Meaning and Purpose

Hello from Margaret Moore, Co-Director

September is our peak month for the Institute of Coaching, the Lift-Off of our annual Conference  for the sixth year. It is a relaunch of our connections with many coaches and kindred spirits in our community, and a launch of new connections with coaches and coaching supporters we haven't yet met or served.

In synchrony with peak experiences, finding and making meaning and purpose is perhaps the peak dimension of being human, a never-ending quest for coaches and our clients. The September MasterClass explores the topic of Coaching for Meaning & Purpose, and considers various models and approaches to meaning-making, including new research and publications. We hope that the MasterClass will inspire you to pause and re-ignite your purpose in each moment and in life.

Our Institute family (aka team) serves the coaching field because of a deeply held purpose. We want to:

• draw on the best that science and art have to offer...
• to help all of us as coaches, and all of those coaches touch...
• to grow and change when change is hard...
• in order to thrive in all walks of life..

We want to create ripples of thriving and positive change that keep on rippling.

We look forward to sharing our collective meaningful purpose and energy with you on September 27 and 28.

The power of compassion

By Margaret Moore, Co Director, Institute of Coaching

Recently I tweeted on a quote from William James: The greatest thing then, in all education, is to make the nervous system our ally, instead of our enemy. Substitute leadership or personal health for education, and this quote is just as powerful.

A potent path to calming the nervous system and improving brain function, including creativity, is to accept and appreciate one’s negative emotions and give them compassion, a little love, rather than push them away or argue with them. Inc.com just published an article on the 7 Traits of True Leaders, which highlighted Brene Brown’s work that shows the power of embracing vulnerability – of not knowing, of struggling.

Both compassion and suffering are deeply wired in our subcortical brains, as illustrated by two premature twins born in Massachusetts in the 1990s. The flourishing one is comforting the suffering one, which saved her life (Google - The Rescuing Hug - for more details). We share both basic needs and capacities – to suffer and to soothe the suffering.

To close with a little poetry: As Rumi advised (sort of), welcome negative emotions as helpful messengers and guides to growth and development.

What does the research say about improvisation in coaching?

Michael J.B. Read (2013): The importance of improvisation in coaching,

Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice, 6:1, 47-56

Edited excerpt:

In this article, Dr. Michael Read introduces the important skill of  improvisation (spontaneous creativity and innovation) for coaches. His research examines:

1.       To what extent do coaches improvise during their coaching interactions?
2.       How important is improvisation to the coaching process
3.       If improvisation is important, in what coaching situations or activities do coaches utilize improvisation to the greatest extent?

  

With scarce previous empirical investigation of improvisation within coaching, this paper offers meaningful contributions to coaching theory and practice. Of the 113 coaches surveyed, over 73% reported improvisation to be very important or essential, suggesting that for coaches, improvisation is a vital part of their ongoing success. For example, coaches reported that they often improvise during coaching conversations or coaching sessions using a variety of

techniques.

This paper offers a first step towards understanding the relationship between coaching and improvisation. As organizations are thought to perform improvisation regularly, understanding this relationship may prove especially fruitful for coaches seeking constant innovation and for those who wish to lead improvisational acts. Leading client organizations to improvise for survival or recovery may be a valuable coaching skill.

The implications are far reaching; a quick coach decision made at a critical moment may result in much larger consequences. In organizations, it is often the spontaneous decisions or innovative ideas that can make all the difference _even more so in highly productive organizations. This places an importance on coach improvisation as well as conducting research to further extend our knowledge about this concept.

What do you think? Are you using improvisation in your coaching practice? Do you dance in the moment or go with the “flow”? And, more importantly, are you aware of when, how and why you are doing this?

Research Review: Exploring the benefits of being a student coach in educational settings: a mixed-method study

by Christian van Nieuwerburgh & Chloe Tong  (2013) Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Practice, and Research, 6, p. 5-24 . Original article is available is available to members of Institute of Coaching Professional Association.

Special thanks to Brodie Gregory, PhD, Founding Fellow of the ICPA, for providing this summary and implications. 

When it comes to the outcomes and benefits of coaching, most people tend to focus on the experience of the coachee. But what about the coach? In their article, “Exploring the benefits of being a student coach in educational settings: A mixed-method study,” Christian van Nieuwerburgh and Chloe Tong examine the impact of coaching and coach training on coaches.

