On more than one occasion, posing this question has pulled the school back from the brink of telling certain clients where to go. There was the highly demanding and bureaucratic utilities client: “We were literally about to pull out but someone asked this question and we realised we had significantly changed the way people worked in teams. Every time we subjected our work with this client to scrutiny, the answer was, yes, it was changing the quality of conversations.”
Then there was the demanding education client. The headteacher admitted he had been difficult but said the coaching programme had transformed his organisation into a 2,000-strong learning population. Yet again, the answer to the “planet” question was that, yes, the quality of conversations was being enhanced.
For Downey, founder and director of studies at the School of Coaching, making an impact is a huge driver. To accept a client, he needs to feel sure that the culture will support any changes an individual is willing to make, and that there is alignment between personal and business agendas, otherwise things become “incredibly frustrating”.
“There is a clear distinction between the private and the business agenda and if you don’t understand these things, you end up not having any impact on the organisation,” he says.
Downey is a man who likes to live close to the edge. When he was in his early twenties, he chucked in a promising career as an architect and came to London with only £300 and all his possessions in a couple of suitcases. Later on, having been passed over for directorship, he walked out of successful consultancy the Alexander Corporation without any clients to his name. And now he has “bought himself back” from the Work Foundation, formerly the Industrial Society, after five years of running the School of Coaching as a joint venture with the Foundation.
“The Work Foundation has been wonderful because I was a non-entity. It gave us credibility and cash flow. But ultimately it became a limitation because I was systematically tied to them in terms of working practice and what we spent our money on. It became difficult to be entrepreneurial,” he says.
Downey embarked on what was to become a career in coaching when he was 17, as a tennis coach. But it took a while for the seeds to germinate. In the meantime, he was drawn to architecture because he liked to understand structures and know how things worked.
Downey worked as an architect for about a year but he felt unfulfilled. It became clear to him that most architectural activity was driven by money and unless you were part of a small handful of people, you were unlikely to get much opportunity to be creative.
All in the game
When he came across The Inner Game of Tennis, by Tim Gallwey, “it was literally an eye-opener” for him. He recalls a “wonderful moment” when his mother, the centre of all authority in his family and a former professional tennis player, basking in the fact that one of her offspring was now earning money, gave him permission to jack it all in.
“I gave her Gallwey’s book. To her credit, she read it and – somewhat less exuberantly than me – said she didn’t understand a word but if it made a difference to me, that was fine. She gave me her permission to stop being an architect and be more Quixotic,” Downey says.
He left his job, headed off to London and “by a series of coincidences”, met some Inner Game practitioners. He joined forces with Alan Fine of InsideOut and Graham Alexander, who trained him in the Inner Game approach for about a year, after which he headed back to Dublin where he worked as a sports coach, mainly in tennis, as well as playing professionally. But it dawned on Downey that he was “either too old or probably not good enough” to carry on. What emerged was that he had a “natural ability to work with people and help them to learn”.
He began to apply his desire to understand how things worked, which had initially attracted him to architecture, to working with people. “Architecture is about having an understanding at macro and micro level. Understanding structures is really useful because it’s a shorthand into the complexities of things and other people,” he says.
A transition happened when Downey was helping a friend with his golfing game, despite knowing nothing about the sport: “The friend then asked if I could help him with his insurance business. And by the end of the third session he had achieved his goals. It was really exciting. I doubled my fees.
“This took me off the tennis court, which was becoming repetitive, and I discovered there were a number of people, including Graham Alexander, who were applying the Inner Game to the world of business.”
So in 1987, Downey packed his bags once again and returned to London. The following year he became involved in setting up the Alexander Corporation, the first provider of executive coaching in the UK.
Downey was one of four people in their late twenties trained up by the older Alexander along with Ben Cannon, who was soon promoted to managing director. Cannon died last November but was someone who influenced Downey hugely: “From him I learned professionalism, integrity and courage. From him I understand what a brave decision looks like.”
Downey stayed at the Alexander Corporation for seven years: “I began to feel I was being taken for granted. There was a sense of me hanging onto the purity of the Inner Game notion and this was mistaken for commitment to the organisation. The directorship was withdrawn for internal political reasons and I left within 14 days of making my decision.”
On 1 August 1995, he was once again on the streets. He says: “It was one of the first times in my life that I had stood in my own two shoes – in two months I had doubled my income working as a one-to-one executive coach and doing something still almost unique at the time – team coaching.”
