The relational turn in executive coaching

Citation

de Haan, E. and Sills, C. (2010), "The relational turn in executive coaching", Journal of Management Development, Vol. 29 No. 10. https://doi.org/10.1108/jmd.2010.02629jaa.001

The relational turn in executive coaching

Article Type: Guest editorial From: Journal of Management Development, Volume 29, Issue 10

About the Guest Editors

Erik de HaanDirector of the Ashridge Centre for Coaching and Programme Director of AMEC, the Ashridge Masters in Executive Coaching, and ACOS, the Ashridge Postgraduate Certificate in Coaching Supervision. He is also a visiting professor at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam and an experienced organisation consultant. He has published widely in the fields of executive coaching, action learning, politics and power in organisations, and OD consulting.

Charlotte SillsCoach and Coach Supervisor and Co-director of the Coaching for Organisation Consultants programme at Ashridge Business School, UK. She is a visiting professor at Middlesex University and was for many years head of the Transactional Analysis Department at Metanoia Institute, UK where she is still a senior tutor and supervisor. She has published widely in the fields of psychotherapy, coaching and supervision.

In this field of “executive coaching”, which is supposed to be “all about the client”, there is a strange bias towards describing models, approaches and, more generally, the coach – as opposed to the client. Perhaps understandably, executive coaches have written mostly about themselves, what they do and what models they prefer or find effective. There are many reasons for this bias:

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  Historical motives. When introducing new ideas, authors tend to emphasise their differences from existing ideas and approaches and they have to amplify these differences if they want to gain an audience and a representation in the field. This creates a coach-centred literature base, with ever more authors studying the proposed methods and responding from their own experience and convictions.

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  Commercial motives. When coaches advertise their services and attempt to win clients, they need to talk about what they have to offer, their methods, how they are effective and how much they add value. Clients contribute to this fallacy of “buying a coach” rather than “buying a process” or “starting a commitment” which would be nearer the truth.

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  Motives of convenience. It is so much easier just to think of coaching in terms of what we offer and what we do, rather than inquiring into the unknown and messy perspective of what the client might be bringing to the table, and what the client might be contributing to the session’s methodology and philosophy.

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  Motives of allegiance. When a coach gets educated and trained, and particularly when this schooling (or self-study) is successful, he does not only learn about coaching, he does not only learn about clients, himself, and methodology: he also learns to embrace an approach, a system, a role model and/or a school of thought. Factors of allegiance and even dogmatism have long been underestimated in the development of coaches.

These factors do not only conspire to create a very self-conscious and coach-centred profession, but they also contribute to making the field even more rivalrous than a field of knowledge-intensive service provision would anyway be.

Why focus on the relationship? A unifying force

In recent years, we have seen the emergence of a countervailing force to reckon with, a force that both directs us back to the diversity and uniqueness of our clients and also especially to the relationship between coach and client. This “relational turn”, as it is called, is striking in that it is mirrored in many areas of life – not only has it become a key area of interest in coaching and psychotherapy, but also in such diverse fields as organisation consulting, philosophy, modern physics and even modern architecture and haute cuisine.

Several factors contribute to this trend: developments in neuroscience have revealed the way that relationship is essential to the development of a stable and coherent sense of self in infancy and studies in human behaviour show how early relational patterns become the template for later relating to the world; quantum physics describes the influence of the relationship with the observer on the outcome of observation; and today’s leading organisational thinkers see an organisation not as a structural entity but as a complex web of communicative interaction where patterns emerge and dissolve (see Critchley in this issue for a more in depth view of the elements of relational thinking in organisations). In addition, ideas of social constructionism point us to the co-created nature of meaning-making, while research into relating recognises intersubjectivity, the powerful mutual influencing of all relationships. As coaches we are influenced by all these trends. Moreover, in these days of global teams, fast turn-over of staff, and pressure for quick results, people are feeling ever more isolated and unsupported. Much of the traditional support of colleagues and communities seems to have fallen away, which means that professional helping relationships are in high demand.

