Occupational psychologist, coach and supervisor, Margaret Chapman-Clarke’s love of learning has kept her one step ahead of the game, she tells Liz Hall
Margaret Chapman-Clarke has been described as a ‘quiet mover and shaker’. She’s often behind the scenes, observing, researching, integrating and, yes, shaking things up with insightful questions and innovations.
A former HR director, Margaret’s an occupational psychologist, coach and coaching supervisor, and a prolific author and speaker in fields including emotional intelligence (EI), and now mindfulness and compassion.
One client, Sarah Kivlin, organisation development lead – Talent Team, Group Human Resources at Cambridge Assessment, describes Margaret as a “dedicated learner, ahead of the game”, saying that often the ideas and thoughts she hears from Margaret “become the norm and new way of doing years later”. This same client also describes Margaret as a “hybrid”, someone comfortable in both the “real” world and the academic world with her “passion for learning”.
This ability to have a well-placed foot in both the practical and academic worlds, combined with her generosity around sharing her ideas, have been much appreciated during her tenure as a member of Coaching at Work’s editorial advisory board. Although she’s now stepping down, Margaret’s been a valued and high-contributing member since its inception in 2005. And I’ve come to appreciate the authenticity, honesty and integrity she brings to her relationships.
Her pioneering spirit has led to a string of firsts, including in 2001 asking whether EI is a ‘critical competency or passing fad?’ and publishing the first practitioner text The Emotional Intelligence Pocketbook, and then in 2003, kicking off a conversation around the psychology of coaching in a special issue of The Occupational Psychologist.
In 2011, she was the first occupational psychologist (OP) to speak, write about and facilitate masterclasses in organisational applications of mindfulness and its transition into the workplace, and the first OP to be appointed to the Board of Trustees of Oxford Mindfulness Centre, to help shape its strategy.
In 2014 she ‘discovered’ and argued for the relevance of auto-ethnography in mindfulness, and created the ‘Mindfulness in the Midlands’ peer community.
In 2015, she called for a return to auto-ethnography in coaching practice (ed. Hall, 2015) and last May (2016) she invited contributors to use an auto-ethnographic approach in the first evidence-based practitioner text on mindfulness-based interventions in the workplace (ed. Chapman-Clarke, 2016). She’s now involved, with Liz Hall in creating the first International Journal for Mindfulness and Compassion at Work, and with Liz and Association for Coaching Spain chair Luis San Martin, the 1st International Summit for Mindfulness and Compassion at Work, on 25 May, in Madrid. Her keynote will be on workplace mindfulness.
Ideas into practice
When asked what she most cares about at work, she says, “I have a curiosity for ideas, which is about constant learning and open-mindedness. But then I want to do something with them. That’s the pragmatist in me. I want to be able to take an idea, translate it into something and share it.
“As a knowledge entrepreneur, usually it starts with lots of people talking about it, it’s become a phenomena, and I go, OK, I‘m curious. I read, then I translate it into my own field, such as people development.”
Growing up
Margaret’s love of learning marked her out in the “emotional and educational hinterland” in which she grew up.
“I remember feeling very different to my siblings, to my family. I grew up in a non-nourishing and non-enriching environment. They never believed I’d leave my long-term boyfriend and go into the Army” (which she joined as soon as was legally able, at 16 years, eight months).
She now has two degrees, two masters’ (hopefully a doctorate) and a host of postgraduate and professional qualifications.
She believes her different path has been due partly to people she’s met along the way, including a ‘vibrant’ personnel officer and her boss, Mr Pilling, who both worked at the local hospital where she was first employed and later, in her early coaching days, the late Mike van Oudtshoorn, founder of i-coach academy.
“Words change minds,” she says. But it’s also down to her resilience and courage, which a cousin highlighted to her recently, saying she was “the only one that got away”.
Career trajectory
Mr Pilling would talk often of his late daughter who had served in the Army, and soon Margaret left to join the Women’s Royal Army Corps. Trained as a data telegraphist, she was attached to the Royal Signals, and served in the Regular and Territorial Army until 1988.
