Unconscious biases are nothing to be ashamed of, yet how do we become better aware of our unconscious biases, manage ourselves in the moment, ensure we’re attuned to and respectful of clients yet still manage to be authentic in our coaching?
These were among questions explored on 17 June at the Roundtable for Race Equity in Coaching’s second webinar in its series on Moving Race Equity from the Margins to the Mainstream. Hosted by Coaching at Work editor Liz Hall, the session on unconscious bias in coaching in relation to race featured three panelists. They were Tia Moin, Roundtable core member, PhD student and lead in diversity equity and inclusion of the British Psychological Society’s Division of Coaching Psychology, Ashnee Naidoo, chair of the people culture and disciplinary committee within the Coaches and Mentors Association of South Africa (COMENSA), and Jacques Myburgh, executive coach, deputy chair of COMENSA’s research committee and founder of SA Coaching News.
The Roundtable was set up in 2021 by Coaching at Work, gathering representatives from leading professional coaching bodies including AC UK, AoCS, APECS, BPS DoCP, COMENSA, EMCC UK, ISCP, UK ICF, with the aim of collaborating and sharing best practice to shift the needle on DEIB in coaching, particularly in relation to race equity.
At the session last month (June), Moin presented research with colleagues (Moin et al, 2024) which reviewed practitioner training materials, analysing themes around how we learn to listen. The findings, ‘dialectical listening theory’, highlight tensions which can occur around listening, which may support or derail how we navigate personal biases in coaching. These tensions include the challenge of showing unconditional positive regard to whoever is speaking, especially when faced with a contrary message, and how this can compromise the listener’s authenticity. Strategies such as mindfulness and being values-driven can help us reserve our judgement when faced with confronting communication, said Moin. If we want to work with our own biases in coaching, we need to navigate holding an intention to be authentic with offering respect, safety, non-judgment and cultural sensitivity. Being authentic might mean being biased, and might risk rupturing the relationship, whereas regulating and masking might mean being inauthentic, the research has highlighted.
Moin said that having bias is “nothing to be ashamed of”:
“We all have different biases and lenses and the way we look at things in the world depends on where we grew up, what kind of influences we’ve had growing up. So there’s nothing sort of necessarily wrong about having biases. I think it’s really important to acknowledge that bias is inherent, it makes up the uniqueness of each of us. It’s nothing to be ashamed of, rather it’s something to be embraced within each of us.”
“But we need to use that as a tool, and think about how we use it… Once we’re aware of our biases, we can start to regulate them (such as through mindfulness).”
Moin positioned the topic of unconscious bias in coaching including by highlighting research such as that of Roche and Passmore (2023) pointing to “the sense of colour blindness that exists not just within the coaching room but also within the industry.” She also cited research by Mosteo et al (2021) which “looked at how culturally sensitive the ICF competencies were.
“It was interesting that even within the competencies, there are cultural biases that we might not even be aware of…things like perceptions of power, of individualism, collectivism…There are some assumptions that we might be making, even within the competencies that we hold really close to us, that are laden with cultural biases. So I think it’s really important that we start to see the colour, start to see things through a cultural lens, and see if there is bias within what we’re already doing.
More on Moin’s research
Moin et al’s research uncovered tensions between mindset and the ‘technical’ performance of listening that appear in the process of learning to listen. The first tension they identified is between ‘way of being’ (such as being non-judgemental and respectful) and ‘listening behaviours’ (such as making eye contact, giving verbal cues).
“The way that we judge listening quality is very behavioural…So there’s a kind of tension between how sometimes you can show the right behavior, but you might not be listening,” said Moin.
The second tension is between intuitive holistic listening – which is assumed to only come with experience and to rely on intuition- holistic listening in training.
“There are some technical things that we can identify. For example, is there a mismatch between what the person’s saying and their body language? Are they using lots of metaphors that might be conveying an underlying message? But overall, I think this advanced level of listening really does rely on our intuition and experiences.”
The third tension is around authentic presence and how showing unconditional positive regard to whoever is speaking is challenging and can compromise the listener’s authenticity. “When we rely on our intuition and our experiences, then inherently, our unconscious biases are going to come into play, because that’s in our internal schemas. So as coaches, we have to balance this tension of conscious awareness and unconscious kind of advanced intuitive listening, and perhaps be aware of what’s driving our intuition…What is it about your own interpretation as a coach, that intuitive level of listening that you’re bringing that might be adapting the message. Are you interpreting it correctly?” she said.