There is another powerful factor in creating the relational turn in coaching, and that is the force of the high-level, in-depth effectiveness studies coming out of the adjacent field of psychotherapy. These studies could only have been conducted to such breadth and rigour in that particular field because the large institutions that pay for up to 80 per cent of those services (for example, the National Health Service in Britain, the government in some other European countries and the large medical insurance companies in the USA) have been able and willing to pour millions of dollars into rigorous quantitative research, because of the value of the cost savings they would make by having hard data about effectiveness. This research included meta-analysis of the vast quantity of outcome studies that has been carried out in the field of psychotherapy over the last more than 50 years. These studies involve numerous approaches and methodologies and have managed to reach a clear picture about effectiveness and the “active ingredients” of therapy, which have gradually found broad agreement among therapists and others. Coaching is a relatively new profession so it has been very useful to coaches to acknowledge the similarities between the two fields and discover what they can learn from this research. Coaches can look again at their effectiveness and find a new way of practising that hones exactly what seems to be most effective. For a detailed discussion of the outcome research literature and its relevance to relational coaching, see De Haan (2008). Here, we summarise some of the most important findings.

Common factors: the ones that count

This “great psychotherapy debate”, neatly summarised in Wampold’s (2001) book of that title, has demonstrated essentially, that:

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  Psychotherapy is highly effective, on a par with psychiatric medicine; in other words one-to-one learning works!

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  None of the main psychotherapy approaches studied enjoys enhanced effectiveness by comparison to the others – in competent hands, they are all equally effective.

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  In consequence, all of the specific active ingredients identified are common to all professional approaches. These are the so-called common factors.

Common factors have to do with the setting (for example, meeting at regular intervals, creating an expectation that things may get better), with the client who wants to be helped (for example, the client’s expectations and support networks), with the coach (for example, warmth, quality of listening) and finally with the relationship (the client feels understood and accepted, there is mutual trust and agreement about the contract).

Some of the common factors with the highest impact on outcome are beyond the control of coach and client, for example their temperament. However, there are some factors over which the coach can have control and it behoves us as coaches to focus on them:

1. 1.

   Allegiance. One that has been demonstrated to have a high contribution to outcome is the common factor known as “allegiance”, i.e. how convinced the coach is that their own ideology, methods and technique is the right one. Paradoxically, outcome research tells us not to diminish allegiance, even though we can safely diminish adherence to our models. In other words, a coach should not stick rigidly to their model but be able to be flexible in response to the needs of their client. However, they must nevertheless have a model – a theory of human beings and of change – that they believe in and which makes sense to their client. This means we now have a situation where while the specific contribution of each specific school has been demonstrated to be of little relevance, nonetheless the therapist’s allegiance to their own specific school is a common factor to reckon with.

2. 2.

   Hope. The meta-analyses of randomised control studies show that there is a rather high outcome for hope (being on a waiting list), placebo (being in a conversation other than a therapeutic one, that the client believes will help) and self-help (working on one’s own with the help of a manual). All in all having a lower outcome than the real thing, still these alternatives to therapy accomplish about half of its effectiveness. At the same time these results hint at a factor that is within the control of the sessions, call it self-motivation, self-efficacy or hope as you will. Clients will often ask “Can you help me?” or “What can I expect from doing this coaching?” or just generally “How am I doing as a client?” These can be seen as opportunities for coaches to at least not diminish their hopes, and consider working explicitly on self-confidence and self-motivation by giving active support, a compliment, or a “hopeful” view. In fact, we think this factor is subtly linked to the allegiance we mentioned above: hope is the client’s allegiance to the process, the sessions and the work, something we might strengthen explicitly or by demonstrating our own allegiance and trust.

3. 3.

   Relationship. The only other common factor that is fully under the control of the client and coach together is the relationship. Coaching and consulting are relational practices and the relationship is established solely by two people agreeing to work together and building an alliance and mutual commitment. Relationship has been shown to be the single best predictor of outcome of therapy, in such a way that it is not only the quality of the relationship in the final session that is a good predictor of final outcome (which would be a trivial finding), but the quality of the relationship in the first sessions as well. It is generally thought a helpful relationship is one that the client experiences as empathic, respectful and non-judgmental. The fact that relationship has received such a boost in the quantitative research results has helped a wide range of professionals to explore whether they can work more explicitly on their relationship with their clients as it is co-created in the room, by acknowledging:

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     Human beings are deeply motivated to be in relationship with others, so part of what we (client and coach) hope from this relationship might be to repeat our previous relational patterns and through awareness of this, create better ones, both within and outside this room.

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     All content of coaching can be seen as relational, i.e. clients are continually even if subliminally linking relationships elsewhere (real and imagined) to this relationship – and so, of course, are coaches.

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     This coaching relationship is worth exploring at all times, for the learning contained within it.

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     The client’s experience of the coaching relationship is worth strengthening.