Inspired by the vibrant personnel officer, in the mid-1980s, Margaret went into HR with the National Westminster Bank Group (Lombard Finance). She rapidly moved from being PA to the assistant head of personnel (HOP). And when she complained to the HOP after just three months that she wasn’t being stretched, her boss challenged her to become the Group’s first job analyst.
The “best move ever”, this offered her an opportunity to see how the organisational system worked. She trained with the Hay Group and worked with external consultants; interviewed people about their jobs; wrote job descriptions, put forward recommendations and argued for grades at job evaluation panels.
“I recall saying to the CEO that he could halve his workforce and enrich people’s jobs!”
She achieved her IPM (Institute of Personnel Management, now CIPD) qualifications, one of only two in a department of 90 to do so, and was appointed head of HR for a software firm in the City in 1989, another pioneering role.
“It was a culture shock, [going from working with] a large PM Handbook for what managers couldn’t do, to creating an HR function from scratch, to support a high-growth, rapidly moving SME. I loved it.”
In 1993, she moved to Yorkshire to be with her now husband, Robin, then a senior police officer. She turned down director roles, instead taking a job paying a quarter of the salary in a government quango in marketing, North Yorkshire Training and Enterprise Council.
“It was a new creative role to design and develop outsourced HR services for all firms across North Yorkshire employing fewer than 50.
“My most successful outcome from that time was being one of a handful of Training and Enterprise Councils (TECs) that made an initiative called ‘Skills for Small Business’ a success. I minimised the bureaucracy.”
Getting into coaching
During this time, coaching and mentoring became more of a focus. After she left the TEC in 1995, she studied full-time, funded by the Institute of Work Psychology to study for her first masters’: in Occupational Psychology at the University of Sheffield. She’d got her first degree in psychology, learning with the Open University, part-time, over five years.
“I loved the year at Sheffield and this sparked my desire to want to go into academia. My masters’ dissertation was with Skipton Building Society (SBS) and the work I did had a significant impact, both on SBS becoming an exemplar in the field of mentoring and my own career trajectory.”
That SBS remains at the forefront of people development through coaching and mentoring is one her “proudest achievements”.
After her MSc, for which she was awarded a distinction, she went into consultancy and specialised in mentoring, with colleagues securing a contract with Cambridge TEC to help SMEs implement mentoring systems and train mentors. After the consultancy ceased trading, she went into private practice, focusing on leadership, team and organisational development. She continued to offer mentoring skills workshops and working one-to-one, but wasn’t yet calling it coaching.
“I recognised that something was happening in and around 2000. I’d come across the work by Dr Tony Grant and as a psychologist, his work had resonance and (it seemed) coaching psychology could become established.”
Also in the early 2000s, counselling psychologist/therapists, through the work of Stephen Palmer, were similarly coming to this conclusion. With Prof. Palmer at the helm, Margaret, along with colleagues including Drs Alison Whybrow, Ho Law and Jonathan Passmore, helped form the British Psychological Society Special Group in Coaching Psychology.
She then went on to design and facilitate (2004-7) the UK’s first Psychology of Coaching programme for the CIPD, serving on its Coaching & Mentoring and Psychology of Leadership faculties.
“It’s testimony to how innovative that programme was that it’s still in the CIPD portfolio and inspired some of my early participants to form their own coach-training organisations.”
In 2006, she joined Manchester Business School and helped establish coaching as a distinct income stream, securing the School’s first contract to “develop a coaching community” with the NHS. This incorporated reflexive practice (supervision) groups, masterclasses and workshops. She also established an internal coaching peer-practice group and bought in external speakers to help reflect on practice and share experiences.
She worked with the alumni relations manager to set up the first Business School Coach-Referral Service.
“Embodiment of an approach in coaching cannot be manufactured and in our interviews we looked for this, using our own ‘felt sense’ as a way of checking out the authenticity of what a coach said, with their presence.
“We appointed coaches globally and our work was featured in The Guardian. It was leading edge and something I enjoyed help make happen.”
A senior fellow in executive education, as coaching lead she loved being in a university and outward-facing. However, the 2008 economic crunch forced her to leave as she was living in the East Midlands and commuting to Manchester, unable to sell their home.
