Renewing and Refreshing The Knowledge Base of Coaching,

By Dr Stephen Gibb, Strathclyde Business School

Working from a secure knowledge base continues to be the foundation of the credibility and success of professional coaching. It allows you to base your practice and approach clients with a combination of tried approaches. And it allows people like me to argue strongly for the status and recognition of substantial coach development programmes, such as the well established Strathclyde University Executive Coaching programme, and our new MSc in Coaching & Mentoring.

There is a risk in this; the risk of getting stuck in an enclosed world, with similar voices saying very familiar things and a feel of ‘preaching among the converted’. Renewing and refreshing the knowledge base dynamically is a challenge. As an annual exercise on our Strathclyde Business School programmes we offer participants a chance to explore this, by voting for a new ‘non-coaching’ name to be inducted into our coaching knowledge base ‘hall of fame’. This years candidates, all with recent books out, represent the potential treasures to be found around coaching. They do not speak about coaching directly. But rather each has key insights to inspire and potential connections to professional practice to offer. Consider the following and cast your vote!

Our first non-coaching candidate is Julia Middleton and her extolling the use in leadership development of the experience of leading ‘beyond authority’. To lead beyond authority is to leave your core circle and position of power, and all that goes with it. This can happen when drawn outside those parts of an organization in which a person has power and authority, or in being drawn outside organizations altogether into other contexts as a leader. Julia has been proselytizing and promoting this in the UK, embracing the experience of leading beyond authority, for some years. Now with this experience and with appreciation of the value of the skills this entails recognized in more and more settings, Julia’s book is a welcome contribution to thinking about leadership. Julia is an advocate rather than a detached reviewer, though she is refreshingly honest about the realities of what she advocates. On the one hand leading ‘beyond authority’ is an exciting, demanding and developmentally rich experience which challenges a leaders skills and mindset. On the other hand it may seem like leadership suicide. For anyone seeking to tread as a leader outside their ‘core circle’ of authority faces a “brutality of questioning”. They will have their legitimacy constantly questioned and their motives suspected.

Why would anyone contemplate this? Well, Julia does a thorough job in outlining the advantages to be found for all parties and a guide to the risks. For all parties leading beyond authority is an opportunity to test and develop talent. As a deliberate strategy it may be a way of allowing ‘rebels’, people who will shake things up, to have some play. The hope is that this will help transformations to occur. That is far from guaranteed. Some of the risks involved are that in seeking to lead beyond authority the much less esteemed role of functioning as (in Julia’s carefully explained terms!) ‘useful idiots’ or ‘expert idiots’. The former may come to be seen at best as agents of other authorities rather than real leaders; pawns in the game as it were, albeit unwittingly. The latter may initially be revered for having some core professional expertise, but that will have little to do with the area they are seeking to lead in beyond authority. Unless they adopt a different style of leadership they can soon become a bit of a liability.

Our second candidate is the North American author Malcolm Gladwell, with his latest internationally marketed, and high profile book ‘Outliers’. This explores stories of individual and remarkable success, and shows the patterns he finds among these. In the stories he explores there emerges a pattern which combines the arbitrary and opportunity with cultural legacies. These provide a tide of advantage, which leads to individual and remarkable success. The stories he recounts range from Canadian elite ice hockey players through to computer industry leaders and mathematicians, and pilots who manage potentially fatal incidents (and the Beatles). The patchwork of lucky breaks, arbitrary advantage and cultural legacies that underpin patterns of remarkable success, if better understood, can be replaced with better systemic support to give more opportunities to all. I suspect the main legacy of this particular work, however well articulated the arguments are, will be the figure of 10,000 hours. That is the amount of practice Gladwell estimates as underpinning remarkable success. Wait for this to begin turning up as fact in presentations far and wide!

Finally consider also Alex Pentland; and his account of experiments to show how ‘honest signals’ shape and determine the effectiveness of individual conversations. Alex was inspired by the challenge of measuring interactions, and provides a fascinating account of how innovations with technology enabled this. His findings can be seen to provide validation of insights into features of communication, which have long been prescribed as part and parcel of most coaches’ practice; including exploring, active listening, and building trust. Pentland’s contribution is to have created and experimented with what he calls a ‘sociometer’; a device capable of measuring several features of a conversation between individuals (or several individuals in teams. Subjects wear the sociometer as badge. It records and measures things like the gaps or overlays in conversations, the time people spend speaking, variations in emphasis and non-verbal behaviours such as proximity, body position and hand movements can all be measured with this one device. His work shows that the presence of successful ‘honest signaling’ of attention, empathy, interest and consistency in prosody (stress and intonation) all work together and predict positive outcomes for the parties concerned. The positive outcome may be a negotiation, a sale, or the start of a romance. The absence of these signals is a predictor of negative outcomes; stalled discussions, no sale, or another night alone!

So it’s a choice between the knowledge of someone presenting the wisdom gleaned from many years innovating and pioneering in leadership development in the UK; someone compiling all kinds of otherwise disparate research and communicating that in a popular form with examples which emerge from North American experience; and someone who has conducted some research of their own and has connected that in a novel and practical way with insights about human communication. These represent to me great examples of the wealth of knowledge we have around us to bring into coaching. Who gets your vote?!

Gladwell, M. (2008) Outliers: The Story of Success, Allen Lane, London
Middleton, J. (2008) Beyond Authority, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke
Pentland, A. (2008) Honest Signals, MIT Press, London

Dr Stephen Gibb FCIPD
Director; Centre for Executive Education
Strathclyde Business School, Glasgow
Tel 0141 548 3846
Mob 07989243156
http://www.strath.ac.uk/business/cee/

By Stephen Gibb