An experienced coach with many hours under his belt is finding that CPD and supervision are not stretching him. How can coaching help raise his game?
The issue
You meet Oscar at a conference. You had both decided separately to leave a session early as it wasn’t meeting your expectations. In conversation, you learn that Oscar has been coaching for 12 years. In that time, he has accumulated hundreds of hours of coaching and consistently gets good feedback from his clients.
He is credentialled with one of the coaching bodies. He participates in at least 40 hours of continuous professional development (CPD) each year yet feels somehow unfulfilled each time he leaves training or a conference. The transfer of learning he gets from this time out of client facing work is small in comparison to the monetary investment – and compared to the first coach training that he undertook, which really stretched him out of his comfort zone.
He is looking for something different, something that will really challenge him to raise his game.
He wonders whether there is anything more appropriate for experienced coaches to continue to extend their learning. You hear that he has a supervisor, who he has been working with for eight years and trusts implicitly. But something still feels missing for him.
He feels that he could sharpen his coaching edge for the benefit of his clients but doesn’t know how to do it. He wonders out loud what you think is most useful to coaches to sharpen their saw.
The interventions
Clare Norman
Transition and leadership coach, coach supervisor and coach mentor
Oscar’s experience of the value of training and conferences is backed up by research by Olivero et al (1997) that training leads to a meagre 20% change in behaviour. He’s not alone in feeling frustrated at the lack of stretch to his own practice.
In my experience mentor coaching and supervision is the most individually tailored, high impact learning that we can invest in as coaches. Mentor coaching is observed coaching with feedback, using a set of competencies as a benchmark. The spotlight’s on the coach and how he/she shows up in the room with the client, how the coach helps or hinders the client to get to the heart of the matter and access new learning. Coaching is such a practical skill that this forensic look at our own coaching advances our practice more than discussing theory.
Oscar might choose to work one-to-one with a mentor coach, where they listen together to a recording of his coaching. Or he might choose group mentor coaching, where he can get feedback on his own coaching and watch others coaching and then learn through observation (Bandura, 1971).
Mentor coaching is for coaches at any development stage, as it brings us back to conscious competence, enabling us to see our blind spots, hear our deaf spots and notice our dumb spots (Eckstein, 1969). Bachkirova (2015) found that coaches are self-deluded when reflecting alone, so working with a mentor coach or other reflective practitioner enables us to understand where we can sharpen our coaching edge.
Alongside mentor coaching, I’d encourage Oscar to consider looking for a new supervisor. It’s possible his supervisor may be colluding with him, rather than challenging him. Even if that’s not the case, looking at his coaching through a different supervisory lens will almost certainly offer new insights. Mentor coaching will keep Oscar sharp. Supervision will keep him safe and sane.
- Clare Norman is the author of Mentor Coaching: a Practical Guide, OUP, 2020
Danielle Brooks
Executive coach (PCC), coach trainer and coaching supervisor, Brooksmiths
My starting curiosity would be, what is his supervisor’s response to extending his learning edge? That implicit trust will serve them well in exploring what transformative learning looks like. Eight years of building trust and intimacy risks a comfortable collusion and getting stuck in the support corner of the supervision triangle. If supervision is fundamentally a learning partnership, it needs the conscious competence of both practitioners in collaborative service of the other – an appropriate check-in on their supervision contract answering the call towards the developmental corner.
My second curiosity: is a parallel process afoot across the client work and the supervisory work? Looking out for over-support or comfort, needs not met or lack of accountability for the contract. One way to highlight this is to map out his clients via a tactile imago – a visual representation to illuminate any clues from his coaching portfolio; noticing patterns across the clients themselves, the work they bring or the resources he brings to those clients and systems. It’s an opportunity to identify sweet spots and blind spots, exploring new aspects of existing work and experimenting with ‘different’. Focusing on raising his coaching game, a worthwhile lens would be to look at how everyone in his ‘field of vision’ could ‘up their game’ – both clients and supervisor – to use the ‘field’ for positive parallel process.
My third curiosity: those 40 CPD hours. What does he notice about the kind of training that he chooses? What are the expectations and assumptions when he signs up? Attendance is often as much about getting our need for connection met as well as growth, so challenge what is the need and how best to meet those competing priorities.
In recognising saw sharpening, how can Oscar take more account of getting his own need for stimulus met rather than mere CPD box ticking? That learning need may or may not be in the supervision space, and may not even be in ‘direct service’ of his coaching clients or even the coaching arena at all.