A person cannot teach another person directly; a person can only facilitate another’s learning.
Carl Rogers, psychologist
In this chapter we will introduce you to three of the most popular contemporary coaching approaches:
You will find that these approaches have some commonalities and most of them have been developed based on some of the fundamental principles of coaching that we discussed in the early part of this book. You will often find these concepts being referred to in coaching communities, and as leaders, or managers as coaches, you should be aware of the basic ideas and principles relating to each of them. In each case we will offer references where you can explore them more thoroughly.
Person-centred coaching is largely attributed to Carl Rogers, who described its theory and background in detail in his book Client-Centred Therapy (1951). For the purposes of this book we will highlight some of the key aspects of person-centred coaching, which have been adapted from Rogers’s original theory, as it applies to you the leader or manager as a coach in today’s business world.
Rogers worked with five key assumptions when he developed his theories about person-centred learning:
Many current-day coaching, counselling, mentoring and psychotherapy practices have been developed based on Rogers’s work. The main reason for this is that there is now much evidence to suggest that by using person-centred approaches you are more likely to lead the coachee to implementation of ideas and thus lasting change. So what does person-centred coaching mean for you, in practice?
First of all and most importantly, it is about focusing on the needs of the individual you are coaching – listening, questioning, observing and responding to their needs. By using these approaches you will encourage them to explore and work with you on the issue, and help them to develop their own plans, ideas and conclusions.
Your role will then be to use the five assumptions together with tools from your coaching toolkit to encourage the coachee to find their own solutions and to set realistic goals for change. Some of the tools you can use are explained in Chapter 16.
Person-centred coaching requires you to have patience, to be creative and to focus exclusively on the individual you are working with and their issue. This type of coaching requires you to be at your most flexible and have the ability to adapt, adjust and use approaches that will work for the coachee and their situation.
Dreams are extremely important. You can’t do it unless you can imagine it.
George Lukas
Another way of coaching is to look at what we can learn from appreciative practice. Appreciative practice owes its origins to work by David Cooperrider and his supervisor Suresh Srivastva, when he was studying for his PhD at Case Western Reserve University in the United States. David and his supervisor Suresh then went on to create the practice called ‘appreciative inquiry’ which is described in detail in Cooperrider’s book Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Revolution in Change. Using different forms of appreciative inquiry has become an increasingly popular approach in coaching and the term ‘appreciative coaching’ is now quite widely used.
We first encountered appreciative inquiry (AI) in 2000 where we also had the pleasure of meeting and working with Frank Barret, one of the co-founders of AI. Since appreciative coaching is based on the work of AI, it’s worthwhile knowing a little bit more about it before we look at some of the things you can do in appreciative coaching.
There are a number of principles on which the concept of appreciative practice is based, and these are:
Although this can be difficult for the coachee – many people automatically react by saying there is no such thing as a miracle – it is important to be persistent and ask them just to suspend their disbelief and try to create this new picture and scenario in their mind. In our coaching practice we have observed and experienced just how powerful the miracle question can be.
Appreciative inquiry is used in many fields and often when dealing with change. There are four stages in AI, known as the four D’s. The four D’s are used to help participants create a different perspective of the change and then to work with others to co-create the change.
The four stages are:
When used in coaching, the Discovery stage would focus on finding out more about the issue, and the person’s involvement, relationships and emotions around the issue. You would want to know what is going on, not to try to solve the issue but to help the coachee become more aware of, and clarify, their thoughts and feelings.
In the Dream phase you would want to explore potential and vision. What does the coachee want to achieve? What is their vision or their dream? What is their potential? What are their strengths and resources?
In the Design phase you would concentrate on creating actions, and look at specific actions and behaviours. What will the coachee do differently? How will they behave? What new practices and behaviours can they choose? How can they embed these different routines and behaviours? What small steps can they take that moves them in the desired direction?
In the Destiny phase you would look at how to maintain the changes and ensure that they are sustainable.
A nice way of summing up what appreciative inquiry is all about is given by Professor Gervase Bushe of Simon Fraser University in Canada. According to Professor Bushe: ‘Appreciative Inquiry advocates collective inquiry into the best of what is, in order to imagine what could be, followed by collective design of a desired future state that is compelling and thus, does not require the use of incentives, coercion or persuasion for planned change to occur.’
Building on this definition and linking it to coaching practice you could build the following model of appreciative coaching:
To summarise, appreciative coaching is one more tool at your disposal to help you become a more effective coach. You probably won’t use all the techniques, but you can borrow some of the methodologies described above in your everyday coaching.
The solution focus (SF) approach to coaching is an adaptation of a therapeutic model that came from the Milwaukee Institute of Solution Focused Brief Therapy where Steve de Shazer, Insoo Kim Berg and their colleagues practised what was then a radical approach to therapy. Paul Z. Jackson and Mark McKergow’s book Solutions Focus: Making Coaching and Change SIMPLE gives a clear account of how you can use SF in business and coaching.
There are some basic assumptions and principles underlying the SF approach to coaching:
In the solution-focused approach it isn’t necessary to delve into the roots of the problem or analyse the problem in detail. The focus, as its name suggests, is towards developing solutions, and in particular the coachee’s own solutions. This is achieved through a variety of steps and processes which involve, first, finding the Platform – that is, what are we here to do today? Then you can move to Counters, which means asking about the coachee’s strengths and resources. What do they have that will help them overcome their issue? Then you would ask Scaling questions – in other words where are they on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being high? If for example the coachee says they are a 3 then you can ask where they would like to be? What would it be like if they were at 5? What would they be doing? Saying? Feeling? Then you would move on to asking about what small steps could the coachee take in the right direction and then give some positive affirmations to the coachee, before perhaps asking them to try out a different way of doing things before your next session.
Imagine you are in a coaching situation and you were asking the following problem-focused questions. How do you think the coachee would react?
Compare that with the following solution-focused questions:
These are much more positive, will give much more energy to the coachee and enable them to think positively about the strengths and resources they already have.
In summary, the SF approach focuses on exploring possible solutions rather than delving too deeply into the ‘problem’. It tries to build on success and look at what works and then encourage people to do more of what works. It looks to discover skills and competencies that the coach already has, and which they might not even be aware of. And it stresses the importance of taking small steps in the right direction rather than huge leaps that might not actually happen.
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