How should we ‘manage’ internal coaches, as they juggle the demands of a day job with the challenges of a new role? Supervision may well be the only answer, say Alison Fletcher and Liz Macann

Internal coaching has become a cost-effective way of widening the reach of coaching beyond top teams. But how should we be supporting this emerging breed of internal practitioner as they combine a new and challenging role with the demands of a very different day job? Is it enough to give them training, a contracting framework and a code of ethics, then send them to work with clients?

How can we ‘manage’ what is happening behind closed doors in a relationship bound by confidentiality, and subjectively experienced only by participants? Should we even be trying?

Could it be magic?

Maybe supervision is the magic potion. Or perhaps it is an expensive, time-consuming and inappropriately ‘therapeutic’ process with no place in a modern business intervention. Aren’t we just paying supervisors to work with internal coaches rather than external coaches to work with clients?

The word itself doesn’t always help. For Southern Railway, ‘supervision’ implied being under the spotlight. It didn’t sit well with the culture. “We had an initial idea of each coach having three clients and one-to-one supervision but it just wasn’t possible; the coaches felt overwhelmed and couldn’t commit,” explained Zoey Hudson, head of organisation, leadership and behavioural development.

“Now each coach has one client and they have what we call coach support sessions – twice yearly conversations with one of the lead coaches to talk about their client work, re-contract and review what they’ve got from the four CPD sessions we run annually.”

Another thing that doesn’t help is that the professional bodies don’t agree on what to call it, who should be doing it, or how often and why coaches should need it. Indeed, the International Coach Federation prefers the term ‘coach mentoring’ – and only requires that for accreditation.

While the professional bodies are making progress in defining what coach mentoring/supervision should achieve – standards, skills and a supportive space – there is still a perception that supervision is about problems: where coaches go to get ‘fixed’, but only when things are not going well.

It’s not surprising that some organisations are reluctant to use it when it may be seen as a sign of failure.

And who should provide this specialist intervention? Some universities and coach training organisations do. But this has led to criticism that supervision is becoming an end in itself, attracting those who may prefer to work one removed from the frontline and who may never have been coaches or managers themselves. Internal coaching teams looking for supervisors may want to know they have appropriate organisational experience.

Then there’s the commitment, which is a real issue for those who coach on top of the day job.

“I’m beginning to wonder”, muses Liz Macann, head of executive coaching at the BBC, “whether all the coaching programmes we run in the BBC lend themselves to the depth of reflection supervision is designed to provide. Would the short solutions-focused programmes be adequately supported by a coach mentor whose role it is to listen and suggest based on their experience?”

Safe space

But whether it’s called mentoring, supervision or something more user-friendly like coach support, all coaches need a safe space to explore their practice.

What do internal coaches need from this kind of support? And what are the business benefits?

  1. Supervision keeps coaches at their learning edge. Good coaching does not come out of the classroom but from reflecting on practice and learning from experience.
  2. Internal coaches inevitably make assumptions about their organisations and may be more susceptible to counter-transference and collusion. Supervision brings these patterns into awareness.
  3. Role conflicts can set up personal and ethical dilemmas for coaches which then have an impact on their day jobs if there is no confidential space where they can be resolved. Supervisors of internal coaches will have a good understanding of organisational dynamics.
  4. Supervision supports coaches in identifying clients with mental health or personal problems which may be outside the remit of an internal coach. At any one time one in six people in the working population is suffering from some form of mental health issue. This includes the coaches themselves.
  5. Contracting protocols and codes of ethics create a theoretical framework for boundaries. However, managing boundary issues in the moment requires confidence and a mature coaching mindset. Organisations need to be protected from the consequences when internal coaches follow their own agendas, breach confidentiality or develop inappropriate relationships.

A no-brainer

Fletcher says there can be an unwillingness to see coaching as a psychological intervention.

“Some organisations are saying? coaching is not about psychology because the people doing it aren’t psychologists and the goals they are working on are business goals, not personal issues.

