Tag: coaching

Your first session with a coach

Martin Vogel

How to work with a coach, part 6

By Martin Vogel

6 iStock_000003102856Small

When you begin work with a coach, the first session can have a significant influence on the how the coaching programme as a whole plays out. It is the coach’s responsibility to facilitate a constructive session. But, for a client, it can by useful to understand the potential dynamics of your first session. This can help you both to evaluate how your coach is doing and to optimise your contribution to making the coaching a success.

For many coaches, their main objective in the first session is to establish rapport with the client and the foundation of a relationship based on mutual trust and respect. You might be forgiven for bringing a little scepticism to such aspirations. Is there any kind of professional who wouldn’t claim to aspire to trust and rapport with their clients? Coaching is different, though. Professions such as lawyers, doctors, architects even many kinds of therapist, are trading on the expertise that they can apply to fixing a client’s problem. This implies a degree of inherent disrespect for their clients – that is to say, a conviction that the client lacks resources to address their issue. Coaches’ expertise is not applied to solving a client’s problem but to helping the client find their own strategy or solution to whatever challenge they face. In short, they trust the client’s resourcefulness, the client’s expertise in their own situation.

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How should executive coaches respond when the role of business in society is contested?

Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

Indignant, in any language.
Indignant, in any language.

I’m looking forward to the APECS symposium on the future for executive coaching on 18th June. As part of a group working on the social and business context for coaching, I’ve submitted a discussion paper. I found it a useful opportunity to pull together the themes I’ve been developing at this blog over the past few years. I’ve been receiving a number of requests to access the paper even ahead of the symposium, so I’m posting it here with the following caveat: my thinking on this is a work in progress rather than my last word. Feedback, critical or otherwise, most welcome.

Anglo-Saxon capitalism is experiencing a shift in the socio-economic paradigm by which we organise ourselves. In the period after the Second World War, a consensus was established around social democracy, with its emphasis on welfare, corporatism and mitigating inequality. As this became dysfunctional, it was replaced by a consensus around free markets, managerialism and shareholder value which, itself, is now being called into question by systemic failure. What replaces it will be contested. It could be a more benign form of capitalism in which organisations accept responsibility for greater stewardship of the public realm or it could be something much closer to fascism or something else again. What role, if any, should coaches play in helping executives both to recognise the shift and to play a role in shaping a constructive outcome?

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The limits of leadership

Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

Mandela: too exceptional to be a leadership role model?
Mandela: too exceptional to be a leadership role model?

It may seem perverse in the week that we have commemorated the impact on the world of one man, Nelson Mandela, but I feel the need to cast a sceptical look at our obsession with leadership.

We live in an age which has made a fetish of leaders. As you squeeze into a rush hour Tube train, consider that probably 50 per cent of the people packed around you consider themselves to be on some kind of leadership mission at work. The other half are most likely being harangued by their organisations to step up more forcefully to the leadership plate.

Like the self-help books that offer the promise that you can achieve whatever you dream, the idea of leadership holds out the possibility that there’s no problem in organisations that can’t be resolved by a visionary and driven individual. Yet we’re regaled routinely with stories of mediocrity, organisational failure and leadership shortcomings. Ours is a tired post-industrial culture, in which the complexity of organisations and the myopia of short-term perspectives conspire to frustrate the realisation of visionary outcomes. The veneration of Mandela is testimony to the fact that, as a leadership role model, he was exceptional.

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Organisations need outsiders to challenge their dysfunctional narratives

Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

Groupthink is rarely healthy
Groupthink is rarely healthy

I’ve been reconnecting with my work on narratives in coaching for a seminar I held this week for a City law firm. I was struck by how the prism of narratives helps us understand the enduring power of organisational cultures that foster corporate scandals – and by the questions this raises for our ethical orientation as coaches.

The problem of dysfunctional organisational cultures just won’t go away. Dysfunction is such an anodyne word, it barely scratches the surface of the harm that is wrought by self-serving organisational cultures. This week we heard how a cover-up at the Care Quality Commission of its own failings in inspecting a hospital in Barrow contributed to the needless deaths of at least eight mothers and babies. An organisation that exists to protect the public interest in health care put protecting its own reputation above the safety of patients.

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The counter-intuitive way to achieve results

Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

Happily

In a previous article, I discussed how personal development occurs through connecting “the doing self” and “the being self”. Here I’m going to look at some of the interesting things that happen when we bring the being self into the equation. We often think of coaching as concerning the task-focussed, doing self that wants to bring about change. Paying attention to the being self actually disrupts the doing self’s action orientation by creating a pause for reflection.

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Agreeing terms with your coach

Martin Vogel

How to work with a coach, part 5

By Martin Vogel

The price is right.

If you have been following the guidelines in earlier posts in this series, you should have been able to find one or two coaches with whom you would be confident to work. But what should you be paying for their services?

The price of coaching is a bit of a vexed issue. At first glance, there is not much transparency of pricing. Rather than post their rate on their websites, many coaches prefer you to ask. If you do this a few times, you’ll find that prices for coaching vary a great deal. You can pay anything from £50 per hour for a life coach working in your local neighbourhood to a four-figure sum for an executive coach working in large corporations.

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Jimmy Savile and tacit knowledge: what the past can teach us about the present

Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

savile

The Jimmy Savile scandal is a textbook example of wilful blindness. It viscerally underlines the necessity for leaders to  free up tacit knowledge in their organisations.

