Drawing on Edgar Schein’s emphasis on humble inquiry and diagnosis in coaching, I sketch a five-phase model of a coaching intervention cycle. I explain how I view the work of coaching as catalysing a client to re-evaluate personal costs of task activities vital to their own work, and to take practical initiatives to engage with these activities. I draw attention to how the psychology of personal constructs (PPC) pinpoints a client’s ‘focus of convenience’ and champions his or her own choice of words. It also privileges using tools which support this motivating style, as illustrated by a former coach to an England boxing team at Olympic level. I propose a buoyant perspective on the long cultural revolution in which coaching can be a valuable component while I also argue that any prevailing banal avoidance of diagnosis and attention to vital client tasks on the part of coaches must be arrested.
Reviving Schein’s emphasis on diagnosis
Coaching, in my experience, is a significant conversation with a person, at any level of an organisation, about a dilemma owned by him/her. It is designed to catalyse a client to exercise discretionary effort in re-evaluating personal costs of vital task activities in relation to their benefits and constraints and in carrying out sustained personal initiatives to realise these tasks, with as much stamina as necessary.
In presenting this characterisation of coaching, I share concerns of Davidson (2014), Garvey, (2014) and Hawkins (2014) about what the latter calls ‘the ‘coaching industry’ – concerns which suggest reservations about the likely match between many coaching interventions and actual expectations of coaching clients or other customers investing in coaching. In doing so, their observations echo those of psychologists who were speaking on leadership and executive coaching at an international congress to which I contributed recently (Duignan 2014), Perhaps I am also more buoyant and optimistic about the benefits of coaching interventions provided, and to the extent, that coaches in work settings make a fresh start at this juncture, informed by a combination of client-friendliness and task-centredness
Perhaps this is because I view coaching as falling within the tradition of evolving cultural democracy in society and of what the cultural critic and professor of drama Raymond Williams (2011) called ‘the long revolution’ in behaviour, institutions and social norms. So, viewing coaching as a strand in this dimension of social industrial history, the current lacklustre flat-lining of coaching practice can also be regarded as a phase of that revolution, rather than merely as fragmenting into a banal game – in both emotional and social senses of pathetic and creepy – which transactional analyst Eric Berne (2010) might label ‘Cruising for a Bruising’..
To move to this sanguine view of coaching, I draw on Jeffrey Pfeffer’s study of the profitability of high-performance organisations and note his constructive dry observation (1998: viii):
‘The incorrect implication frequently drawn is that if something isn’t being done, it must not be as useful or worthwhile as is thought….: sometimes people in organisations simply don’t practice common sense, don’t behave strategically and aren’t always thoughtful or logical about the policies they implement’.
Accordingly, I construct an approach to coaching based on the unequivocal advocacy of diagnosis by the doyen of organisational psychology, Edgar Schein (2000), as an integral component, along with process consultation and content expertise. Figure 1 below illustrates this as a five-phase intervention cycle.
Five phases of a coaching intervention cycle
When it is conducted well, this cycle includes and goes well beyond satisfying the criterion of ‘vertical learning’ proposed by Davidson. However, its underlying model of the psychology of personal constructs, ‘PPC’ (Kelly, 1955/91) uses a very different model of learning than the one which Davidson used to anchor his analysis. Arguably, Kelly’s model can be much more readily adapted to the enormous range of contexts in which useful coaching takes place with people at all levels of an organisation.
Phase 1. A client’s dilemma
This cycle begins with a client’s dilemma, couched in his or her own words, which unavoidably express some of his or her personal constructs about his or her Self – even if the language they choose is silence!. As Kelly (op. cit.) argued, the premise of PPC is that an intervention can be designed to catalyse a client to create constructive alternative perspectives on their Selves and indeed on any question, any time before their death (!).
As Schein (2013) emphasises, effective helping intervention begins with ‘humble inquiry’ about the client’s dilemma, in his or her own words. The coach may then negotiate with the client about how they are formulating their dilemma, but the starting blocks for the coaching venture remain the original words of clients. Where clients don’t start with explicit awareness of their dilemma and appear locked in a formulaic desire for an ill-informed objective, some may abruptly shy away from the prospect of some uncertainty that a dilemma entails. A savvy coach respects this but may invite a serious, though not too solemn, conversation about their assumptions.
