What is the Role of a Coach Anyway...if Not to Show People How to Change Their Mind?
A few weeks back I ran across an Op Ed piece by Stanley Fish in the New York Times titled ‘We are All Badgers Now.’ If you follow his columns at all, you may think that the musing of a professor of Humanities and Law from Florida International University in Miami is an unusual source of inspiration for someone like me who thinks and writes about coaching and management development. Au contraire, dear readers! Stanley Fish, aside from his academic credentials, is a student of ideas particularly how they get formulated and communicated, and he is rigorous about this topic in an uncommon fashion. I read his columns regularly and almost always come away the better for it.
In…Badgers… he was joined by a colleague, Walter Benn Michaels, professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, in a thoughtful exchange about the relative merits and drawbacks to unionization in higher education. What I was drawn to was a statement Stanley made in the second paragraph as he expresses embarrassment at unmasking the frailness of the thinking that supported one of his strong biases…
“The big reason was the feeling — hardly thought through sufficiently to be called a conviction — that someone with an advanced degree and scholarly publications should not be in the same category as factory workers with lunch boxes and hard hats.”
What struck me in this statement was the revelation that here, a man of letters, is owning up to the fact that he has discovered that his perspective on a serious topic had been supported for years by nothing more than an emotion.
“The big reason was the feeling — hardly thought through sufficiently to be called a conviction…”
You may think this is an obscure insight I am sharing with you. Perhaps, but as a coach especially as a coach of coaches (managers) this personal revelation on Fish’s part occurred to me as profound. If a man such as he, steeped in the discipline of logic, can go for years with a strongly held bias supported by a mere emotional response what do I suppose is going on around me in my workplace with far less disciplined thinkers, such as maybe me and very likely, my direct reports?
I have been thinking recently about how much has been written on the topic of coaching and what there might still be left to look at and distinguish. The inspiration I took from the piece by Stanley Fish is that one of the key unexplored roles of a coach may be to teach those in their charge the art/skill of seeing the world differently, especially when the perspective they are operating from is not offering them actions that are effective.
In The Three Laws of Performance authors Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan give us a peek under the hood of what lies behind the actions. Whether effective or not, they pose the notion that all our actions originate and are guided by three immutable laws:
First Law of Performance: How people perform correlates to how situations occur to them. (People act in correlation to what they see in front of them)
Second Law of Performance: How a situation occurs arises in language (What people “see” is a function of what they tell themselves)
Third Law of Performance: Future-based language transforms how situations occur to people. (If actions are going to ever be different, they need to be rooted in another version of what is being seen)
If you are going to be an effective coach I strongly recommend you not go around sharing these laws with the people you are coaching, that will not be helpful! Being informed by these laws and asking questions is the approach that will probably work best and using questions derived from this knowledge is very likely the way to go.
Here are some examples when you find yourself coaching someone who is “stuck”:
- Do you think there is another way you could see this?
- Are your actions consistent with what you say you want or how you feel about the situation?
- Do you have any facts that support the discomfort you are experiencing?
Space is too brief here for any extended discussion, but I imagine that if you take the three laws at face value and use them to examine your own perspective in a challenging situation, you can practice this technique of questioning your own beliefs and begin to create a set of questions that are reusable in many coaching situations.
- Where are you stuck right now? Does the “sticking” starts with a feeling of discomfort?
