Book Review
Title: Making Coaching Work – Creating a Coaching Culture (2005)
Authors: David Clutterbuck and David Megginson
Publisher: CIPD Publishing (www.cipd.co.uk/bookstore)
ISBN: 1 84398 074 6
Does your organisation rely on the ingenuity, efficacy and loyalty of your people? Are you working in a climate of continuous change? Is your company’s leadership capable of, and committed to, performance improvement? If not, argue Clutterbuck and Megginson, you shouldn’t bother trying to implement a coaching culture because you’re unlikely to carry it through. You’re better sticking to piecemeal coaching interventions with specific needs and outcomes.
The stark distinction between piecemeal coaching and creating a coaching culture sums up the essence of the latest work from two of the Grand Masters of coaching and mentoring. This is definitively not another book on how to coach or even how to set up a company-wide coaching scheme. With candour and realism, the authors recognise that creating a coaching culture is not only a very difficult, complex process, but that it is not a universal panacea, and not applicable to every company.
You’ll know you have succeeded, however, when “coaching is the predominant style of managing and working together, and where a commitment to grow the organisation is embedded in a parallel commitment to grow the people in the organisation.” Following their principles of academic research, Clutterbuck and Megginson reviewed all the existing material and then selected seven organisations for further study, all of which have gone much further than the 90 per cent of companies who reportedly use coaching in the workplace. None of the seven case study organisations covered in Making Coaching Work claimed to have done everything right in creating a coaching culture, but the authors were able to identify similarities, define descriptions and create a rigorous model with six distinct areas and four descriptive actions for each.
The six areas of the model are:
1. Coaching is linked to business drivers
2. Being a coachee is encouraged and supported
3. Provide coach training
4. Reward and recognise coaching
5. Systemic perspective
6. The move to coaching is managed.
When this model was introduced at the 1994 EMCC Annual Conference the author of one of the case studies took up the challenge of measuring his company’s progress against the model. The same questionnaire will enable any L&D or OD practitioner to benchmark their organisation against the model.
The very strong academic influence which contributes so much to the gravitas of this book also accounts for its sole weakness. If you like the clarity and impact of much of today’s business literature, you may find Making Coaching Work heavy going. The style is writerly, rather than readerly, and the book would have benefited from bolder editing to reduce the impression of it being an academic paper, rather than a practitioner’s guide. That said, the quality of content more than compensates for shortcomings in presentation. If you are truly interested in creating or embedding a coaching culture within your organisation, this book provides both the framework and the detail. More than that, it captures some of the mistakes that others have made in their bid to build a coaching culture. Within a very short time, Making Coaching Work will undoubtedly be seen as the standard reference on the subject, and on the reading list of the growing number of postgraduate coaching courses. Enthusiastic advocates of coaching could dream that with its successful application, 10 years from now we will look back at the book and say: “Great book in its day, but it’s all now common practice in the majority of organisations”. With the same realism that the authors apply, that’s unlikely to happen, so Making Coaching Work will be a valuable resource for many years to come.
John Driscoll is head of coaching at the Dove Nest Group. He can be contacted at www.dovenest.co.uk
Research from the field of work/organisational psychology shows that one of the critical success factors in both entrepreneurial and executive performance is the capacity to engage intuition. That is, to think holistically and contextually and to act on hunches and feelings about possibilities. However, our culture gives primacy to analytic thinking. This is a cognitive style, which is deductive, rigorous, constrained and critical. In contrast intuitive thinking is inductive, expansive, unconstrained, diffuse, divergent, informal and creative. Analytic thinking characterises our “way of being” in organisational life. Here the focus is on goal setting, problem solving and based on conventional approaches to managing. My research shows that analytic thinking leads executives to fear risk taking and by raising their EI they can identify these fears and begin to trust their gut feelings (intuition), resulting in positive outcomes.
To excel, coaches need to be able to harness their own fears and tap into their intuition to help clients develop their EI. A coach’s wisdom can only come through experience and having acknowledged and acted on their sixth sense. This means that we need to “bracket” our own assumptions, fears and expectations and deal effectively with “the coach’s dilemma”.
A dilemma is a feature of self regulation and is concerned with how a person feels and thinks about competing pressures or reasons to act in a particular way. The decision to act is governed by our personal integrity. Whether we choose to pursue one course over another is dependent on the degree to which we feel our integrity to be threatened. In terms of coaching, this is manifest in the “contract” that we negotiate with our clients and sponsors. By not acting on our intuition, however, we may be doing our clients a disservice. As an illustration, this is a dilemma I encountered with a client who had learnt to trust her intuition. I had worked with this client over a period of four years. I had discovered from the sponsor that there would be changes taking place of which the client was unaware and could have serious implications for her. It became apparent that the client was struggling with whether to continue in her role, or to move elsewhere in the organisation. She felt that the team were dependent on her and that in moving she would be “letting them down and betraying their loyalty”. In our dialogue it became apparent that if she knew what the organisation was planning, then this would help.
Bounded by confidentiality I could not disclose what I knew. However, the client sensed a shift and probed me. This shift had been evoked by the realisation that I too was faced with a dilemma; between my relationship with the client and my commitment to the sponsor. I chose to disclose what I knew. My sixth sense suggested that it was the right thing to do. In disclosing what I knew, what transpired was transformational for all parties concerned. The client came to a decision and approached the sponsor. The subsequent outcomes suited all parties and, two years later, all involved are still with the organisation. I learnt many things from this experience. The first is to acknowledge your sixth sense. The second revolves around ensuring that the contracting process is as transparent as possible. Finally, in trusting my intuition, paradoxically, I realised that to maintain my integrity I needed to have the courage of my convictions and take a risk. I now know from my research in EI that personal integrity is inextricably bound up with our social and emotional experience and that both reflect mature emotional competence.
Margaret Chapman is a coaching psychologist, EI Researcher & Practitioner. She is a member of the Institute’s Coaching and Mentoring Faculty & facilitates the Psychology of Coaching workshop. She can be contacted at mc@eicoaching.co.uk
Margaret Chapman is a coaching psychologist, EI researcher and practitioner