“But unconscious processes go on in coaching relationships whether you recognise them or not. It’s not like fairies at the bottom of the garden who exist only if you believe in them.”

At its best supervision is the cement that binds knowledge acquired through CPD with insights derived from experience; the space in which the coaching community grows in wisdom. It’s also a means of ensuring that the intimate view of the organisation unique to the coach can be fed back into the system as coherent messages about present and future challenges.

For organisations with full-time coaches in the business, supervision is a no-brainer.

Barbara Picheta, who heads up the PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) coaching centre of excellence, emphasises that for PwC, with its six full-time coaches and 20 human capital consultants devoting 50 per cent of their time to coaching, supervision is business as usual.

“If you’re going to bother to have coaches in the workplace, [supervision] is part of it – it’s not an optional exercise.

“Working with colleagues in group supervision is particularly suited to noticing organisational themes surfacing in our coaching work and reflecting on conscious and unconscious processes.”

It’s a view echoed at KPMG by lead coach Louise Buckle. Having grown coaching organically, KPMG is bringing in qualified supervisors to run group supervision and allowing coaches to choose their own external supervisors.

“It’s important to see supervision as a basic performance cost for coaches,” says Buckle.

And KPMG is putting its money where its mouth is, by ringfencing ?2,000 a year per coach to cover supervision costs.

That’s all very well for the big consultancies, but for the cash-strapped public sector, finding the money can be a challenge. The NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement uses a pool of internal supervisors to provide regional supervision sets and telephone supervision (see NHS feature). And the Welsh Public Service uses peer group supervision in action learning sets, with internal coaches trained to facilitate the process.

Fit for purpose

For Macann it’s about designing a model that’s fit for purpose, rather than following some externally imposed orthodoxy.

“Even people who don’t know what supervision is are saying ‘coaches must be in regular supervision’, which for me rings alarm bells about Groupthink rather than indicating an informed view. Let’s get back to basics and ask, what do those of us involved in in-house coaching want internal coaches to be, do, have? And what support can be provided to help achieve that?”

At the BBC, internal supervisors offer four one-to-one sessions to all coaches and run four shared learning groups each year, with attendance a requirement of continued coaching practice.

The current model, says Macann, reflects the needs of the organisation by helping to keep the coaching space free of the coach’s world view and ensuring that protocols are being followed, as well as giving coaches somewhere to unhook from the individual impact of sessions.

How does this help organisations like Co-op Financial Services, which is reassessing how it supports the 80 internal coaches it inherited following the merger with Britannia Building Society? Development manager Cath St Leger wants to raise the expectations of the level at which internal coaches can operate and is looking at introducing mentoring as a means of doing this.

“We would like coaches to see CPD as a way of supporting them to develop reflective practice. We’re planning to train internal supervisors and reinforce the competencies so the coaches know where they are on their journey.”

Supervision: a major resource

An EMCC survey of internal coaches found that almost half came from operational or corporate (non-HR) roles and 60 per cent were coaching on top of the day job. Less than half had one-to-one supervision and 56 per cent had access to some form of shared learning group. Given that these individuals don’t as a rule get any extra money for their coaching activities, this is at least a substantial extra resource in time and skill and at best a powerhouse of change energy encouraging new perspectives and different ways of working with people in the organisation. Many of them deserve more support and challenge (the very essence of coaching) than they’re getting at the moment.

Alison Fletcher is a qualified coach supervisor and coach developer who works with organisations to develop their internal coaching capability. A former journalist, BBC senior manager and lead coach, she is passionate about exploring the untapped potential for business leaders to become inspirational coaches.

Email: alison@thecoachwithin.co.uk

Liz Macann is head of executive, leadership and management coaching at the BBC, and was Coaching at Work’s Coach of the Year in 2009. She leads the BBC Network of senior leaders coaching in addition to the day job, which won the ICF PRISM award for coaching impact on the business in 2008 and the Training Journal Best Coaching Programme award in 2007.

Email: liz.macann-coaching@bbc.co.uk

Coaching at Work, Volume 6, Issue 1