Viewpoint
Chris Welford
How can coaches support a client’s personal growth while fulfilling larger contractual obligations?
Despite not wishing to add to the burgeoning range of classified maladies of the mind and spirit, I often wonder if a common, but unreported, problem in organisational life is continuous partial attention disorder.
I could imagine a range of diagnostic criteria, with symptoms ranging from a short concentration span, itself continually interrupted by undue attention to electronic media, the ability to engage with others at only the most superficial level and a marked lack of truly creative problem solving.
I wouldn’t expect diagnosis to be straightforward. After all, such a condition would affect high-functioning people who appear – superficially at least – to be agreeable, productive and loyal, and who work long hours and get things done.
But assuming a problem was seen, is there something that could help?
There’s a popular view that any coaching is good coaching, but I wonder if that really is the case. Could the wrong type of coaching make matters worse?
The real risk here is inadvertently supporting a mindset of false productivity in our clients – where task completion is given greater weight than mindful engagement. It’s my assertion that this happens when, as coaches, we become the sophisticated end of an organisation’s performance management process.
But it’s not that we should step outside of the system either. Our reality is that we are often contracted to and rewarded by those who are not our direct clients and who typically have outcomes they are entitled to seek.
So, it’s a delicate balance. If we are to coach, we must be mindful of how we coach. We must hold in mind some fundamental, existential questions. How do we operate in a system and yet remain independent of it? How do we acknowledge the primacy of goal achievement in coaching, yet provide the support that allows our clients to dismantle their own defence mechanisms, feel their own emotions, challenge their own beliefs and work through the state of stuckness they so often bring to us?
Coaches, like therapists, have an important role to play in creating a holding environment that supports personal growth: where clients are safe to explore what drives, limits, energises and frightens them.
This is a reflective place, free from the demands of everyday life and from censure or judgment. The coaching that maximises the impact of a holding space is where clients truly meet themselves; where they feel safe to move beyond intellectualisation of an issue to look deep inside themselves, without fear of being emotionally overwhelmed, to explore choice and possibilities.
This is a place where being is celebrated as much as doing; where goals are allowed to remain hazy for as long as they need to be; where the upwards spiral of personal growth rather than linear progression is encouraged and where the whole approach is humanistic and client-centred. It’s not an easy space – it’s demanding, disturbing and often destabilising in its early stages, but what makes the journey worthwhile are the benefits at the end destination.
Not much changes in organisations as a result of declaring empowerment, and we stand little chance of encouraging personal development by forcing more information into people. But what frees the spirit, frees the mind. And a free mind supplies endless choice, creativity and capability. It is our challenge as coaches to create the conditions in which this can happen naturally.
Chris Welford is managing director of Sixth Sense Consulting and an experienced management consultant and coach. He is undertaking advanced training in psychotherapy, using TA as the primary modality. chris.welford@sixthsenseconsulting.co.uk
coaching at work, volume 8, issue 3