Written by Chris Munro, Executive Director, Growth Coaching International
Although a relatively young field, research has confirmed the positive effects of workplace coaching. These positive effects range from improvements in self-efficacy and wellbeing to behavioural change including leadership skills, performance, and skill development.
So why are coaching, and coaching approaches, a good fit in educational contexts? Here are seven great reasons:
- Conversations Move Things Forward
The way people talk with each other is at the heart of relationships and change. Education and learning are sustained by the quality of interactions and relationships between individuals and within groups. The conscious way we act and contribute in different conversational contexts can positively impact relationships and help others move towards their goals. Coaching conversations are essentially helping conversations. Conversations that help another individual think with more clarity, feel more hopeful and ultimately exert greater influence on their situation.
- Coaching Conversations are Respectful Conversations
Coaching conversations are empowering interactions that enable agency. The coachee is in the driving seat and their contextual experience, knowledge and identity are the starting points for change. A skilled coach (or coach-like leader) builds on the resources of the coachee to raise awareness, enable insight and build resourcefulness. The coachee is the expert in their world and best placed to act on it.
- Coaching is a Way of Leading
A coaching-based approach to leadership is the best-fit style for contemporary organisations. Coaching leaders are excellent communicators and build trusting relationships. They acknowledge and build the strengths of their team members, offer and receive constructive feedback, and are solution focused. Coach-like leadership serves the thinking and progress of team members as they navigate the complexities of their work. Motivated employees are supported in their ongoing professional growth, feel a sense of purpose and value in their work and have a sufficient degree of autonomy over the way they go about it.
- Professional Conversations Between Colleagues Work Best with a Coaching Approach
Adopting a coaching approach in colleague-to-colleague interactions helps build engagement, leading to action. Conversations about professional practice are enhanced using coaching skills and an awareness of conversational dynamics – we can all become better conversation leaders for each other. Respectfully curious conversations between colleagues build connection and contextual empathy as well as enhancing collaboration and collective efficacy. A coaching approach to interactions engenders a sense of responsibility and supportive accountability that compels us to action.
- Coaching Builds Supportive Accountability
Integral to the coaching approach is a focus on next step action and follow up. Effective coaching conversations provide supportive accountability rather than top-down accountability by supporting the coachee in their quest for greater clarity and helping them to identify positive progress. Supportive accountability is created in the coaching relationship when the coachee thinks through and commits to their own small step actions. Momentum based on signs of progress emerge over a series of follow-up conversations.
- On-the-job and In-the-moment Professional Learning
Skilfully facilitated conversations about challenges of practice can often be transformational. Coaching conversations are a form of job-embedded professional learning. They happen as ‘close to the action’ as we can get, enabling praxis – the intersection between new learning, reflection, and action in the real-life context. By noticing what’s working and witnessing and celebrating tangible progress towards goals, motivation and hopefulness increase resulting in further striving for that next ‘personal best’.
- Coaching is the Missing Link in Sustaining Change
Change is hard, but coaching helps transform good intentions into great results. As adult learners, our practice and ‘default settings’ are inextricably linked to our experiences, beliefs, values, assumptions, and identity. Changing these default settings often requires critical reflection, new learning, and conscious effort. Coaching helps support an iterative process of incremental change towards compelling goals. It acknowledges that habit change takes time, needs support, and happens in a series of small steps.
It has been said that, “If you change the conversation, then there is every chance you will change everything that surrounds it – your relationships with colleagues, how you get on with your family and friends, your very ability to accomplish whatever you want.” (Jackson & Waldman, 2011, p.7). Interactions between school leaders and teachers; between teachers and teachers; between teachers and administrators; and between teachers and parents, make up the greater part of school life. Perhaps even more importantly, in schools and other education settings, the learning conversations between teachers and students are at the heart of the matter. Learning and leadership are enacted through conversation. Indeed, it can be argued that education is the natural home of coaching (Campbell & van Nieuwerburgh, 2018, p.3).