Phase 2. A coach’s diagnosis
Figure 2 below outlines the diagnostic model used in coaching for constructive alternatives (Duignan and others, 2015). It is a model of ‘reversing perceived inequality’ because the intention of a coach is to catalyse a client to re-evaluate how he or she perceives personal costs of ‘vital task activities’ associated with an area of the ‘real world’ as they see it, in relation to a set of five other elements of their world-view. This style fundamentally shifts what Kelly (op. cit.) writes about as their ‘focus of convenience’, where the client’s .expression of their set of perceptions and beliefs represents a pathway to dialogue with the coach. From the outset, the coach remains alert not merely to the semantics used by a client but also to the syntax and pragmatics of their behaviour with a coach, as the PPC educational psychologist Ravenette, (1967, 1999) explained.
Table 1 below sets out definitions of the elements of this model.
Table 1. Six elements of the model of diagnosis within coaching for constructive alternatives.
- Vital Task Activities. ‘Real world’ work to be done in response to a dilemma of a client; they are discussed below
- Dissatisfaction. Without dissatisfaction, clients are apt to quite reasonably experience no move to change behaviour, whatever others may say or do, although part of the work of a coach at times may well be to offer cues to dissatisfaction, especially where clients are numbed by habitual self-aggrandisement, fear, anxiety, an identity crisis, or are distracted by anger or threat
- Vision. Without clear vision of a line of sight between well-specified ‘vital’ task activities and dissatisfaction and practical initiatives, a client’s actions are apt to be random, so that an important part of the work of a coach is collaboratively to generate a framework within which clients hold such a vision and then adapt it as they see fit.
- Commitment. Unless an espoused vision and acknowledged dissatisfactions are harnessed through disciplined application of cognitive, emotional and motor energies, coaching is at risk of degrading from amiable chats into mutually irritating exchanges and withdrawal by client or coach. Commitment is two-sided: unless clients stretch to realise agreed vision in practical initiatives, and avoid blaming others for not doing so, coaching is effectively voided, regardless of rhetoric.
- Constraints. As competent furniture makers have long recognised, all good designs embrace ‘real world’ constraints. It is the joint responsibility of clients and coach to identify relevant constraints on the vision and practical initiatives of clients. Both parties must also agree that facets of such constraints should become focal points of practical initiatives, or that they should be accepted as practical boundaries in any particular coaching cycle.
- Practical initiatives. A major skill of catalytic action on the part of a coach is to evaluate potential practical initiatives with clients. The coach should warn clearly where any appear to be beyond their scope or in some instances dangerous and/or unlawful, unless redesigned. It then becomes primarily the responsibility of the client to undertake practical initiatives and to share data on outcomes and feedback with the coach.
Two facets of this model of diagnosis call for brief explanation.
Buoyancy
Firstly, while this model acknowledges that a degree of imbalance is a normal facet of healthy living, it proposes that coaching may enable a client to reverse their perception of the personal costs of ‘vital task activities’, which may not have been well-specified at the outset. In effect, the model involves stress management stamina and resilience from the very outset. An accent on buoyancy is the observable outcome condition of such coaching. The ‘buoyancy’ condition may in turn find expression in a range of experiences, from tolerating pain and adversity through to developing skills previously shirked, to sustained enterprise, creativity or smart, clear-cut resolution of wasteful conflict,
Multiplicative and additive elements
Secondly, the relationship between the five elements of buoyancy combines both multiplicative elements and an additive element. Where the relationship is multiplicative, a value of zero for any component means that the switch does not happen so that, counter-intuitively, the presence of some dissatisfaction is actually as necessary for change as vision and commitment. Where the relationship is additive, as in the Constraints condition, this is not the case. For example, levels of economic clear mobility and of physical health set constraints, but their levels do not necessarily affect the functioning of each of the other elements.
Phase 3. Vital task activities
Working out well-specified ‘vital’ tasks may appear superficially to be a routine phase, of the kind you might find on a downloadable ‘app’ or the plastic container of ‘Add water and mix’ ingredients in a supermarket for making pancakes. If it were so straightforward, the client’s root dilemma is not one of substance that calls for coaching, but rather of instruction.
Actually, the profound significance of this emphasis on vital task activities lies in how much the formal structures and processes of organisational behaviour can actually prevent a client from realising performance indicators and role objectives, when they are embedded in computer-controlled routines that are not open to revision. Where leaders have themselves adapted to such rigidity, the services of a diplomatic, ergonomically-informed coach can literally open their eyes to the social and technological realities around them and to avoidable business costs of rigidity.
Despite over seventy-five years of manufacturing and military investment in ‘fit-for-human-use ergonomics’, the term ‘ergonomics’ is still too often misunderstood as limited to physical ease associated with a well-designed chair. I emphasise how its distinctive features are twofold: a user-friendliness, in this instance focused on needs of a client, and – equally important – a task-centredness that enables and stimulates a person to perform tasks effectively, whether the tasks are physical or cognitive or emotional or a blend of any of them.