Work colleagues included Judith Firman, who is now part of the School of Coaching faculty. One of his clients was the then Industrial Society. Tony Morgan, the chief executive, was a good friend of John Whitmore and Graham Alexander, who was married to Firman.
Downey’s proposal for the establishment of the School of Coaching within the Industrial Society was accepted by Morgan and the first pilot went live in 1996.
Since separating from the foundation, the school has moved from Pall Mall to new premises on Dean Street. It currently offers executive coaching, training executive coaches and training leaders and managers in coaching skills. The latter is an area Downey plans to develop further: “There is an opportunity for a well-constructed organisation that can delve into these three disciplines to have real, lasting impact,” he says.
Raising the standards
Downey says one of the distinctive features of the school’s approach is its focus on skills and interaction: “We are less concentrated on theories and competing models.”
He says there are pockets of excellence in coaching and he wants the school to be an organisation that raises standards.
“I see an awful lot of bad coaching, a lot of therapeutic interventions without any real clarity in what they are trying to do. Unless you have that, there might be lots of warmth but not much impact. I’d like to change that.”
Downey resists the notion of having heroes, which he believes is linked to a problem with authority, but among those people who have had a lot of influence on him are Gallwey, Cannon and his wife.
Of his wife, Downey says she has taught him how to love and to be compassionate. “That has been very important for me. I have discovered that you don’t have to like the people you work with but you do have to love them.”
He tries to find out what employees are interested in – and make it happen. “You’ve got to have compassion rather than be driven by will. It’s a hoot.”
One of the most fundamental things about human beings is their ability to create and be the author of their own lives, Downey adds.
“It would have been incredibly easy for me to remain an architect; the Catholic expectation was that you stayed in the job for life and I needed to have the courage to step outside others’ expectations.”
Downey’s late father would have drawn much pleasure from seeing his son make waves in the executive coaching world. “I didn’t hug him until I was 37 and married,” says Downey. “He hated his job, which fed my courage. And if he could see what I’ve done, he’d be grinning from ear to ear.”
My practice – the creative paradox
When I started, I was more wedded to the non-directive approach than I am now, Downey writes. I still believe it’s the absolute cornerstone, but as I learn my craft, which sounds pretentious, I am also learning how to bring my own intelligence to the experience in a way that doesn’t interfere with the authority of the other.
Everyone changes and, as an early practitioner I was fearful of making mistakes and was incredibly non-directive. But now I have 30 years behind me as a coach and much more business experience. I have become much more relaxed and less worried about the impact on others. And I have a very good psychotherapist!
In the more purist non-directive school, people say that you can’t offer suggestions, which is patently nonsense. So there has been a shift over the past five years that leaves room for creativity.
Creativity in coaching is somewhat of a paradox. Your primary role as coach is to cause the other person to think and have new ideas. So you might be forgiven for thinking that you have to sit quietly and take notes. Lots of people have a passive approach but, once they understand what it can be to release creativity and intelligence, they realise that this is a skill in itself and using it is an active expression of creativity. But you have to learn to be passive first.
There are techniques for bringing one’s own stuff into the conversation and I might take a risk. For example, I had a client who works as a partner in one of the most successful offices of a professional services firm. He said if he didn’t do X in the next six months, he would be a failure. I wanted to laugh, so I said: “You can’t be serious,” for him to see the absurdity of what he was saying. Rather than having these objectives as a burden, he needed to ask himself whether he really had to achieve them. I have become much more active than I ever was.
When I coach, I am clear that I need to be in the appropriate mental state, where all my resources are available and I can help the person do their best thinking. And to do that, I can’t just sit back; I have to be on the edge of my seat.
You do need to be psychologically literate but you don’t need to be a therapist. In terms of which psychological approach informs my practice, I’d say, by osmosis, the process of psycho-synthesis.
Myles Downey: CV
- 2007: Managing director of the School of Coaching
- 2003: Second edition of Effective Coaching (Texere/Thomson), a significant rewrite of the 1999 edition
- 1997: Set up the School of Coaching with the Industrial Society (now the Work Foundation)
- 1988: A founding member of the Alexander Corporation, one of the first providers of executive coaching and coaching skills training
- 1987: Made the transition from an Inner Game sports coach to a business coach
- 1984: Moved to London to train as an Inner Game coach alongside practitioners Graham Alexander, Alan Fine and Susie Morell
- 1982: Burke Kennedy Doyle, architects, Dublin
- 1978: Tennis coach
- 1977: Bolton Street College of Technology, Dublin
- 1972–77: Glenstall Abbey School, Limerick