The BBC is not alone in facing questions about how it allowed a predatory paedophile to conduct a career of child sexual abuse stretching over decades – apparently to the knowledge of colleagues around him. The NHS, the police, sundry care homes and approved schools among others also have to account for apparent failures in their duty of care. But the BBC holds a special responsibility, having provided the platform upon which Savile built his celebrity as a family entertainer and sustained his powerful influence over vulnerable people. Such is (or was) the trust in the BBC that the halo effect it conferred over Savile possibly encouraged others to drop their guard.

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Story matters – how narrative awareness assists coaching

Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

Coaches can learn from exploring how narratives unfold
Coaches can learn from exploring how narratives unfold

The findings of my academic research into the use of narrative in coaching have been published by the International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring. I interviewed six coaches whose approach is informed by a sensitivity to stories.

The project was an opportunity for me to take further my life-long interest in narrative. My background to this was as a journalist who naturally makes sense of things through shaping events and information into stories. When I first experienced coaching, I was drawn to becoming a practitioner because I noticed an affinity with my earlier career as a reporter – asking challenging and open questions, cutting to the chase, synthesising and summarising on the fly. While my approach has changed since then, I realised that this story-driven frame of reference was still influencing my style as a coach, even though I wasn’t consciously nor explicitly make it a part of my coaching model. So I decided to use my research project to bring some rigour to my belief in the relevance of narrative to coaching.

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Meeting a prospective coach

Martin Vogel2 Comments

How to work with a coach, part 4

By Martin Vogel

Meeting
What can you glean from first impressions?

Before you work with a coach, you should aim to meet two or three before deciding which to appoint. In part 3 of this series, I argued that you should never be choosing from a field of one.

When it comes to the meeting, your main purpose is to establish whether there is the potential for a good working connection between you both. At one level, this is a job interview and you are the recruiter. There is a certain amount that you have to ascertain in order to make an informed decision. You have to be clear in advance what information you need to get out of the meeting.

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Looking for coaches who work with stories

Martin Vogel6 Comments

By Martin Vogel

What’s the story?

Are you a coach whose practice draws on a narrative perspective, or explores how clients make and tell themselves stories? If so, can you help with my research project?

I’m doing a Masters dissertation on how an awareness of stories can help clients. I want to talk to coaches who work with a narrative perspective. I’d particularly like to hear from you if your approach resonates at all with what I describe below.

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How do you find a coach?

Martin Vogel

How to work with a coach, part 3

By Martin Vogel

Are you looking in the right place?

Finding a coach is harder than finding a doctor, lawyer or most other kinds of professional service. Coaching is a fast growing profession, but strangely invisible and not clearly defined to its market. People often reach a coach through word of mouth; but chances are you won’t know many people who have experienced working with a coach. Alternatively, you might pick up a flyer for a coach who works in your neighbourhood; but how do you know if this person is the real deal or a quack?
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Why coaching works

Martin Vogel

By Martin Vogel

Coaching reaches parts of the brain other approaches don't
Coaching reaches parts of the brain other approaches don’t

During these past three months, I’ve resumed my Masters studies in coaching – which partly accounts for the lack of posts here.  Aside from earning a living and maintaining family life, most of my spare capacity has been absorbed by keeping across the reading.  So it’s high time to put the studies aside and renew my acquaintance with my blog.

One of the things that strikes me is how my attitude to coaching has subtly shifted since I was last here.  I’ve always paid a lot of attention in coaching to my clients’ conscious sense of self.  I often tend to explore people’s values and aspirations, and what it would take to achieve better alignment with one’s values.  What this often flushes out is that we tend to hold a range of values that may contradict each other – such as the perennial tension between work and personal life.

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What do you want from coaching?

Martin Vogel1 Comment

How to work with a coach, part 2

By Martin Vogel

Understand your needs

In the first part of this series, we looked at what coaching is and in what circumstances it might make sense to turn to a coach.  This post is about how to work out what you want from coaching.

I’m not thinking here specifically about your goals for coaching, although this is a part of it.  It’s more about how you like to learn and develop and what kind of coaching experience would best suit you.

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Why use a coach?

Martin Vogel

How to work with a coach, part 1

By Martin Vogel

Need space to think?
Need space to think?

Coaching is a young profession and not well understood.  The barriers to entry are low and the standards and methodologies variable.  No surprise, then, that I find that people who approach me for coaching often have little idea what to expect.

So this is the first of a series of posts for people who are thinking of working with a coach.  It will try to shed light on what coaching is and how to use a coach.  Among other things, we’ll look at criteria to use when choosing a coach and how to get the best out of coaching once you begin.  But we’ll start with exploring how coaching can help you and when it might benefit you to work with a coach.

Let’s try first of all to pin down what coaching is – a surprisingly difficult question to answer.  If you have explored coaching at all, you will have found that no-one ever seems to call themselves simply a coach.  There are life coaches and executive coaches, NLP coaches, ontological coaches, co-active coaches, performance coaches, wellbeing coaches, fertility coaches.  I could go on.  I don’t intend to get into the distinctions in approach between the various methodologies or niches within the profession.  Having explored a variety of philosophical traditions in coaching, I can see that they all offer a certain wisdom.  I’m more interested here in some of the common factors which underlie coaching, whatever tradition in which it’s rooted.  The reason for this is that, for prospective clients, the label given to a particular kind of coaching is less important than the quality and professionalism that a coach has to offer.

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