On coaching maturity

17 May 202422 November 2024 Martin VogelLeave a comment

This piece was originally published by the Critical Coaching Group in a collection of essays, Coaches Becoming, on what it means to become a mature coach. Also published in Organisations and People, June 2024.

What is the price of Experience? Do men buy it for a song?

Or wisdom for a dance in the street? No, it is bought with the price

Of all that a man hath.

– William Blake, The Four Zoas

I first came to appreciate William Blake’s work as a young man, drawn to his idealistic sentiments expressed in vivid imagery.

Now, in what may be called my maturity, I read his verse anew with the disenchantment of experience.

I recognise the allure of what he calls “the easy thing” – “to talk of patience to the afflicted/To speak the laws of prudence to the homeless wanderer.”

I shudder at my collusions with the glib language of organisations – the promises of wellbeing, social responsibility and inclusion.

Within a society that can’t decently house its people and seems resigned to the resurrection of food banks.

As humans burn the world.

All of human life is here: the wide canvas of executive coaching

16 May 202217 May 2024 Martin Vogel2 Comments

Mate

By Martin Vogel

Book review: Are You Listening? Stories from a Coaching Life, by Jenny Rogers. 2021, Penguin.

Are You Listening? by Jenny Rogers is a collection of stories from her 30 years as a coaching professional. It occupies a similar place in relation to coaching as do, to psychotherapy, Stephen Grosz’s The Examined Life or Irvin Yalom’s Love’s Executioner.

Given that Rogers is a doyenne of the profession, you might expect this book to be a catalogue of triumphant interventions. There are successes, but it’s more nuanced than that. She shares the compromises and failings that are inevitable companions on a coaching journey.

Notes towards practising unknowing in coaching

29 April 202117 May 2024 Martin VogelLeave a comment

By Martin Vogel

Questioning

This is the second of a two-part series on the orientation of unknowing. Part 1 explored what is meant by unknowing. This second part discusses how it might be applied to coaching.

Unknowing can be viewed as a discipline. It is the practice of letting go of what we think we know, opening to freshness and holding ideas lightly. It is hard, because our identities, even our sense of moral worth, are wrapped up in our knowing. As with all disciplines, the more we practice, the more fluent we become.

Most of us have deep knowledge about a few small areas of life. You might call this erudition. Erudition is to be valued – though, even here, it is prudent to hold one’s knowledge open to challenge and revision. But beyond our areas of erudition, our knowledge about everything else tends to be very shallow. So shallow, it is hard to distinguish from ignorance. If we make decisions informed by ignorance, masquerading as knowledge, they can have unfortunate consequences. We might vote in a referendum on an issue we scarcely understand or espouse ways of responding to a novel virus about which (by definition) even scientific experts know very little.

Unknowing is about loosening our attachments to ignorant certainties – bringing, instead, humility and curiosity to the world as we find it. Applied to coaching, it entails relaxing the idea of coaching as solution-focussed and goal-oriented – leaning more towards a view of coaching as a reflective practice, in which coach and coachee explore and make sense together. It can help clients to encounter the world in fresh ways. Paradoxically, by entering a space where the pressure to have an answer is alleviated, the client is more likely to gain clarity about what to do next. What to do next might be to do nothing: to wait to see what emerges, and to be ready to respond.

On getting it wrong

22 December 201829 August 2019 Martin VogelLeave a comment

By Martin Vogel

At its edges, the world of coaching is influenced by memes that originate in new age thinking. This isn’t entirely to be deprecated. Coaching’s porousness to diverse influences helps make it adaptive and less susceptible to the orthodoxy that eventually stifles professions. But occasionally an idea threatens to break through that needs to be stamped on if we are to maintain rigorous foundations for our work.

One such that I have encountered this year is the comforting notion that “you can’t get it wrong”. I think this translates as: “Don’t worry about messing up – there’s no single right way to do something, so just go ahead and imagine that the way you are doing it will meet the exigencies of the situation.”

