where productivity is at its peak.
• Adjourning – The phase where the group is disbanding and returning to their other roles or moving on to the next team.

Coaches can help organizations develop effective teams by helping the teams to get set up on the right path from the very beginning. After all, Richard Hackman in Collaborative Intelligence estimates that 60 percent of a group’s ultimate performance is established in the preparation and forming of the group.

Meeting Types

There are, according to Coachbook, four kinds of meetings:

• Information Dissemination Meetings – Meetings designed to inform and only lightly accept feedback.
• Conflict Management Meetings – Opportunities to “clear the air” and allow everyone to be heard and share their respective positions to diffuse potentially explosive conflict.
• Problem Solving Meetings – Focused on the resolution of some sort of challenge, these meetings have a specific goal of solving a specific problem.
• Decision Making Meetings – When a decision must be made, often decision-making meetings are called so that everyone can participate in the decision process – and can commit to executing the decision after the meeting.

No matter what kind of meeting you’re holding, The Four Disciplines of Execution has approaches to be effective.

Reframing

One of the most powerful things that a coach can do is to help a coachee to reframe their situation. As Epictetus said, “it’s not the things themselves which trouble us, but the opinions that we have about these things.” That is, much of what we make of something is how we walk up Chris Argyris’ ladder of inference. It’s about how we interpret things more than what the things themselves are.

We all suffer from the fundamental attribution error – that is, we tend to see our negative behavior as the result of our circumstances, and other people’s negative behavior as a result of their character. (See The Advantage for more on fundamental attribution error.) A coach can help the situation by creating an awareness that it may not be the character of the person that is the problem, it may be their circumstances. In doing so, it’s possible to develop empathy and reduce anger or frustration. The result is often a more productive and healthy relationship.

Dualism and Relativism

Often, we hear that people are concrete thinkers or that they believe only in black or white. We hear that they miss the subtly of gray. This is an expression of dualism – that is, either-or thinking. Dualism may be sometimes portrayed as a bad thing; in truth, the clarity of dualism makes decisions easier and promotes action – but it does so at the expense of understanding the nuances of the situation.

Relativism allows us to float above the fray and answer with, “it depends.” This may improve interpersonal relations and reduce conflict in the short term; however, it has its own set of drawbacks. Folks who are focused on relativism tend to be unable to move things forward. They spend so much time in the nuances that they forget what they were initially working on.

The trick in coaching isn’t to rely on one or the other strategy – to push folks one way or the other. Instead, the goal should be to balance dualism with its rapid action and relativism with its desire to seek into the nuances.

You Are Unique, but Not Alone

In the end, good coaching reassures you that you’re not alone. It reassures you that you’re like others while simultaneously helping you to recognize your own unique value. It’s possible to get this point on your own, like Carl Rogers expresses in A Way of Being; however, it’s easier and better with a coach.

If you’ve looked for a good coach and couldn’t find what you were looking for – or you are a coach and you’re confused when your coaching clients don’t get the value out of your services – you’re not alone. Perhaps it’s time to add Coachbook to your repertoire so you know how to hire the coach you need – or, as a coach, how to better help your clients.

Book Review-A Way of Being

I started 2017 off with my review of Motivational Interviewing, which serves as a structure for how to communicate with those who are struggling to help them be more successful. It’s foundationally based on active listening, which is attributed to Thomas Gordon in Parent Effectiveness Training. The other foundation of motivational interviewing is the work of Carl Rogers, so I decided to look into A Way of Being, one of his final works. It wasn’t a single-threaded thought expressed across the pages of a book. Instead it was a collection of essays, presentations, and papers that together form a sense for this great psychologist who urged us to listen and truly hear people as they speak.

Psychology the Profession

I have both a deep respect for psychology and an uneasiness about how it’s been used over the years. I’ve seen, through the works of others and personally, how it can be misused. (See House of Cards, The Cult of Psychology Testing, and Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology for some of the underbelly of this profession.) Rogers was present at the formation of psychology as a profession. He was the president of the American Psychological Association in 1947 and was also aware of the problems with creating any profession.

Rogers acknowledged that credentials didn’t completely separate the good psychologists from the bad ones – or those who shouldn’t be licensed. He recognized that non-credentialed laypersons were doing more good than some of the credentialed psychologists of his day. He also acknowledged that the key challenge with codifying something into a profession is the fact that in doing so you necessarily retard the growth of the practice of the profession. Credentialing relies upon agreement on the skills and beliefs that a credentialed person should have, and that necessarily must lag the exploration at the edges of the profession.

However, the perspective is one of awareness, as he could see the mind-expanding properties of education and the mind-shrinking properties of traditional therapy. Education expanded the boundaries of the mind, where therapy typically shrank the number of options.

Really Listening

It was in the 1970s when Gordon wrote Parent Effectiveness Training and spoke of active listening. As radical as this was for its time, Rogers had been gradually refining an approach of person-centered therapy, where listening to what the client was really saying was core. He had realized that when someone was in a crisis what they often needed most was for someone to understand them. They needed someone to connect with them through language and words. They needed to be heard.

This is the core of active listening – reflecting what the other person says in a way that helps them know that they were heard and understood. It’s in that way that you connect with them and help them know that they’re not alone.

Separateness

In person-centered therapy, you intentionally connect with someone to understand their world without accepting it as your own. By allowing the other person to have their opinions without trying to persuade them of something different, you both recognize where they are as well as accept that their answer is not the only answer. (See How to Be an Adult in Relationships for more on allowing.) There is both acceptance of the other person and boundaries between their reality and your reality. (See Boundaries for more on boundaries, and Choice Theory for more on inner world realities.) Rogers deeply believed in the right for others to have their views – even if they contradicted his own.

