What does ‘any time, any place, anywhere’ look like in a coaching conversation, asks Stephanie Sturges, senior lecturer, Coaching & Mentoring Research Unit (CMRU), Sheffield Business School.
A number of years ago, my colleague and I were exploring with a group of coaches how coaching might be transferred into the workplace, where and when it might be appropriate to coach and how to assist in the development of a coaching culture.
We explored the notion of coaching ‘any time, any place, anywhere’, or as one coaching student termed it, a ‘Martini Moments’ approach to creating coaching culture.
Arnold (2012) has talked about Marmite versus Martini coaches, favouring the former – the latter (those who claim to “just like working with people” and can “coach anyone, any place, any time”) sounding “at best generic, at worst flaky”.
However, our exploration of ‘Martini moments’ was more about the potential flexibility of coaching delivery, context and location. We considered the appropriateness of a four-position framework for embedding a coaching culture: Informal, Unplanned, Planned and Formal. Certainly, it has become more common for coaching and mentoring to form part of the ongoing formal and informal development approaches that managers can provide (Gold, Thorpe and Mumford, 2010).
By highlighting the differing positions, we need to consider what coaching is within the context of the framework, within each dimension and the organisational context in question.
As coaching carries so many definitions and meanings, a number of useful typologies set out different approaches to prompt us. For example, Hawkins and Smith (2006) differentiate coaching types as: skills, performance, development and transformation. They place skills and performance normally in the domain of manager, and development and transformation in
the domain of offline executive coach or mentor.
This may perhaps assist in harnessing a variety of approaches within a framework. Furthermore, Brockbank (2008) offers ‘functionalist’, ‘engagement’ and ‘evolutionary’. Each are linked to the power dynamics that influence coaching type in an organisation where functionalist coaching maintains the status quo, while evolutionary coaching challenges it.
We also need to perhaps consider that types of coaching may reflect a theoretical underpinning influencing the approach and practice.
All of which offer a wonderful range and diversity in coaching when we might consider what Martini moments might look like.
This week, for example, I was helping someone work out how to move forward with an existing problem.
I offered up some questions, some silence and time to think (Kline’s Thinking Environment, 1999), and I listened (Downey’s spectrum of directive/non-directive skills cites ‘listening’ as the peak of non-directive coaching; 2003).
The opportunity presented itself in the moment, took a couple of minutes, and was an unplanned coaching intervention offered in formal setting in a non-judgmental, supportive yet challenging way. It could equally have been done in any informal context. This starts to express what some aspects of Martini moments coaching might be.
Was this simply the application of coaching skills and/or the provision of questions with space to think?
Is coaching always formal and planned? Can everyone share Martini moments? Does this raise the debate about what coaching is and is not?
References
C Arnold, “Accounting for Taste”, Coaching at Work, vol 7, issue 4, 2012
A Brockbank, “Is coaching fit for purpose? A typology of coaching and learning approaches”, in International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice, 1(2), September 2008, pp132–44
M Downey, Effective Coaching: Lessons from the Coach’s Coach, 2nd ed, Mason, OH: Texere, 2003
J Gold, R Thorpe and A Mumford, Leadership and Management Development, 5th ed, London: CIPD, 2010
N Kline, Time to Think: Listening to Ignite the Human Mind, London: Octopus Publishing Group Ltd, 1999
P Hawkins and N Smith, Coaching, Mentoring and Organizational Consultancy; Supervision and Development, Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill/OUP, 2006
Coaching at Work, Volume 8, Issue 5