I have come across this in relation to the practice of mindfulness and with respect to how to practice as a coach or supervisor. Before long, this kind of thinking will be infecting organisations and letting leaders off the hook for all sorts of things. The idea has a beguiling appeal and sounds like it’s in the same terrain as constructs that are helpful to dealing with a complex world. But, in fact, it’s opposed to them. Read More »

Beyond codes of ethics to ethical maturity

13 December 201829 April 2021 Martin VogelLeave a comment

By Martin Vogel

A recent article by Kara Swisher in the New York Times appeared under the headline Who Will Teach Silicon Valley to Be Ethical? Tech companies have been attracting a fair amount of criticism this year over their grasp of ethics. But they’re not alone in finding this area a minefield. The shareholder value view of firms, which has it that their sole purpose is to make a profit, still shapes leadership thinking in most organisations. This infects even those – like the BBC or NHS – that aren’t ostensibly profit focussed but where stripping out cost often crowds out other considerations. Where a reductionist view of purpose prevails, it’s not surprising that questions of ethics may receive scant consideration.

Kara Swisher considers various solutions including companies appointing chief ethics officers, putting in place official systems of ethics or (radical idea) chief executives stepping up to the plate to provide more leadership. She quotes an unnamed ethical consultant who complains that appointing custodians of ethics would be no more than window dressing because “we haven’t even defined ethics yet”.

Running through all of this is an assumption that ethics can be defined to delineate universal principles that clearly determine ethical or unethical behaviour in all eventualities. Coaching has been pursuing this track for some years. Every professional association of coaches has a code of ethics that its members commit to follow. And yet coaches, who are privy to ethical dilemmas more than most in business, must know that ethical choices are highly contingent on the contexts in which they arise. This is the essence of the well-known trolley problem: it’s obviously wrong to kill someone; but what if doing so saves the lives of five others? Read More »

The serious business of playing the Fool

3 December 201822 August 2019 Martin VogelLeave a comment

By Martin Vogel

fool

It’s a shame that Hetty Einzig’s The Future of Coaching is so-called. Its concerns spread much wider than its title implies. It’s a radical and thoughtful book which holds before us the chaotic nuttiness of the world as it is now and asks what kind of leadership should coaching call forth.

Hetty Einzig takes it as axiomatic that the big challenges we humans face demand committed and creative interventions by leaders. Never mind present concerns such as Brexit or Trump, Hetty reminds us that the broader context is that of a trajectory to environmental catastrophe. She has no truck with the notion that coaches should be neutral facilitators of whatever goals their corporate clients might pursue. Nor does she believe leaders should collude with such ideas. Coaches and leaders alike are citizens in wider society as well as servants of the organisations that employ them. It is the legitimate task of all of us to try to influence organisations to play a constructive role in addressing society’s problems.

Looking for senior leaders or coaches who want a fresh approach to their development

22 October 20186 October 2020 Martin VogelLeave a comment

By Martin Vogel

Are you a coach or a leader who needs a reflective space to think creatively about how you work with others? If so, we may be able to help each other. I’ve just started a one-year diploma and I’m offering discounted access to leadership or coaching supervision to people willing to be practice clients.

This is an opportunity to experience a rich and creative space for developing yourself. Your part of the bargain is to show up in a spirit of experimentation and to be prepared to give me feedback on your experience. I’m looking to try out new approaches, in particular to facilitate ways of reflecting that get beyond the constraints of language and cognitive thinking. So there might be, for instance, drawing, imaginative work, mindfulness or reflecting while walking outside. There’ll also be observation in the moment on how our work unfolds and what this might say about your work with other people. You’ll need an appetite to learn in ways that are possibly unfamiliar. The point, as I see it, is to take you beyond the habitual routines of your working life so that you can access aspects of yourself that might sometimes be bracketed out of how you normally approach your work.

