This new column will explore diversity and inclusion in coaching.
This issue: Coach neutrality and rationality are myths, argues Rebecca J Jones
Imagine this coaching conversation. Your client presents with the following issue. They’re ambitious and driven, which they consider to be assets – key strengths that have helped them immensely in their career so far. They’d like to work on how to balance them with greater patience.
They’d like to feel a sense of calm when they consider their professional aspirations, with an acceptance that ‘things will take as long as they take’. The client doesn’t bring into the conversation a desire to pull back on work activities or issues with work-life balance.
How might you engage in this coaching conversation? What type of questions might you ask? What approach might you take? When you were imagining the client, what was their gender?
This example is taken from a real case and that client was a woman.
Does that change your approach? Your response? How about if I tell you that this client was a mother?
A widely accepted assumption in the coaching profession is that we are ‘gender neutral’, able to support our clients, free from bias and prejudice. However, is this really ever possible? I’d argue that coach neutrality and rationality are myths. We’re all human and that means we’re
all susceptible to biases that will influence how we view the world, including our client’s challenges.
The case I described above was a classic case where the coach’s response to the client’s issue appeared to be heavily influenced by the identity of the client (a woman and a mother). Despite the client not mentioning a desire to pull back on work activities or issues with work-life balance, these questions were persistently raised by the coach, including questions as to how the client’s family might feel about the client’s ambition and if another achievement might really be ‘worth it’. I wonder whether a male client would have been asked the same questions?
How do you think that client felt in that coaching conversation? Well, that client was me and I can tell you I felt pretty awful. The coach persisted in attempting to help me through my ‘denial’ of the ‘real’ issue, despite my assurances that, thank you very much, my work-life balance was fine and my children and husband were very happy (not that it was any of the coach’s business, quite frankly).
The problem is that women are on the whole judged negatively when they demonstrate that they’re ambitious and driven. Ambition isn’t viewed as a characteristically ‘female’ trait and as such, women can be penalised for openly expressing this characteristic. In her excellent
book, The Authority Gap (2022), Mary Ann Sieghart tackles this topic and explains how “you don’t get to the top of any organization without being ambitious. It’s so taken for granted in men that it’s rarely even noted, and certainly not in the derogatory way in which it’s used against women” (p. 98). As a professor, one might assume that it goes without saying that I’m ambitious – I didn’t ‘accidentally’ get here! Yet, in that coaching conversation, I found myself having to justify and explain my ambition to someone who should have been supporting me from a position of non-judgement and unconditional positive regard.
The challenge we all have as coaches is that we’re susceptible to these unconscious, implicit biases that influence how we view others, including our clients. However, we have a responsibility to accept that no matter how hard we work on our non-judgmental attitude, we’ll always arrive at our coaching sessions with bias. It’s our job to notice and park those as they inevitably arise.
- Henley Business School will be offering a DEI in coaching programme
- Next issue: Dr Matt Jacobs on embodied discourses and the coaching relationship
Reference
- Sieghart, M. A. (2022). The Authority Gap: Why women are still taken less seriously than men, and what we can do about it. WW Norton & Company.
About the author
- Professor Rebecca J Jones is a professor in coaching and behavioural change at Henley Business School, a chartered psychologist and co-founder of Inclusive Leadership Company. Rebecca is the author of Coaching with Research in Mind and Key Topics in Coaching Psychology, and Simplifying Inclusive Leadership, both due to be published in 2025. She hosts the Coaching@Henley Podcast and has published her research in globally renowned journals.