At Leeds Metropolitan University, Kathy Ashton is planning to take the coaching practice it is known for on the sports field into the university at large
Kate Hilpern
When Kathy Ashton tells people about her new role as head of coaching at Leeds Metropolitan University, a common reaction is: “That’s a great place to do it; the university has already got a sports coaching culture.”

Indeed, the university’s world-renowned Carnegie Faculty of Sport and Education was chosen as the UK Centre for Coaching Excellence to help the next generation of coaches.

For Ashton, however, it’s something of a mixed blessing – it means she’ll have to challenge people’s understanding of coaching before she even starts. Sports coaching tends to be instructive while business coaching doesn’t.

She points to a further key difference. “In sports coaching the coach will traditionally be familiar with the sport and will be coaching or instructing in specific techniques, whereas the business coach does not need knowledge of the business to coach effectively,” she says.

Lastly, in sports coaching, “the individual or team performance is seen as the responsibility of the coach more than in business coaching, where the responsibility lies with the individual”.

Inner game

But there are similarities. Ashton says increasing numbers of sports coaches are focusing on the “inner game” what is stopping a sportsman or woman from achieving their potential? “Like a business coach, a sports coach works on unearthing in someone potential that already exists,” she explains.

This debate has already taken off in the university, Ashton says. “Every September, the university has a staff development festival and this year’s theme was ‘coaching with a difference’. On day one, international coaches Frank Dick and Sir John Whitmore talked in depth about the differences and overlap of sports coaching and business coaching. So there’s food for thought already out there.”

Ashton, who started her new post as people development manager in October, will have a wider remit than coaching, but a key priority will be establishing a business coaching culture in all six faculties of the university. At the moment there is nothing formal in place, and she is relishing the opportunity.

“From the outside looking in, I could see the university had an increasingly high profile and that it was a forward-thinking organisation open to creativity in reaching its vision of becoming a world-class university,” she says. “In addition, it is going through big changes, with three new deans of faculties being recruited now. All of this makes it an excellent time to introduce coaching.”

Installing rigour

Doubtless, Ashton was seen as the woman for the job following her outstanding achievements in her previous post at Leeds Partnerships NHS Foundation Trust, where she introduced internal coaching to a staff base including clinical psychologists, a profession that often need convincing about the benefits of business coaching. “In terms of how coaching sat within their view of psychology, there was a lot of groundwork to be done,” is how she diplomatically puts it.

Among Ashton’s most valuable contributions in this role was putting in place a coach-trading model. Indeed, she has earned herself a name in the field of coaching on the back of her decision to implement a “coach-swapping” scheme, which aimed to make coaching more cost- and time-effective while overcoming the potential confidentiality problems of internal coaching.

The idea, she explains, was to create a regional network of coaches internally and from other organisations in the region in the private and public sectors, including Next, Skippko, Leeds Social Services and York Hospital NHS Trust. “They would send staff on our in-house programme and then I’d trade the coaches across organisations when internal coaching wasn’t appropriate,” she says.

Ashton made a point of instilling rigour into the network. “I developed a regional agreement so that anyone providing coaching for staff in the trust or across the partnership programme had to adhere to certain things, such as supervision and ongoing continuing professional development,” she says.

“I felt it was vital for everyone to work to the same code of ethics… they had to agree to coach a minimum of three people, each of whom took four to six sessions of 90 minutes.”

Leeds Metropolitan University was particularly taken with its success. “Partnership working is something the university sees itself doing increasingly in the future,” she explains. Ultimately, she adds, she would like the service at the university to extend to the likes of sports institutions, Apple, Google and the BBC as well.

Blown away

Despite Ashton’s passion and experience in business coaching, she admits she was only really introduced to coaching in 2004, when the Leeds trust hired a new head of development, Michael Taggart. “He came from the private sector and was very much a visionary in terms of what he introduced to the NHS,” she says.

The trust had traditionally run in-house leadership programmes, but Taggart commissioned an external coach to design and deliver a programme so that all participants on the leadership programme also had access to a coach.