I’m taking my diploma with the Coaching Supervision Academy, the top international provider of supervision training. As part of my assessment, I need to work with a number of practice clients over the coming nine months. Although I’ll be trying some new methods and approaches, I’m an experienced professional. I’m an APECS-accredited executive coach who has been practising for 12 years and already provides supervision. For more on my background, please check out my coaching profile and testimonials.

Supervision can be thought of as supporting people who support other people. It grew up as a discipline to help professionals such as psychotherapists, teachers and social workers. Many coaches work with a supervisor to get quality assurance of their work. (I always recommend to prospective coachees that they only work with a coach who is supervised). Applied to leaders, supervision offers a thinking partner who can engage dispassionately with your challenges and help you find new perspectives. Good supervision should help you maintain your energy, or regain it when depleted, and make you feel someone has your back even as you are challenged to think afresh. It’s a connection of heart and intuition as much as of the mind; one that might leave you stirred, but not shaken.

If this sounds like it might interest you, let’s talk. I can offer five one-hour sessions between now and next summer. I’m looking for a mixture of senior executives, coaches and perhaps one small group. I’m open to working both by videoconference and – for those within reach of London – face to face.

If you’re paying your own way, the cost would be £50 (GBP) per hour. If your company is paying, the cost is £100 (GBP) per hour. In addition, VAT is chargeable for those in the EU. There may be some occasional ad hoc additional cost, such as venue hire when a private room is needed for face-to-face work. But, given the aforementioned spirit of experimentation, it may not always be necessary to use a private venue – for instance, if we choose to meet and walk. If you are familiar with costs in the executive coaching market, you will appreciate that this is very good deal.

To find out more, please email supervision@vogelwakefield.com or message me via LinkedIn.

Image courtesy Stewart Baird.

Engage a coach to save humanity from itself

15 June 201822 August 2019 Martin Vogel4 Comments

By Martin Vogel

Humans are a clever species. Look at the world we’ve constructed. The very name homo sapiens describes us as wise. But somehow we’ve come to live in a way that is inimical to our nature and destructive of our wellbeing. The organisations in which we work are part of the problem. They are incapable of maintaining bonds of trust with their employees, and obstruct our efforts to sustain our closest relationships.

This is the thesis of A General Theory of Love by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini and Richard Lannon which attempts to explain the science behind our fundamental need for human connection. Written by three professors of psychiatry, it was published in 2000. In my layman’s reading, its scientific authority has been overtaken by more recent neuroscience. But its date of publication is significant. At the start of a new century, the book aimed to debunk the mythology – whether psychodynamic or behaviourist – which shaped our understanding of emotions through the 20th Century. Insofar as these mythologies remain influential today, A General Theory of Love remains a relevant read. Indeed it seems prescient in its cultural criticism of how Western societies have developed so as to deny our physiological need for attachment, and the social maladies that thereby arise.

When it’s time to finish coaching

24 March 201822 August 2019 Martin VogelLeave a comment

How to work with a coach, part 10

By Martin Vogel

When is it time to finish coaching? And how do you end the relationship elegantly when you feel it’s time to part company with your coach?

Often, decisions about ending are determined in advance. There’s frequently an understanding that the coaching is a finite arrangement. This is partly philosophical: an assumption (not necessarily valid) that a client risks becoming dependent on their coach. Partly, it’s budgetary: the number of sessions is determined by the funds available. Whatever the reason, your coach will likely have a well-rehearsed model for bringing the coaching to closure.

If your coaching isn’t going well

16 March 201822 August 2019 Martin VogelLeave a comment

How to work with a coach, part 9

By Martin Vogel

Sometimes coaching disappoints. But it’s a sign of the determined positivity that grips much of the coaching business that this isn’t well acknowledged.

As Steven Berglas, a psychiatrist turned executive coach noted in 2002, purveyors of coaching have an interest in inviting prospective clients into a story of readily attainable transformation. Coaching contracts are mostly short-term. This is ripe ground for clients forming misguided expectations of a quick fix. Coaches might reinforce this with an emphasis on behavioural change, the linearity of which defies the complexity of human experience. Because coaches mostly hold to a professional ethos of facilitating a neutral process, they can implicitly absolve themselves of responsibility when the product doesn’t deliver.

