How can coaches use evidence more effectively in their practice? Peter Jackson reports
Coaches put considerable effort into their professional development: reading magazines such as Coaching at Work, attending seminars and doing additional skills training. But are we making best use of the available evidence? I’ve been looking at the issue of translating research knowledge into practice.
When we visit a doctor, we probably expect them not only to be skilful but also very knowledgeable about a whole range of things like physiology, anatomy and pharmacology. Not only does enormous effort go into learning the basics in all these contributory fields of knowledge, but also in keeping up to date with the current state of knowledge.
In coaching, we’re working with a much younger discipline in which less definitive knowledge has been established. To be fair, it’s also a discipline in which our decision-making might not be as critically important to our client’s well-being as that of a doctor – it’s the client after all who’s making the decisions. Still, it’s implicit in the very idea of coaching as a professional discipline that there are some practices demonstrably more effective than others. Why would we all be so keen on our listening skills if developing these had no effect?
Anthony Grant (2016) argues that professional practitioners should be making “intelligent and conscientious use of relevant and best current knowledge”. Creating this knowledge is the very purpose of the serious, robust research published in academic journals, and gathering it in one place is the aim of initiatives such as that of the Future of Coaching Collaboration Group: http://bit.ly/31JCM6D
Yet, it’s probably fair to say that most of us as coaches find a set of tools, a method or an approach that suits us and we more or less build up around that core. For many of us, this core will be determined by the particular training programme we attended. Gradually, we accumulated techniques, ideas and the odd new tool. In a small study I carried out into how coaches chose what methods to use, this process of adding on techniques more or less followed Bandura’s (1977) framework of which experiences best predicted self-efficacy.
Bandura predicts that our confidence in being able to carry out a skill or task is going to be most influenced by the experience of personal mastery. In my study, coaches were most likely to adopt a technique that had tangibly worked on them as a client. Next, Bandura predicts the effect of vicarious experience. In my study, the next most important influence was seeing the technique demonstrated successfully.
Finally, coaches were likely to be swayed by recommendation from a figure of authority (perhaps someone who impresses in a presentation, or is recognised as a leading practitioner). So this approach to accumulating technique is quite natural, but does it reflect the best use of best available evidence?
Researchers and doctoral students are constantly trying to push forward the boundaries of what we really know about coaching, and publishing the results of their efforts in theses and academic journals. But who reads them (well … other than researchers and doctoral students)? Barends and colleagues (2017), in their study on evidence-based management, found that 91% of respondents based their professional decisions on personal experience, while 14% had never read a peer-reviewed academic journal.
Wall and colleagues (2016) reported that practitioners had difficulty accessing published research and relating to it once they found it. Embarking on a formal academic programme does overcome some of this, but it’s not everyone’s cup of tea.
The earlier quotation from Grant continues thus (my italics):
“intelligent and conscientious use of relevant and best current knowledge integrated with professional practitioner expertise in making decisions about how to deliver coaching to coaching clients …”
It is by thinking about this integration that we can make ‘the best current knowledge’ more digestible. Instead of knowledge being ‘out there’ we can use our natural inclination towards social learning as an asset. This might be as simple as thinking of an article as something to be discussed among colleagues (as an add-on to an action learning set, or a developmental supervision group?) Or setting up a reading group to exchange ideas about a specific topic.
It’s worth noting that academics and coach educators are not insensitive to the opportunity for learning in this way. Garvey (2017), in an excellent discussion of coaching professional development, refers to this applied learning as a ‘phronetic’ approach – a critical, reflexive engagement with one’s own practice – and notes how it fits well with what we know of adult learning.
Wall et al (2016) similarly argue that by “treating research as a provocative theory … the engagement shifts from a consumer engagement with research, towards a more provocative engagement, where the practitioner (the person who will actually be utilising the ideas) is moved or inspired to act differently in some way.”
So, are there any ideas here that you are going to incorporate into your learning in 2020? You might start with journals which you do have access to. The International Journal of Evidence-Based Coaching & Mentoring is open access. Association for Coaching members have an online subscription to Coaching: An International Journal of Theory and Practice, EMCC has its own journal and BPS members have extensive access to psychology journals.
- Peter Jackson is coach, supervisor and senior lecturer on the MA Coaching and Mentoring Practice at Oxford Brookes University Business School. He is editor (with Elaine Cox) of Doing Coaching Research, due for publication by SAGE this summer. The book includes a deeper exploration of the problem of disseminating research-derived knowledge about coaching.
- Jackson is currently carrying out research on the content of coaching conversations, see: www.coachingcontentresearch.org
References
- A Bandura, ‘Self-efficacy: toward a unifying theory of behavioral change’, in Psychological Review, 84(2), 1977
- E Barends, J Villanueva, D M Rousseau, R B Briner, D M Jepsen, E Houghton, et al, ‘Managerial attitudes and perceived barriers regarding evidence-based practice: An international survey’, in PLoS ONE, 12(10), 2017
- B Garvey, ‘Issues of assessment and accreditation of coaches’, in T Bachkirova, G Spence and D Drake (eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Coaching, (pp680–695), SAGE Publications, 2017
- A M Grant, ‘What constitutes evidence-based coaching? A two-by-two framework for distinguishing strong from weak evidence for coaching’ in International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring, 14(1), 74-85, 2016
- T Wall, R Hawley, I Iordanou and Z Csigás, Research Policy and Practice Provocations – Towards Research That Sparks and Connects, European Mentoring and Coaching Council, 2016