The annual Anthony Grant lecture
We need to change how we research, view and approach coaching, including becoming more aligned with AI, taking a more systemic stance, focusing more on why and how coaching works, and being open to research, or we face redundancy, warned Sean O’Connor, director of Sydney University’s Coaching Psychology Unit.
“’We need to start thinking of coaching as a process rather than a profession, as an embedded tool that can help organisations, and of emotional contagion as a form of engagement,” said O’Connor in his keynote for the International Society of Coaching Psychology’s annual Anthony Grant lecture at its annual congress.
“We don’t need another coaching model; we know coaching works. We need to better understand the ways in which coaching works, and to stay away from the overspecification towards coaching outcomes,” said O’Connor in his session: Coaching psychology: research, practice and the importance of systemically integrated approaches.
“Organisations are getting far more complex, wellbeing directives are being embedded within workplace experience, and the advent of AI means much more change at a faster pace and we need to think about how coaching interactions and interventions are embedded in these contexts, otherwise we’re going to get outdated very quickly.
He said, “If we’re not integrating our change methodology in complex, cohesive ways that are driven by the fundamentals of scientific practice, then you can forget about maintaining the utility of coaching over the longer-term. Simple coaching approaches can be done by AI.”
His 2013 PhD explored how coaching happens and how it can work when we operate in such complexity. Drawing on network theory among others, it highlighted the potential ripple effect of coaching. For leaders who received coaching, the quality of how they experienced others improved, as did their wellbeing and even for “those who didn’t receive coaching but who were connected to leaders who were coached, the more leaders they were connected to, the more their psychological wellbeing improved.
“You’re never out of the system…
We cannot hide behind the idea that we only coach the person in the room. We have a duty of care to inform the coachee the changes they experience through coaching may have an impact on those around them,” he said.