How do you know when coaching isn’t working? You might find yourself going through the motions: turning up for the sessions but not really engaging with the endeavour. Or you might be engaging wholeheartedly with the sessions but feeling that the process as a whole is not producing the outcomes you had hoped for.

Your work between coaching sessions

9 March 201822 August 2019 Martin Vogel

How to work with a coach, part 8

By Martin Vogel

The work you do between coaching sessions is as important as the work you do when you’re with your coach.

Coaching can be conceived as a staging post for the stuff, in the world beyond the sessions, that the client wants to work on. It’s a safe place to try out different ways of being. Coach and client reflect together on what the client brings and might formulate ideas for action. There may be an opportunity to rehearse in the session. But it’s not like learning a musical instrument, where the pupil practises in private before performing publicly on the stage. For the most part, the client practises on stage as they put the ideas into practice directly in their everyday life.

Working with your coach

5 March 201823 August 2019 Martin Vogel

How to work with a coach, part 7

By Martin Vogel

How should the working relationship with your coach develop? It’s worth thinking about this if you want to get the most out of your coaching. Clients sometimes take a while to realise that it’s not the best strategy to sit back and let coaching happen to them. Coaching is a two-way street and it pays to lean into it.

Martha Stark, a psychotherapist, has described how there are implicitly three possible models at work in professional helping relationships. Which do you imagine yourself to be in as a coachee?

Leading in complexity

11 March 201620 October 2021 Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

busy street

I’m not a great one for introducing theoretical models in my work with clients, however much my practice may be informed by theory. One that I frequently reference, though, is the leader’s framework for decision making devised by David Snowden and Mary Boone. This is the clearest and most usable articulation I know of what it means to lead in complex situations.

Snowden and Boone argue that leaders often come unstuck because they misconstrue the nature of the scenario they are dealing with. Typically, often without realising it, they are informed by an ideology of management that likens organisations to machines. So they fall in with expectations that most problems can be subject to linear solutions of command and control. Unfortunately, they are likely to be putting unreasonable pressure on themselves and, ultimately, setting themselves up for failure.

Reconnecting universities to their public purposes

11 February 201622 August 2019 Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

This is the final post in our series looking at how our counter-consultancy approach meets the needs of higher education institutions. Here we explore how interdisciplinarity and external collaboration can revitalise the public value of universities.

Interdisciplinarity and external partnerships provide a foundation for universities to renew their public value. This is because they grow out of the genuine and distinct strengths of a particular institution and point to how it can make a unique contribution to addressing society’s challenges. But this contribution can be realised only if there is clarity about the institution’s public purposes: the generic ones it shares with other higher education establishments and the distinct one that arise out of its own particular circumstances.

The emergent route to fostering interdisciplinary collaboration in higher education

10 February 201622 August 2019 Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

networking

This is the third in our series looking at how our counter-consultancy approach meets the needs of higher education institutions. Here we explore the complex nature of university cultures and how we use conversation and reflection to mobilise distributed leadership.

Interdisciplinarity can address a university’s need for funds and a distinctive marketing proposition but also the individual academic’s need for compelling research opportunities. If each university has unique research strengths, these can be synthesised into interdisciplinary ventures which pursue approaches to research excellence that can’t be replicated easily elsewhere. This creates compelling reasons for funds, students and academics to gravitate to particular institutions. It counters a view of higher education as a largely undifferentiated, instrumental business with one which construes it as comprising diverse institutions each with intrinsic value and distinctive contributions to make to the world’s knowledge.

Coaching: a vocation for our times

13 February 201522 August 2019 Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

Coaches follow in the tradition of shamans.