“So there are lots of nuances to consider, and there’s an extra tension there that when you bring your consciousness back into the coaching room to be aware of this, you might then pull back from that advanced holistic listening because you need to be more aware of what it is that you’re interpreting. You might need to mask a bias if you become aware of it, and that then has a tension with you being authentic in the coaching room.”
Being authentic might mean bringing a unique outsider perspective, but this could lead to misunderstanding, “particularly when we’re talking about identity and things that are really important to people… at what point does that outsider perspective become misunderstanding or risk rupturing the relationship if you’re not empathizing or appreciating the person who’s sitting in front of you, if you’re not appreciating their point of view or their lived experience, their identity. On the other side, we’ve got respect, non-judgment, safety, cultural sensitivity, and all of the things we would expect when we’re coaching with race in mind.”
Fellow panelist Naidoo shared her personal experience of growing up in South Africa. “I came from a very sheltered background when it came to racism in South Africa, growing up as a teenager, it was part of the apartheid era, and my parents protected us completely from that. When I went to university, it was when South Africa was moving into a democratic South Africa, and I didn’t have time to digest at that particular point what that meant for me as an Indian female.”
“So we were moving into a diverse South Africa, and you don’t want to see colour because you want South Africa to be a uniform rainbow nation. But being part of this roundtable has made me realize that I’ve actually done myself an injustice, purely from the perspective of not putting myself as seeing myself as separate. I had a conversation with another coach, and we were speaking about, how do we see people? And I always saw everybody in the same light. And part of our conversation was that, when you do that, you’re actually robbing that individual of their identity based on their race, based on their experience,” said Naidoo.
“These conversations have made me step back and ask myself the question, reflect and become more aware of my behaviour as a coach and possibly not getting the most out of a situation. If I reflect back on my coaching in a work environment, I can see myself having fallen into that rabbit hole of not really seeing the client in that space, but purely seeing them from a business perspective, and not where they were coming from, from a racial perspective, from an experience perspective. So there is more awareness, “ said Naidoo.
Fellow panelist Myburgh shared personal experiences too, including that in preparing for the session, he’d thought he didn’t had bias in his coaching experience. “But I thought that must be wrong, because it’s unconscious. We’re not even aware that it is there. So we do it, and sometimes we don’t even know we do it. And that is the worrying part. Sometimes I worry about these kind of things in coaching sessions, and I’ve become almost overly aware of my choice of words, what stories I shouldn’t tell, what stories do I tell deliberately to create awareness, to create conversation, to create questions, when is it appropriate.
“I grew up as a racist, my family and almost everybody that I knew were racist which meant that while I was growing up, I was becoming a racist. But it was what things were…if (I was) still that racist in my mind of when I grew up and (then I was) trying to regulate, that’s not authentic… there’s no energy for active listening, to empathize, there’s no energy for anything else. (I’d be) so busy regulating and somewhere (I’d) slip.
“Over time, life brought me certain life events…so powerful in my own learning and growing up and things started to change for me…I knew I had to do my own inner work…I had to question myself, to question everything about how I grew up and it’s still ongoing,” said Myburgh.
Naidoo said, “It’s that awareness. If you become too aware of it, you’re not being authentic. It’s got to become a way of life. The minute you become aware, you’ve got to slowly start integrating and reminding yourself of that behavior, rather than forcing it. It has to come across as authentic, not just for your client, but for yourself as well…The more opportunity we get to have these conversations and show up authentically as ourselves and owning the space as well in terms of saying who we are but we’re mindful of our behaviour, and we want to make the shift in order to create a better society for future generations, then that’s work in progress. And that’s the work that we want to do in this race roundtable.”
Attendees were put into small breakouts and invited to share what was coming up for them including around questions posed by Moin:
- What makes up your coach identity- your background, your experiences, and how does all this present as bias or a dynamic in your coaching?
- What kind of differences and/or similarities exist between you and your clients?
- What do you need to be mindful of in the coaching interaction, how can you use it as a tool? How could it hinder you as a coach?
- What emotions are coming up for you?
- What action does this reflection spur you towards?
Other comments from attendees and panelists included:
Coretta Hine, Roundtable core team member representing the EMCC UK: “Where’s the balance and fine line in how you play out between an unconscious bias and what is just your own limiting beliefs, or self doubt or whatever in the space that you’re going into?”