‘The coaching industry’, in Hawkins’ phrase, commonly appears to display a collective blind eye towards the need for attention to the vital tasks that are the focal points of practical initiatives that mark the threshold which differentiates a coaching intervention cycle as either, on balance, a success or failure. In making this category error, the industry shares contemporary habits of the HR profession which appears to be content to substitute HR-speak, ‘performance outcomes’ and ‘role objectives’, for appropriate attention to vital tasks goals and activities and the practical initiatives which a responsible person takes to realise them.
This myopic approach to coaching persists despite the host of techniques, standards and guidelines for analysing of tasks which has mushroomed according as the internet and social media have expanded, and which Karwowski (2006) has codified in readable form. Tried and trusted methods fruitful in coaching were explained by Kirwan and Ainsworth (1992) and many of them are straightforward enough for a coach to use with a pencil and paper, or a flipchart and pen, within coaching meetings.
The profiler developed by Richard Butler and his colleagues (1993, 1995) is an example of a diagnostic tool which incisively surfaces ‘vital task activities’. They did so using repertory grids, which – unlike psychometric tools – use the very words of clients themselves to represent how they make sense of their worlds and their work as athletes. What can be more motivating in addressing dilemmas of coaching clients, than using their own words collaboratively to diagnose their paths to vital task activities through practical initiatives? This method and framework for crafting feedback to clients in the very language they personally choose is fitting in almost any coaching domain as a reading of Butler (1996) indicates.
Use of PPC in workplaces and with the 1992 England Olympic boxing team
Coaching psychologists Thomas and Harri-Augstein (1991) reported on how they systemically used task-centred coaching with PPC in diverse organisations at all levels.
A clinical psychologist who coached the England boxing team at the 1992 Olympic Games, Butler (1996) explains how he applied the psychology of personal constructs (PPC) in a book that is also highly relevant to coaches in business, training and education.
For, uniquely amongst coaching methodologies, PPC was designed by a clinical psychologist, George Kelly, who had worked as a human factors psychologist – also known as an ‘ergonomist’ – with the USA Navy from 1940 to 1945. As Figure 3 illustrates, attention to vital task activities is absolutely core to the multidisciplinary science of human factors, which was created to design cognitive as well as physical interfaces compatible with needs and tastes of clients and users. Today, they increasingly underpin the design of smart-phones, tablets, phones and personal computers, as well as hospital and mass transport systems of every kind. As a feisty war veteran, Kelly (op. cit.) incorporated this task focus in the design of psychotherapy, very explicitly in most of the principles of PPC, as well as implicitly in his formulation of emotional arousal in terms of ‘constructs of transition’. As an artful mathematician, he advocated uses of matrices in the forms of innovative kinds of grids (repertory and dependency) as well as use of very carefully selected psychometric tools.
Phase 4. Feedforward with ‘spacious’ language
Chinese-American novelist and professor of cultural criticism, Ha Jin, is quoted as observing that English is a ‘spacious’ language with room for different elements, tones and energies; ‘it means English…. is really open to all kinds of people, all kinds of users (Sebag-Montefiore, 2015).
Appreciation of the structure of the English language enriches application of PPC in coaching. This is based on empirical data, and the kind of bilingual shuttling between the language of a client’s dilemma and associated vital task activities on the one hand, and choices about feedback compatible with the client’s individual cognitive structure and his or her processes of Self-management on the other. In this work, it is often useful in coaching to draw on investigations of language researchers and teachers, as well as of business information analysts, into how words and other media can be optimally applied. They use the term to differentiate between nuances of intentions that guide well-crafted communications on the part of the person generating them, in this instance a coach, and between the semantics and syntax of words and images and media, used to encode the intentions.
Phase 5. Practical initiatives by a client
This phase calls for a mix of deft analysis, ethical transparency and stamina on the part of a coach, as it is the one ‘where the rubber hits the road’ – or not. At this juncture, a client stretches in re-evaluating the personal costs of the vital task activities focussed on in coaching. Coaching in a context in which a client is enmeshed in a wearisome drawn-out conflict at work presents options for deploying an imaginative appreciation of pragmatics – the study of influencing intentions of other people. Evolutionary psychology has established how much it represents an ‘ultimate’ area of human experience, common to all societies; English ethnologist Richard Dawkins’s (1976) work on the use of memes (a unit of cultural inheritance, physical or cultural, replicating through imitation or learning) can be useful in thinking through ways of proposing practical initiatives unambiguously as constructive alternative ways of addressing issues perceived as unpalatable.
The following story illustrates this point.