She re-established her private practice, training as a coach supervisor with Bath Consultancy and delivering coach workshops, and coaching for personal development. She was appointed by Health Education England to provide coaching to junior doctors and specialist registrars.
From 2008 her journey as a coaching practitioner has broadened to include research, writing and speaking internationally about the relationship between EI and coaching. She has now turned to exploring the relationship between EI, mindfulness and compassion at work.
Underpinnings
As a chartered and registered psychologist, Margaret “naturally” draws on models of human development and believes “an understanding of cognitive and social psychology is vital to understand the individual in their system”.
The late Prof. van Oudtshoorn said to Margaret in 2000 that “as a psychologist, don’t do a coaching course – go back to our roots and train in the original psychological models”.
“So that’s what I have done. Ten years’ training in gestalt psychotherapy; gestalt coaching, including spending time in 2008 in Esalen, California, the spiritual home of gestalt, working with key players in the UK and US.
“I’m drawn to gestalt because the training is about who you are in the world and how you relate to yourself and others. It is EI and mindfulness in action, underpinned by openness and compassion [with the intention] to bring all that you can to support another human being in their relationship with themselves and to help them navigate their place in a VUCA world.
“It’s tough out there and I see this embodied in those coaching clients with whom I work. They’re highly educated, successful and at the heart of it, trying to make sense of a world of busyness in which they feel trapped. [The] GROW [model] isn’t going to help them find an answer – they need space for an exploration so they can reach their ‘own truth’ in a post-Brexit and Trump world.”
Margaret’s also interested in narrative approaches, is trained to advanced master practitioner level in NLP, and has trained in cognitive behavioural coaching with Stephen Palmer and in coaching happiness with Robert Holden.
She draws on existential therapy (training with Emmy van Deurzen and Ernesto Spinelli) and cognitive behavioural therapy (Oxford University) and recently trained as a mindfulness based stress reduction and mindfulness based cognitive therapy teacher at Bangor and
Oxford Universities.
She also has an advanced diploma and masters’ in education, “all about how we learn and adult models/theories of learning that underpin and inform coaching practice”.
Other CPD includes constellations work, body as consultant and masterclasses in coaching supervision and reflexive practice.
The research she conducted in her doctoral work was designed for coaches and the ‘data’ was their experiences captured through reflexive/free writing. She designed the method ‘Playing with Nine Words’ (Coaching at Work, vol 10, issue 6), with each coach writing a poem a week. “This had a powerful impact on me.”
In 2016, she attended Jackee Holder’s masterclass organised by Coaching at Work. “It was great to connect with other coaches who engage in creative writing and use it in their practice. I felt as if I had come home.” (For an example of Margaret’s poetry go here: http://bit.ly/2llAtk3)
A vision
In addition to her many influences, she cites gestalt practitioners and coaches, Pete Bluckert and John Leary Joyce, and mentoring experts Kathy Kram and Bob Garvey.
She also cites Stephen Palmer “for his skill in knowledge entrepreneurship and taking coaching forward”, and Dr Ho Law and Liz Hall “for their generosity of spirit, innovation, common humanity and support to me and my ideas”.
What has Margaret observed about the evolution of coaching, and what is her vision for the profession?
“The field has matured and the key bodies are now collaborating. We tried to do this in 2004 and it was a little early. Coaching is now at the stage, like many emerging professions, of looking to gain credibility. This means standardisation, needing to demonstrate evidence against competencies.
“However, these have taken on a life of their own and it’s easy to forget they were forged by a small handful of people who were passionate about helping people to be all they can be, through one-to-one conversations. I wonder how many of us, if we had to go through these processes would meet the criteria!
“Even though I am trained and experienced in developing and assessing competencies, I think we have to be careful that in our desire to move beyond what’s been called the Wild West of coaching, we don’t lose that special protective space where clients can engage in conversations about their meaning in life in this VUCA world.
“We have to continue to focus on building the relationship, creating space and having presence so clients can open up and explore things.
“We need to stop talking about competencies and mastery and get back to what it means to be engaged in a conversation with another human being who’s suffering.”