Fenella Trevillion, Roundtable core team member, previously representing the AoCS: “Sometimes in a situation with a new person, I’m aware that there might be assumptions made about our dynamics as an older white person, for example. And then I thought, what an arrogant assumption for me to assume that that someone meeting me for the first time might feel inhibited by my race or my age. Almost like to assume that the power dynamic is the white person is the one with the power dynamic. And I’ve never really thought of that, because I don’t actually believe that or think about it, but it pops out in ‘okay, this is a racial difference here. Let me be aware of the power dynamic.’ And I really just suddenly thought I want to question that in myself… I don’t want to minimize the dynamics that have been going on and the domination aspects of the power dynamic of white and black, but at the same time, I think there is an arrogance in me to just assume that people are going to think I’ve got more power because I’m white, because actually, maybe that’s just my own little illusion.”
Jacques Myburgh:“I often find myself walking into a room group coaching, and I’m the only white person…sometimes I get the same thoughts of what are the coaches in this group thinking about me being the only white person here and being in what is often seen as a power position of being a coach or a facilitator or whatever. My mind is taking that a little bit further into the whole idea of decolonizing coaching. And what I’m thinking really is that if we decolonize something, if we deconstruct, the intent is to remove (whatever it is). So if we decolonize, we remove whatever came through during colonization. Being of European descendancy, decolonization means to remove me as the white person out of this coaching. And it’s not a nice feeling. It’s not necessarily the intent, but that’s what comes through in the word decolonizing. And I was in a conversation October last year, and I thought, when we bring in inclusivity, should we not then, rather, in Africa and South Africa, talk about africanizing coaching instead of decolonizing it. Otherwise, I have to leave the room.”
Tia Moin: “It’s not about taking you out of the room, it’s about valuing who you are and what you can bring…not placing the colonisation on a human being like that… separating the human being from the actions becomes really important.
(comment from chat)
”Decolonization extends beyond just black and white, looking then at gender diversity and diversity in sexual orientations, and relationship structures. There’s so much good that can come from actually opening up coaching and healing spaces to a larger, more diverse, more human nature focused approach. The whole decolonization thing isn’t just related to race. It encompasses so much more than that. It’s not targeted at any one person. It’s at the structures and the processes and liberating those othered by the more colonized mindset.”
Coretta Hine: “In our breakout room, we discussed that there’s a bit of a lack in the (coach) training that many of us have received.”
Tia: “You might not have a black coach in your offer of coaches in an organization, and it might be, if you talk to them about it, ‘well, there isn’t, there isn’t anyone who’s got the right qualifications or the right experience’. And why is that? If we keep asking, we come back to this kind of barriers in in society as well. And so I think (it’s important to try) to identify what these barriers are, and then take proactive steps. I think it’s an important conversation for all the professional bodies and associations to be really looking internally and addressing what those barriers are, so that we can increase the diversity of coaches that are being trained…we’ve talked a lot about our biases as us as coaches…but I was just curious about biases in the system. Who gets coaching, who has access to coaching? And you know, in the UK, it’s predominantly white, and you know, coaches are white…What’s our responsibility to ensure that we’re taking those biases out or calling it out when we see it to try and diversify the pool of coaches.”
Moving Race Equity from the margins into the mainstream:
forthcoming Roundtable webinars
- Roundtable Webinar No 3. 17 September, 9.30-11 UK time
Let’s talk about leveraging DEIB, including around race, for high-performing boardrooms
Register : https://lnkd.in/dKXrTuC9 - Roundtable Webinar No. 4 19 November, 9.30-11 UK time
Let’s talk about…the role of coaching & DEIB, including around race, to develop the workplaces of the future
Register: https://lnkd.in/dteVYn9Y - Roundtable Webinar No. 5, 15 January 2025, 9.30-11.00 UK time
Let’s talk about …Overcoming individual and collective resistance to change- integrating & influencing
Register: https://lnkd.in/dnCTMkid - Roundtable webinar No. 6, 11 March, 2025, 9.30-11.00 UK time
Let’s talk about…Coaching to address cultural and societal barriers and practices to DEIB, including around race - Register: https://lnkd.in/d5rAngDe
References
- Moin, T., Weinstein, N., & Itzchakov, G. (2024). Listening: A Dialectical Theory of the Tensions between Mindset and Behavior. https://osf.io/ht2by/
- Mosteo, L., Maltbia, T., & Marsick, V. (2021). Coaching for cultural sensitivity: Content analysis applying Hofstede’s framework to a select set of the International Coach Federation’s (ICF) Core Competencies. Bulletin of the British Psychological Society, 16, 51. https://doi.org/10.53841/bpsicpr.2021.16.2.51
- Roche, C., & Passmore, J. (2023). Anti-racism in coaching: A global call to action. Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice, 16(1), 115-132. https://doi.org/10.1080/17521882.2022.2098789