Book review: Coaching and Mentoring: A Critical Text, by Simon Western

Simon Western seeks to challenge and expand our view about what constitutes coaching but, in so doing, he also challenges and expands received wisdom on what it means to be a leader in today’s complex and fast-moving organisations.

Coaching is a young practice, scarcely a profession. On the one hand, it has an inferiority complex in relation to other helping professions, particularly psychotherapy from which it takes much of its sense of good practice. On the other, it is rapidly being colonised by big management consultancies and business schools who recognise coaching’s threat to their turf. Talk of codifying what coaching should be through accreditation and even regulation is a sure sign of vested interests attempting to appropriate ground for themselves.

Western’s book, Coaching and Mentoring: A Critical Text, investigates coaching as it is practised rather than how it is conceptualised in the literature. The strength of this approach is that it resists the tendency to reduce and constrain how coaching is defined. Instead, Western celebrates its diversity – from new age influenced life coaching through to corporate coaching interventions with their solutions-focussed processes and returns on investment.

Mindfulness plus narrative awareness equals critique

3 December 201422 August 2019 Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

This is the third and final part in my series on being and doing in coaching. In Part 1, I explained how I draw on mindfulness and narrative awareness in my work. In Part 2, I discussed the symbiotic link between being and doing, and the challenge to bring more of a sense of being to our doing.

Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with the critique of organisations that we have developed here: the idea that organisations could be less toxic places to work and could play a more positive role in addressing society’s problems. I don’t want to rehearse those arguments again but instead look at how they come out of the approach to coaching that I have been describing in this series. If coaching is, as I maintain, a way of facilitating unfamiliarity, it follows that it is potentially disruptive of the received wisdom in organisations – the things that are so taken for granted that it’s otherwise almost impossible to question them. By putting a premium on connecting with our embodied wisdom, our gut instincts and nagging doubts, it creates space to acknowledge the ways in which the things organisations ask of us might make us uneasy.

Where does received wisdom come from? Narrative theory tells us that it is shaped by the dominant culture of the age. In our age, the common sense is defined by neoliberalism: the idea that the market is the natural way to do things and, if we live with the consequences of the market, this will be better for everyone in the long run. More than that – and more pertinent to this conversation – it’s a common sense characterised by hyper-rationality in which the insights that comes from emotion, values and embodied wisdom count for little.

Judging non-judgment

23 October 201422 August 2019 Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

non-judgment day

All through my professional life, I have cultivated the quality of non-judgment. It’s a foundation of my work as a coach. Yet – as my increasingly trenchant views on this blog attest – I also appreciate space in which to exercise judgment and I facilitate others to do the same. Is it possible to value judgment and non-judgment simultaneously? I think so.

Coaching in a messed-up world

1 October 201422 August 2019 Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

The Universe: its future may depend on you

Last night, I attended a stirring call on the coaching profession to wake up and recast its responsibilities in relation to a world that is messed up and in crisis. The call was made by Aboodi Shabi, who one might reasonably describe as a leader of the coaching profession in the UK. Courtesy of a platform with the London Coaching Group, he extemporised on themes I have advocated myself, most recently in my presentation to APECS. But Aboodi made the case with a passion and bluntness that challenged me to stand up for this agenda with much greater clarity. A theme of the evening was how coaching could “come out” as a profession that engages with society’s problems. Aboodi’s message resonated with a good proportion of his audience, although it also provoked fear and dismissal among a vociferous minority.

Vogel Vault

Tag: coaching

On coaching maturity

All of human life is here: the wide canvas of executive coaching

Notes towards practising unknowing in coaching

On getting it wrong

Beyond codes of ethics to ethical maturity

The serious business of playing the Fool

Looking for senior leaders or coaches who want a fresh approach to their development

Engage a coach to save humanity from itself

When it’s time to finish coaching

If your coaching isn’t going well

Your work between coaching sessions

Working with your coach

Leading in complexity

The emergent route to fostering interdisciplinary collaboration in higher education

Coaching: a vocation for our times

Judging non-judgment

Coaching in a messed-up world