There are two reasons why this article makes a significant contribution to the coaching literature. First, van Nieuwerburgh and Tong take us outside of the business setting in an examination of coaching in a school setting. Additionally, rather than relying on teachers or external professionals, students take on a coaching role with their peers. Second, van Nieuwerburgh and Tong focus on the impact of coaching and coach training on the coach rather than the coachee. Little research has been devoted to exploring the positive outcomes and personal development opportunities afforded to coaches as a result of their training and coaching experience.

Students selected to be peer coaches participated in a 3-day coaching skills training course that drew on behavioral and cognitive behavioral techniques, as we all Whitmore’s (2002) GROW model. Once peer coaches were matched with younger students of similar gender and with similar interests, coaching dyads met approximately once per week for 9 months.

Van Nieuwerburgh and Tong used both qualitative and quantitative data collection methods to arrive at a number of important conclusions. Student coaches reported a number of positive outcomes as a result of the coach training and their experience as a coach, including improved communication skills (specifically, learning how to ask good questions and really listen), increased self-confidence, improved skill in perspective-taking, and improved relationships with peers, teachers, and even siblings.

These findings have broad implications for both coaching practice and also for application in school settings. How have your coach training and your experience as a coach positively impacted you? We focus so often on outcomes for the coachee… how can coaching researchers build on van Nieuwerburgh and Tong’s work by further exploring the benefits of coaching and coach training on coaching practitioners?

Resiliency

by Carol Kauffman, PhD, Director of Institute of Coaching

Success isn’t about how far you fall; it’s how high you bounce back. What are the ingredients of resilience? How do we get more? I think the building blocks are: optimism, interest in learning from mistakes, self/other compassion, and developing options when you hit the wall.

There is massive research on resilience. One stream of research that comes from positive psychology, particularly the area of “Hope Therapy and Coaching” is CR Snyder’s research on “hope” that strongly predicted performance in over a hundred studies.  His cognitive model of hope includes two main ingredients:  Will power and Way power.  The first is based on a sense of “agency” that you CAN do something. There are many coaching techniques to support empowerment that we all know. But “Waypower?” (For the science deep dive see: Positive Psychology: Scientific and Practical Explorations of human Strengths, Sage publications 2010 or Google CR Snyder)

Brainstorming is the “O” in the famous GROW model of coaching. Did you know there is a vast body of research that shows that highest, most enduring performers can articulate 6 pathways to a goal?  In science-speak: this variable accounts for a significant percentage of the variance of performance in many, many different situations.

A brand new paper ( March 2013) on resilience, linking psychological and biological perspectives, concludes:  Secure attachment, experiencing positive emotions and having a purpose in life are three important psychological building blocks of resiliences. ( abstract: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23488807

What does this say to me?   Often, what we are trained to do as coaches, even if we haven’t learned the theory, turns out to have solid research evidence.  Why is that good to know? Understanding it not only helps your practice, it can help you market what you offer more effectively.

When the job is calling: The role of applying one’s signature strengths at work

by Claudia Harzer and Willibald Ruch, Journal of Positive Psychology, 7(5) p. 362-372, September 2012

Special thanks to Brodie Gregory, PhD for providing this summary

Were you “called” to your line of work? In their recent Journal of Positive Psychology article, Claudia Harzer and Willibaud Ruch suggest that individuals who have a calling view their work as their purpose in life, as opposed to simply a job, source of income, or path to advancement. They predict that when people’s signature strengths are aligned to the demands of their work, they are more likely to experience that work as a calling. Past research has shown that people tend to be drawn to jobs that utilize their signature strengths, and that when signature strengths are applied on the job people experience higher job satisfaction, positive emotion, and meaning in their work.

In their study, Harzer and Ruch confirmed that when individuals use their signature strengths on the job, they are more likely to experience that job as a calling, as well as more likely to experience positive emotions at work. One of the most interesting findings was the importance of how many signature strengths are applied on the job. Harzer and Ruch discovered a “tipping point” between 3 and 4 strengths – such that applying 4 or more strengths on the job resulted in participants a) experiencing more positive emotion at work and b) indicating that their job is a calling. Individuals who applied 3 or fewer signature strengths on the job experienced less positive emotion and did not perceive their jobs as a calling.

