Could empathy, openness and common purpose be more important than a particular coaching approach, asks Geoff Alred, visiting research fellow at Sheffield Business School

Irvin Yalom, the eminent existential psychotherapist, tells a good story. One concerns his failure to cook dishes as well as a teacher in a cooking class (1980). “What was it”, Yalom wondered, “that gave her cooking that special touch?” An answer came when he observed the teacher handing the dish to an assistant who “carried it into the kitchen to the oven and, without breaking stride, threw in handful after handful of assorted spices and condiments”.

He became convinced that ‘those surreptitious ‘throw-ins’ made all the difference: “I believe deeply that, when no one is looking, the therapist throws in the ‘real thing’.”

How can a coach know what are the ingredients, those plain to see and those subtle, which make up the ‘real thing’?

One way is to examine research. For instance, numerous sources (eg, O’Broin & Palmer, 2008), draw on similarities between coaching and psychotherapy. They point to the importance of the coaching relationship, and the robust research finding (Cooper, 2008) that particular approaches are less important than a working alliance characterised by empathy, openness and common purpose.

Less often mentioned is psychotherapy research concerned with the ‘researcher allegiance effect’ (Luborsky et al, 1999) – the tendency to find support for what we already believe and do. Such research underlines the difficulty of seeing what we are doing when engaged in the complexity of a serious human relationship. It raises questions regarding how to be more perceptive, sensitive and surefooted.

At the level of a specific coaching encounter, de Haan (2008: p31) poses challenging questions: “What works best for this coachee with this issue? What will help us in this session, at this moment?”

He addresses these through detailed analysis of “critical moments”, experiences and occurrences in coaching that progressively shape the living coaching relationship.

The real thing

Late in his career, Yalom wrote The Gift of Therapy (2001) containing 85 lessons gleaned from 45 years of clinical experience. These include therapeutic ingredients he threw in ‘when he wasn’t looking’, as it were, but which experience gradually revealed to be the real thing.

He presents them as “personal, opinionated and occasionally original”. They stand as a model of reflective practice, premised on the belief that in practice, and alongside a plethora of theories, models, strategies and techniques (Palmer & Whybrow, 2010; McMahon & Archer, 2010), and a growing evidence base (Fillery-Travis & Lane, 2010), what is actually beneficial on any one occasion is not always immediately obvious.

Given the prevailing enthusiasm for coaching, and concerns expressed about standards (Garvey et al, 2009), it is important not to evade the slippery task of spotting what is actually going on.

References

  • M Cooper, Essential Research Findings in Counselling and Psychotherapy: The Facts are Friendly, London: SAGE, 2008
  • E de Haan, Relational Coaching: Journeys towards Mastering One-to-One Learning, Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 2008
  • A Fillery-Travis, & D A Lane, ‘Research: does coaching work?’, in S Palmer, & A Whybrow (Eds), Handbook of Coaching Psychology: A Guide for Practitioners (pp57-70). Hove: Routledge, 2010
  • B Garvey, P Stokes and D Megginson, Coaching and Mentoring Theory and Practice, London: SAGE, 2009
  • L Luborsky, L Diguer, D A Seligman, R Rosental, E D Krause and S Johnson et al, ‘The researcher’s own therapy allegiances: A ‘wild card’ in comparisons of treatment efficacy’, in Clinical Psychology: Science and Practice, 6(1) p95, 1999
  • G McMahon and A Archer (Eds), 101 Coaching Strategies and Techniques, Hove: Routledge, 2010
  • A O’Broin and S Palmer, ‘Reappraising the coach-client relationship: The unassuming change agent in coaching’, in S Palmer and A Whybrow (Eds), Handbook of Coaching Psychology: A Guide for Practitioners, pp295-324, Hove: Routledge, 2008
  • S Palmer and A McDowall (Eds), The Coaching Relationship: Putting People First, Hove: Routledge, 2010
  • S Palmer and A Whybrow (Eds), The Handbook of Coaching Psychology: A Guide for Practitioners (2nd ed), Hove: Routledge, 2007
  • I Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy, New York: Basic Books, 1980
  • I Yalom, The Gift of Therapy, London: Piatkus Books, 2001

Coaching at Work, Volume 6, Issue 1