The story of Louise, actuary, entering a newly-branded large insurance company
Louise, 27, had qualified as an actuary, with degrees in Economics and Actuarial Science from a university with an international reputation in these disciplines, when she presented herself for coaching. Her dilemma concerned entering a newly branded insurance company where she very much wanted to have a much greater sense of professional inclusion than she had in her previous one. In this light, the vital task activities focused on communicating effectively with her line manager and other direct stakeholders in services of an actuary, especially during meetings.
Louise reported that she had felt profoundly demoralised about the sense of fumbling with which she responded to being put down by her previous line manager in another company, although he himself was not an actuary. She felt anxious, even at a loss, about how to establish herself as both technically competent and was quite willing to learn the ropes in her new role.
She reported with some enthusiasm and a sense of inspiration how Warren Buffet had shaped the vision of enterprise and analytical excellence. Her degree of commitment was evident not only from her success in academic and professional exams, but also from a fair measure of success in 400 metre flat running and as a viola player. The main constraint she experienced she attributed to her perplexity in establishing a sense of social presence at work that matched her analytical savoir fair. The coach observed how in his meetings with her, evidence of such feelings had been hard to detect.
To provide the link between the degree of improvement in performance in her role and her working relationships with a new manager and other stakeholders, her coach invited her both to complete the HEXACO personality inventory and to work through a repertory grid with him. He chose as reference points in the grid managers and teachers with whom she had worked, as well as her view of herself ‘now’, ‘ideally’ and when she was sixteen. From this, they did two things. They developed together a Self-Profiler with three levels (unsatisfactory, satisfactory, how I really want to be) and eight areas of verifiable behaviour They also spent some time as their meetings unfolded in role-playing situations which she reported on as sources of ambivalence for her.
Practical initiatives Louise took – completing her Self-Profiler between coaching consultations over two months – enabled her to record progress in five of the eight areas. It also enabled her to map out a programme of further development, with peer monitoring by a colleague she trusted, in all areas during the following nine months.
In retrospect, Louise reflected on how she felt she had managed to generate a ‘constructive alternative’ approach to her professional presence with a sense of ease and humour as well as concentration. She attributed this to the combination of the reassuring feedback from the particular personality inventory, the role playing and the inclusion on her Self Profiler, in her own words, of both social skills and cues to cognitive recall. She reported that these stimulated her to focus acutely before and during the meetings which had been such a source of dread for her.
Anticipating next steps
In outlining this particular cycle of coaching intervention, rooted in my own reading of the PPC in the context of the long cultural revolution throughout society and in occupational ergonomics, I have sketched a pro-active stance in coaching. While this model may perhaps avow a more diagnostic and prescriptive component than is fashionable in coaching, it is premised on conditions that clients mirror the commitment to the process of a coach.
This implies that clients avoid sabotage through omissions or actions, and specifically that they do not shirk their contractual or statutory obligations. Regrettably, such conditions are regrettably lessons from harsh experiences of attempted collaboration with pseudo leaders, and from recognising how they were content to pocket salaries many times that of their employees, but not to listen to the latter or safeguard them from foreseeable stresses and injuries. For this to happen, current banal avoidance of diagnosis and attention to vital tasks of clients, on the part of too many coaches, must be firmly arrested.
I remain sanguine about the end-game of ergonomically-rooted coaching as erecting markers in the long cultural revolution, and as practical appreciation of human capital as a competitive organisational resource, through cultivating a client’s initiative and accountability, and valuing them.
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Illustrations.
The drawing of Kieran Duignan is by Jasper Graphics. All the other illustrations are the intellectual property of Kieran Duignan, and they may be used with attribution of his authorship.
Acknowledgements.
I am pleased to record my appreciation to Dennis Bury, Secretary of the Personal Construct Psychology Association, for discussions about personal construct psychology, and to Pauline Willis of the Coaching and Mentoring Network and Bob MacKenzie of AMED for discussing coaching. At the same time, I accept sole responsibility for the contents of this article.
About the author
Kieran Duignan, Principal of Positive Interactions, serves organisational and individual clients, mainly in the U.K and Republic of Ireland, in one or more of the roles of ergonomist, coach, or occupational and safety psychologist. He also occasionally serves courts and employment tribunals as an expert witness. Kieran is a chartered and registered occupational psychologist, a Chartered Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, and a chartered safety and health practitioner. He is also registered with the British Psychological Society as a Specialist in Test Use. His qualifications include degrees in economics, psychology and ergonomics, a postgraduate diploma in management consultancy and coaching along with practitioner diplomas in PPC counselling, career guidance and distance education. Kieran can be reached at kieran@positiveinteractions.co.uk.