Covid-19 has brought us a New Norm: working from home and greater recognition of the power of coaching beyond one-to-ones. Prof. H Law explains
We’re still at the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and homeworking via online platforms such as Microsoft Teams, Google Meet or Zoom, has become part of our New Norm.
At the same time, increasingly we’re moving away from the idea that coaching is purely one-to-one, with growing recognition of the power of coaching beyond that. My colleagues Dr Manfusa Shams and Professor David Lane assert that team coaching is the most effective intervention (Shams & Lane, 2020), for example. As for the foreseeable future, it’s likely coaching will be mostly online, and coaching delivered with groups and teams will involve multi-windows or screens.
Narrative coaching
Narrative coaching has much to offer in these times. Its processes can be adapted for a virtual setting and it has a long tradition of working in groups. For example, we use techniques called ‘outsider witness’ (which we explore below) and ‘definitional ceremony’, which take place in groups.
These processes are powerful and effective. They’re also an efficient way to widen access to training and psychological interventions, especially in the pandemic and climate emergency crises.
Let’s explore how to roll out a narrative coaching approach, zooming in on its basic principle of externalising conversation, and outsider witness.
Externalising conversation in team and group coaching
Below are the steps involved, which can easily be applied to an online setting:
Step 1. Storying/story description
Invite the client to tell a story about recent events and their experiences that have brought them to this meeting. In the workplace context, this person could be any team member, leader, manager or director, and events could be part of the meeting agenda, eg, a project update.
Focus on any unique outcome of the project, the learning of team members, their problem-solving skills, barrier and challenges they had in the narration.
Step 2. Narrative analyses
Carry out the following two-part analyses:
1. Identify various domains from the client’s story in terms of the background/backdrop
Identify spaces and places (such as home, school, workplace); culture and context; sequence of events that took place (time); actors (colleagues, peers, friends and the client, the member of the team who is doing the narration, as the key figure); their self-identity (purposes, values, aspirations, hopes and dreams); and zone of proximal development (future possibilities and action plan action).
- Top tip Ask questions where there are information gaps in any significant domains. For example, about places and spaces: where did the event take place? Ask open questions such what, when, where, who and why?
2. Relation mapping / narrative plot
Map the effects/influence of the barriers/problem identified through the various domains of the client’s life story in which complications are identified, such as familiar relationships (eg, colleague, peer, friendships and the self) most significant to the client’s aspirations, beliefs, dreams, hopes, values and self-identity. Metaphorically speaking, we are trying to map the landscape of events/action onto the landscape of consciousness/self-identity.
- Top tip Try plotting these features on paper or on an online whiteboard and see what they look like in terms of the position in relation to the other spatially.
Step 3. Evaluation/Reflection
Invite the client to reflect and evaluate the impact (effects/influence) of the themes/plots that emerge from the stories within the given domains.
Step 4. Justification
Ask the client to justify their action and evaluation and make judgements about the agreed action in relation to their dreams, hopes, values and self-identity.
- Top tip Ask the client, “What will you do next?”
Step 5. Conclusion/recommendation
Invite the client to put into words valued conclusions about their lives and positional identities. These may be conclusions, wishes or pledges, about their preferred commitments, desires, longings, hopes and dreams that are congruent with their beliefs, values, purposes and self-identity. Finally, invite the client to formulate a plan of action.
- Top tip Ask the client to give their story a name/title in relation to the identified themes and plots.
Outsider witness retelling in team and group coaching
The procedure of externalising conversations can be applied in group or team situations, where one member from the group is asked to act as a storyteller, the rest of the group as outsider witnesses to the story. And again, it works well in a virtual setting.
The group/team members can assist the coach as they can provide extra support to the individual members. After they’ve listened to the story, the coach can invite one of the members to re-tell the story. Instead of reiterating the story, they’re asked to:
- Identify the expression
- Describe the image the story has evoked
- Embody responses in their own life experiences
- Acknowledge any ‘transport’ of knowledge (learning)
As illustrated in the narrative analysis in Part 2, we can map the steps of the narrative process on an Identity Position Map as shown in Figure 1.
For consistency, I’ve shown how each step of the outsider witness retelling maps onto externalising conversation steps and the landscape of consciousness, respectively; where the bottom line represents externalising conversation, re-authoring changes the line of externalising conversation into a dotted line. The top dotted line represents outsider witness retelling, which forms a mirror image of the story being told in the re-authoring conversation.
The above approach is usually used in leadership and organisation development. According to narrative approach expert, Professor Reinhard Stelter, ideally the coach should be external to the company rather than an employee or employer. In this case, the coach acts as a facilitator for the meeting. The manager may act as an internal coach for staff development, eg, during annual performance reviews of staff or in the team meeting as a coaching-oriented manager. However, they’ll need to be mindful of the power relationship, and to be clear when they’re speaking as a coach, and when as a manager.
- Professor H Law is honorary professor of research & psychology at Colombo International Institute of Higher Education (CIIHE), Sri Lanka, director of the ISFCP, and founder of Empsy www.empsy.com Email: drholaw@gmail.com
References
- M Shams & D Lane, Team coaching and family business, in The Coaching Psychologist, 16(1), 25-33, 2020
- R Stelter, A Guide to Third Generation Coaching: Narrative-Collaborative Theory and Practice. Springer, 2012
Figure 1: Outsider Witness Identity Position Map 1+n: Retellings
Figure 1