Considerations such as these have brought a great unifying, integrating force to bear on coaching and consulting, a force which is now shifting the profession’s attention away from the minutiae of specific approaches. We now have large communities of relational consultants, we have relational gestalt (see for example Critchley’s article in this issue), relational behavioural coaching (see for example Visser’s article in this issue), relational psychoanalysis (see for example Day’s article in this issue), relational TA (see for example Hargaden and Sills, 2002), and many others. On the one hand, this is not new: nobody would deny that there is such a thing as a relationship in our work and that it is worth strengthening this “rapport” or “working alliance”. More so, if we are entirely honest, we have to admit that we have always been preoccupied by our coaching relationships and by our own feelings about the relationship. On the other hand, now there is a way of thinking that gives us permission to attend fully to the relationships we are in and to what happens at that relational level. Enhancing and reflecting on the relationship in this way, as it evolves from moment to moment, is a radical new proposition. Many and diverse people are being brought together under this banner as they begin to look at the complexity of what happens between coach and client.

The relational turn is a bit like a Fourier transformation in physics: suddenly you stop seeing the separate bits and the pieces, the issues and the comments. You start looking at a field which permeates all the remarks, comments and issues, a field which is all to do with the conversation itself, with the feel of what is present in this very moment, and with the quality of our relationship whilst we are talking, listening, advising, challenging.

The big questions in relational coaching

We identify three important questions, which are still open and unresolved within this new field of relational coaching, three questions which some of the articles in this special issue will address:

1. 1.

   If we know that the relationship, through the eyes of the client, is likely to be the best predictor of successful outcome, how then do we strengthen that (view of the) relationship? What happens between coach and client that helps to build the sort of empathic connection that is so important? What creates ruptures in the relationship and how can they be repaired?

2. 2.

   To what degree might it be useful to raise the client’s awareness about this “here-and-now” relationship? It is common practice in relational coaching to focus explicitly, in collaboration with the client, on what happens in the coaching relationship itself, believing that important information about relational patterns emerges in the process of relating. The research does not explicitly support this stance and yet it seems to follow naturally as an adjunct to working relationally.

3. 3.

   Knowing that it is the relationship that counts, and that coach and client are engaged in a process of mutual influencing, how far should the coach go in living out a “radical” mutuality, with substantial focus on self and self-disclosure? Might this distract from the core agenda of the client? Might the essential asymmetry of the coaching contract get lost? How does the coach manage the ethics and boundaries of a relationship that is mutual but not symmetrical?

Overview of the articles in this issue

Above we have sketched one way into relational coaching: through quantitative research outcomes. The first two articles of this issue show two other ways in, two other allegiances, and they are both steeped in coaching practice. In the opening article Bill Critchley offers his personal rationale for the relational approach, bringing together ideas from developmental psychology, organisation theory and neurobiology amongst others. Then Andrew Day focuses particularly on a psychoanalytic view of repeating relational dynamics as they emerge and are co-created in the (transferential) coaching relationship.

In an article that goes under the surface of collaborative relationships, Simon Cavicchia shines a light on a prevailing form of anxiety in work and coaching, stemming from the felt pressure to be superhuman. He explores how this pressure to perform can lead to feelings of shame which threaten to engulf coaches’ competence.

Max Visser and Elaine Robinson analyse specific approaches within a general relational framework. Visser demonstrates how the modern behavioural systems approach can be useful for relational coaches. He illustrates its use to reflect on the coaching relationship with the use of a coaching vignette. Robinson demonstrates how narrative techniques, inspired by metaphor, use of language and story-telling enable sense-making and interpretation within the coaching relationship and shared reflective practice.

The final article focuses specifically on the topic of client-coach matching and its impact on coaching outcome. Lisa Boyce, Jeffrey Jackson and Laura Neal studied 74 coach-client relationships in the context of a US military academy, where clients were cadets and coaches were senior military leaders who had had some training in executive coaching. Their findings confirm the importance of the coaching relationship for effectiveness and shed new light on the matching process.

Acknowledgements

The Guest Editors wish to thank colleagues Robina Chatham, David Clutterbuck, Anna Duckworth, Maria Gilbert, Peter Hawkins, Carla Millar, John Nuttall, Diana Shmukler and Gerard Wijers who have all reviewed articles in this issue, and helped them to provide good feedback to a much wider range of authors who had submitted to this special issue. Special thanks go to Liz Ainslie, who has provided invaluable help with processing review forms, making submissions fully anonymous, and processing countless versions of each article.

Corresponding author

Charlotte Sills can be contacted at: charlotte.sills@ashridge.org.uk