Coaching has become a familiar strategy for supporting and accelerating the adaptive development of leaders and those aspiring to become leaders. Moreover, a growing body of research and anecdotal experience demonstrates its potential efficacy for two specific applications: proactive, anticipated support for leaders who are taking on a new and bigger role; and helping leaders who are struggling in a new role or a changed situation of increased challenge.
Growth requires discovering afresh how to use our core strengths, but also learning more about additional capabilities that we must cultivate in order to adapt and thrive in new roles and/or situations.
I shall focus on three things I believe we all privately want and need as persons in order to get the most from a coaching experience.
First, I believe we want to experience gains in competence and confidence. This almost always means coming to grips with our fears and “secret” doubts and insecurities. That, of course, is one of the more important paradoxes in what I call transformative growth and development. Often, we have already claimed a role and are trying to live up to what we see as the expectations of that role. So, it can feel awkward, even scary, to explore our needs for growth.
Second, is the corollary to the first really. That is, we want to feel authentic and unencumbered by our insecurities. After all, having genuine confidence means being competent in ways that draw upon our personal qualities, relational tendencies and distinctive aptitudes. All three exist in various states of actuality and potentiality. None of us is great at everything, nor are we equally interested and adept in playing our role the same way others might. So, it’s finding the way that works best for us that’s key.
Third, is a quality of intimate and challenging engagement. It is most manifest when we recognize that our coach is able to understand our individual psychology, relate it to our role-based aspirations and then help us see more than we could before about what might be getting in our way. This empathic gain in perspective enables the coach to offer hypotheses that truly resonate about how we get stuck and how we can get unstuck. This is how deep trust is born and how we become adept at “not knowing.”
Notice the progression:
• 1) Competence and overt confidence are often the goals we, as clients, most readily focus on and desire as outcomes, even as we harbor fears or insecurities about being “found out.”
• 2) But it’s only possible to make lasting gains in competence and genuine confidence by adopting an attitude of humility (“not knowing”), and getting a bit of “tough love” from our coach.
• 3) Thus, learning how to drop our guard, get to the “real stuff” – how to approach rather than avoid our fears – that’s what promotes our capacity for ongoing adaptive development.
Of course, we don’t know what we don’t know about this experience at the outset. And to read my characterization of it, and even to grasp its cognitive meaning, is one thing; to really experience it is another. Thus, to open oneself to development with a coach requires a leap of faith. To do this and feel empathically understood, that’s what we really need in order to learn and grow through coaching. A good coach helps create that experience in the intersubjective space of the relationship.
It’s an iterative kind of interaction. In a relationship of empathic openness, we become able to notice our feelings sooner, making them more accessible for joint examination. Faulty, outdated beliefs, and exaggerated and inhibiting feelings of fear, begin to lose some of their power in the light of day. As we learn to do this with our coach, we enhance our readiness for adaptive change. We may also bring this transformative dynamic into our relations with those we lead and those we love.
William P. Macaux is principal of Generativity LLC, an East Greenwich-based management psychology consultancy specializing in leadership and organizational development.