Overall, Harzer & Ruch’s findings indicate that people are more inclined to perceive their work to be a calling when it is allows them to apply 4 or more of their signature strengths. How can you use this research in your practice? How can you help clients or colleagues find deeper meaning and experience more positive emotion and job satisfaction in their work? Knowing that higher job satisfaction contributes to reduced turnover and employee withdrawal behaviors, how can you help organizations appeal to their employees’ “callings” and more effectively match their work to their signature strengths?

What's most interesting to you these days?

What's most interesting to you these days?

From Carol Kauffman, PhD, Director of the Institute of Coaching

For me it's high-stakes coaching. When you and your client are on the firing line, the consequences are large, sometimes affecting hundreds of thousands of employees or millions of customers. It's daunting! Our work is also pivotal if one person's career or health is at stake.

What IS most effective at these times? 
In my coaching and supervision practice I'm seeing that, yes, we need to know what we "do" best and pull on all we know, including translating the latest research into good practice. But to coach at the top or with high-stakes challenges we need to cultivate who we are -- our "being" skills. 

Under pressure, we need to be able to hold and emanate opposite qualities. What can be demanded of us is to be highly determined and also not attached to our interventions. We must have clear presence, confidence while simultaneously being ego-free. While we know the ropes and structures, at the same time we need to dance in the emergent process. Last, our "confidence" need not be in ourselves, but to be confident in the processes and power of coaching.

What qualities do you want to cultivate this year? I'm working on calm in the face of frenzy. My success is, well, mixed.

Research Review: An HR perspective on executive coaching for organizational learning”

International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring, 9, 67-79. 2011

Special thanks to Brodie Gregory, PhD for preparing this article

In Alison  Walker-Fraser's 2011 article, “An HR perspective on executive coaching for organizational learning,” Alison Walker-Fraser calls for an evidence-based approach to executive coaching, noting a need to demonstrate “how or why organizations perceive coaching to be a contributor to organizational and leadership performance” (p.67). In short, coaches, researchers, and practitioners need to get serious about producing clear evidence that coaching contributes to both individual and organizational performance.

Walker-Fraser’s study set out to explore the strategic use of coaching as a form of organizational learning, to examine HR perceptions regarding the purpose of executive coaching, to investigate the factors that inform the use of executive coaching in organizations, and to understand the role of HR in demonstrating the ROI of coaching.

Data were collected through interviews with 17 HR professionals. Walker-Fraser found that the use of executive coaching can largely be classified as strategic – aligned to business goals and targeted at senior leaders and high-potential candidates for senior leadership roles – or “ad hoc” – used reactively to address challenges as they arise. Factors that contribute to the strategic v. ad hoc use of executive coaching included organizational culture and HR perceptions regarding the benefits of executive coaching.

Participants also indicated that HR should be responsible for evaluating the outcomes and/or ROI of coaching. Additionally, 41% of participants specifically identified matching individuals with appropriate coaches and having a clearly defined set of goals for the coaching engagement as essential to the success of coaching. Interestingly, however, results indicated no universally accepted criteria for assessing the success and/or impact of coaching. Further, one third of participants reported that their organizations did not engage in any formal process of evaluation for coaching.

One essential takeaway from Walker-Fraser’s study is that the success of executive coaching is largely contingent on strategic connections between coaching and organizations systems and/or strategic HR. Specifically, Walker-Fraser comments that, “effective organizational learning and development requires an integrated approach, in which coaching and or mentoring are situated in the context and culture of the organization, and the internal and external resources that a coach or mentor brings, enabling learning to occur” (p. 73).

So – what does this mean for coaches or HR practitioners?  

1) First and foremost, coaching must be linked to strategic HR processes and business goals in order to be maximally effective and also continue to be perceived as a valuable development tool. 

2)Organizations must identify a set of relevant criteria, based on their needs and expectations, for evaluating the impact, effectiveness, and ROI of coaching. 

Walker-Fraser’s article makes a strong contribution to the coaching literature by providing concrete evidence of the importance of connecting coaching with strategic HR and business goals. 

How can you incorporate these findings into your own practice?