Outside Looking In

One of the comments that caught my attention was, “In my younger years, although I was not a hero-worshiper, I definitely looked up to a number of men whom I felt were ‘real psychologists,’ whereas I existed on a poorly accepted fringe.” I think the reason this comment was so interesting was because I believe that we all have experienced this belief that we’re on the outside, or that we’re not doing the “real work” of the profession. It’s refreshing to know that some of the men who defined their professions have felt like they too were on the outside once.

It’s comforting that everyone feels like they’re on the outside looking in at what others are doing, which seems to be more impactful or more relevant to the profession. For me, it was learning to do software development and considering those professionals creating compilers and new languages. I felt like I didn’t understand. Later in my career, it was those folks who were doing agile development or learning patterns before I had time to learn and use these techniques.

As I spent more time in the industry, I realized that there is an ugliness that doesn’t show from the outside. I’ve seen how projects that were trumpeted as winners never accomplished their goals. However, the press coverage was good.

Wanting but Not Expecting

Rogers continues later: “Writing is my way of communicating with a world to which, in a very real sense, I feel I do not quite belong. I wish very much to be understood, but I don’t expect to be,” after relating that psychologists aren’t interested in new ideas – in ideas that challenge the status quo. It’s easier to accept that we have the answers rather than question whether we do or don’t.

Inherent in people – including Rogers, you, and I – is that we want to be understood. As the father of person-centered therapy, he knew this completely. He desired to be fully understood and at some level knew, because of his intelligence and his different view of the world, that he wouldn’t be. He chose to write his ideas, to give him time to optimize their clarity and to articulate the dimensions of his thoughts.

However, no matter how much he crafted his prose, he never expected to be fully understood. He longed for people of his era to understand his message and simultaneously didn’t expect that this was possible. At some level, this feels like a lonely place. He’s the misunderstood artist. He’s the genius that no one gets.

The people that I respect the most are people who feel a bit like misfits. They have a message burning inside of them, but they feel as if they may not be able to get the message through to a world that needs it. I feel this way at times. I identify with the thought that there are parts of my experience that are difficult, if not impossible, to relate to others.

We Have a Choice

The debates of Roger’s day reverberated through social consciousness and are still felt today. Skinner and some of his colleagues believed that man has no choices, that humans are a result of their genetics and environments, and therefore don’t have the choice in how they act. Everything is preprogrammed and running like a large clock down until the end. This, however, denies free will and the ability for us to make our own choices and alter the course of our lives. If you’re driven by the desire to help people, thinking that you’re helpless to influence your goal isn’t motivating.

The repercussions of the disagreement between Skinner and Rogers can be felt today. Dweck had to study and write about the idea of a fixed vs. a growth mindset. (See Mindset for more.) We read of the different ways that people see time in The Time Paradox. Depending upon your frame of reference, we’re either prisoners traveling in the train of time, or we’re conductors of the train guiding our own destinies. Glasser struggles for acceptance of his Choice Theory because we’re so caught up in controlling others by controlling their experiences.

Ultimately, the growth of Motivational Interviewing and other techniques that can be helpful to others are proof that we do have a choice in how we act and react. I suppose the counter-argument is that it’s hard, as evidenced by John Kotter’s often-quoted responses about most organizational change initiatives failing.

Quenching of Desires

Maslow wasn’t wrong when he expressed his hierarchy of needs, but he wasn’t entirely right either. We all have basic needs that we need met. We start with physiological needs like air, water, and food, and move up the hierarchy to self-actualization. Where he wasn’t quite right is that we don’t work on the lower level to the exclusion of the higher level. He said that we work on it to sufficiency before proceeding, but that misses the fundamental element of time. We satiate or quench our desires, but we never fully put them out.

When hunger rears its head, it can block or delay higher pursuits; but sometimes we can delay our hunger to obtain our higher-level goals. We quench our thirst for water for a while. It takes mental energy to pursue higher goals while our lower needs are not fully met, while at the same time we know that our lower-level needs may never be completely met.

Degeneration and Generation

Entropy says that the universe is a clock that is slowly winding down. The complex order of things is being disrupted by the continual decline and deterioration of things. However, on the opposite side of the fence, we know that stars convert less complex atoms into more complex – or at least heavier – atoms. We know that there are forces that are converting single-celled organisms into multi-celled organisms. There is generation as well as degeneration happening at the same time.

Bohm (see On Dialogue) described the growth of a tree from an acorn as the emergence of the tree through the aperture of the acorn. It would be silly to say that the tree was inside the acorn. The tree is much more voluminous and has a much higher mass. However, when considered as the opening through which the tree emerges, one can see that the tree isn’t inside the acorn – but the acorn is the way the tree comes into being.

The constant ebb and flow of generation and deterioration means that there is change. People can and do change. They have the capacity to tear down old patterns of behavior and create new ones where the old ones were, like a forest that sprouts up new life where a fire has occurred.

The Demands on the Therapist

Another one of Roger’s quotes that is intriguing is, “As I have considered this evidence and also my own experience in the training of therapists, I come to the somewhat uncomfortable conclusion that the more psychologically mature and integrated the therapist is, the more helpful is the relationship that he or she provides. This puts a heavy demand on the therapist as a person.” In other words, one has to be very centered and mentally healthy themselves to withstand the buffeting by those that they seek to support. They must be open to the inner turmoil that exists in the worlds of their patients while not losing themselves.

I often think about the scene from The Matrix where Nero no longer dodges the bullets. He stops them, investigates one, then drops it. This is powerful. The ability to see the “slings and arrows” fired your way while not reacting to them is something Buddhists train extensively for.

While neither you nor I are likely to be therapists, A Way of Being can help us understand what it is like to be a fellow, supportive human being.