“The impact on their practice and their understanding of the organisation’s vision blew us away. In 2005 the internal coach programme started, and by this year we were in a position where the coaching programme was really quite focused and efficient.”

Although Ashton is understandably proud of her work at the trust, you can’t help feeling that it’s her willingness to admit where things went wrong – and even more important, what she’s learnt from those failures; that also helped her to get the job at the university.

“There are a number of things I will do differently here,” she says frankly. “You could say that coaching in the Leeds partnership was almost a victim of its own success because it took off so quickly. Somehow what we meant by coaching got a bit lost along the way, and this meant evaluating it was difficult.

“The upshot was that it always felt a bit like catch-up. The coaching needed a mission statement so there could be clearer answers to questions such as: ‘What does coaching look like?’, ‘What does it mean to the trust?’ and ‘What is its purpose?’”

Asked whether the trust had a coaching culture by the time she left, she pauses. “Again, the difficulty comes back to the fact that the trust hadn’t defined what a coaching culture meant, which is very much how I’m going to start here – providing a university-wide definition.

There were pockets of really good practice that sprung up throughout the trust. I’m just not sure whether that counts as an overall coaching culture.”

At the moment, Ashton isn’t sure how much coaching expertise there is at Leeds Metropolitan University. She explains: “There appear to be no qualified coaches, although I think there is some informal coaching going on and some of the six faculties appear to be using external coaches.

So once we’ve communicated a university-specific definition of coaching and its purpose – including how it’s different from sports coaching – my next step will be to carry out an audit of what already exists.”

In addition, she wants the university to become a member of one of the main coaching bodies, to establish a university-wide steering group and possibly to introduce faculty coaching champions.
Ashton speaks of a three-pronged approach to implementation.

First, she’ll recruit a pool of external executive coaches through a selection process, after which she will manage the matchmaking of external coaches to senior staff in the organisation.

Second, she will set up an internal coaching programme that will partner organisations both inside and outside higher education. “I’ll start by spreading coaches in different faculties to enable cross-faculty matchmaking of coach to client,” she says, insisting that it will be just as rigorous – if not more so – than it was in the NHS trust.

Only staff of certain management grades will be able to apply, for example, and they’ll need agreement and commitment from their line manager and faculty dean. They’ll have to agree to be observed and to attain a certain standard of coaching prior to one-to-one workplace coaching.

Lastly, Ashton wants all line managers to take a one-day “introduction to coaching skills” course, to enable the move towards a less directive, more coaching style of management.

No bulldozers

It’s too early for Ashton to predict what she can learn from other universities, but she plans to meet with local ones in due course. “Bradford and Newcastle both have interesting things going on, although I believe they are very much going down the road of external coaches,” she says.

“I’m really keen to find out where they are at and what other universities are doing with regards to internal coaches.” Is she worried they won’t share best practice? “The jury’s out on that one… but I’ve not found an insular attitude,” she reports.

In only four years, Ashton managed to get 500 of the 2,500 staff at the NHS trust into coaching. Her objective at Leeds is no less ambitious.

There won’t be a metaphorical bulldozer in sight, however. “Coaching can add value to so many areas of work in the university, but there is a need to start small rather than trying to do everything at once. I’ve learnt that from the NHS. But that will be a challenge in itself.”

Kathy Ashton: CV

2008-present People development manager, Leeds Metropolitan University
2006-08 Executive coach to teams and individuals at Blue Sky, Leeds and The Learning Grove, Bristol
2007 CIPD certificate in coaching and mentoring
2006 MBTI Step I and II qualified facilitator
2005 ILM level 5 diploma in management coaching and mentoring
2005 NLP certified practitioner
2004 Accredited facilitator, Margerison-McCann team performance profile
2004-08 Development manager (coaching lead), Leeds Partnerships NHS Foundation Trust (LPFT)
2002 Postgraduate diploma in training and development, Leicester University
2001-04 Carers’ education and training manager, LPFT
1995-2000 Community carers’ support worker, St Anne’s Community Services, Leeds
1988-95 Volunteer manager, then training manager, St Anne’s Community Services, Leeds
1987-88 Placement development officer, Leeds Metropolitan University

Volume 4, Issue 1