SCP members have a long-standing interest in coaching.  Surveys by members consistently rank coaching a top interest area, and attendance at the 2003 Mid-Winter Pre-Conference workshop on coaching supports this interest.  Participants ranged from master coaches to members wanting to learn more about the field.  This Spotlight article, part of an ongoing series of articles on key consulting psychology topics using a “members-speaking-to-members” format, focuses on some of the essentials in coach training .  Jeffrey E. Auerbach, founder of the College of Executive Coaching and Pamela McLean, CEO of The Hudson Institute of Santa Barbara provide their thoughts and insights. Back to The Consulting Psychologist™

The training and skills possessed by most psychologists provides an excellent foundation to pursue the rapidly growing coaching profession.  Like any profession, psychologists need to learn some new models and skills to become excellent coaches.

We have two SCP members who focus on training professional coaches.  Jeffrey E. Auerbach worked as a psychologist and manager for several years before creating the College of Executive Coaching.  The College of Executive Coaching provides training only for professionals with advanced degrees – most of whom have degrees in psychology, but also in business and organizational development. Pamela McLean is a clinical psychologist, lecturer, author,  and CEO of The Hudson Institute of Santa Barbara.  She and her husband, Frederic Hudson, Ph.D., founder of the Fielding Institute, established The Hudson Institute of Santa Barbara in 1986 and train seasoned professionals from a variety of backgrounds to become professional coaches. Both institutes are located in southern California and occasionally sponsor programs around the country. 

Let’s begin with a description of coaching from the training experts.  What exactly is coaching?

Jeffrey:  Coaching is an ongoing relationship between the professional and the client, which focuses on the client taking action toward the realization of their vision, goals or desires.  Coaching uses a process of inquiry and personal discovery to build the client’s level of awareness and responsibility while providing the client with structure, support, and feedback.

Pamela:  I think of Coaching as a facilitative process that engages clients in creating visions and scenarios that are change-focused and typically related to desired futures.   Coaching is one of the very few professions to be born in a change paradigm, requiring the coaching field to function and be organized differently from the older professions that embrace permanence, linearity, and hierarchies.  Coaches are committed to change, so they can stay aligned to challenging and believable futures that are in constant flux.  They are committed to external performance when that can be attained, and to internal renewal and resilience when that is necessary.

How is coaching similar and different from psychotherapy?

Jeffrey:  Coaching is considered to be distinct from psychotherapy in that most coaches engage in coaching with generally well-functioning individuals. Coaches are helping people meet their most important goals - not treating mental disorders.

Pamela:  While there are some similarities between therapy and coaching, there are many more differences.  Most therapists function from a hierarchical position, with clients who exhibit mental health symptoms.  Coaches function from a collaborative position, as facilitators of change. Coaches have a different skill set from therapists, aimed at guiding clients toward goals and future scenarios that usually require a stretch in the current skills, abilities, and social settings of clients.

Why do psychologists need to get specialized training in coaching?
Jeffrey:  The coaching process has some similarities to therapy but is also a distinct type of professional work. Within the general field of coaching, there is a further distinction to be made between personal and executive coaching. Both offer opportunities to psychologists with the appropriate retraining – and both types of coaching have a toolbox that goes beyond traditional psychologist training.

Pamela:  While psychologists  have one of  the strongest skill-sets needed as a base  for professional coaching, additional intellectual knowledge, skills and abilities must be cultivated, along with some " unlearning" of the style and goals of psychotherapy. A shift from the hierarchical relationship and the lens of disorders is part of the "unlearning" as coaching is more about exploring future possibilities than working with long-term problems.  Coaches are catalysts for the emerging goals and purposes of individuals and organizations. 

What conceptual models or processes do you use in your coaching and training of coaches?

Jeffrey:  We have a model to train mental health professionals in personal coaching and additional components for executive coaching. Personal coaching involves helping generally well-functioning people create and achieve goals, maximize personal development, and navigate transitions on the path to realizing their ideal vision for the current and emerging chapters of their lives. Most personal coaching clients are focused on the development of an ideal future self, an ideal career, or an improved family life. The coach aids the client through the coaching conversation in developing a coaching agenda, incorporating values clarification, identification of strengths, and articulation of the client’s current life and career purpose. The coach supports the client’s efforts to engage in lifelong learning, navigate any obstacles, delegate or let go of energy-draining situations, honor challenges, and celebrate successes.

Executive coaching is similar in some ways to personal coaching, but it focuses especially on issues related to effectiveness and fulfillment at work. Executive coaching has a steep learning curve for most psychologists.  Common themes in executive coaching are developing key executive and managerial skills, enhancing teambuilding and leadership qualities, identifying and optimizing the use of key strengths, and building the competencies of emotional intelligence.

Executive coaching makes unique demands on the coaching professional. In Behind the Closed Doors: What Really Happens in Executive Coaching, Hall and colleagues report on the results of their interviews with 75 executives who were surveyed about their coaching experience. Their survey led to the conclusion that the two most important factors in effective executive coaching are honest, reliable feedback and good action ideas. Twelve other qualities rated as important by the executive clients were approachability, self-knowledge, comfort around top management, intellectual horsepower, compassion, interpersonal savvy, creativity, listening, customer focus, political savvy, integrity and trust, and ability to deal with paradox.

Pamela:  The two principal theoretical orientations we employ in our coaching training are drawn from the fields of adult development and human and organizational systems. In our view, coaching is often far more than performance-based work. Coaching fundamentally embraces the whole person within his or her whole social context.

Over the years we have outlined six essential perspectives we use in our coaching and training programs to help coaches understand and work with the whole person or organization on a range of issues.  These perspectives include:  a focus on renewal and change issues people face on a continual basis throughout their lives; an examination of values, beliefs and passions in one’s life;  a focus that explores the myriad roles in the client’s current situation; an understanding of the inevitable adult life stages and changes that occur throughout the client’s life; concepts of learning and un-learning in the coaching process; and finally, the deeper issues of purpose and vision as they connect to plans. 

The essential ingredients of the learning model embedded in our training program include: a) Understanding the theory and concepts of coaching; b) Understanding the process of coaching; c) Understanding ourselves as coaches; and d) Coaching practice and integration work.  Together these four elements seek to combine the critical ingredients necessary to develop a sophisticated set of coaching practices and skills.

What are the key competencies of an effective coach?

 Jeffrey:  I think Brotman, Liberi and Wasylyshyn wrote a wonderful article in CP on competencies of an effective coach.  They emphasized that the coach needs to be trustworthy, approachable, comfortable around top management, have high interpersonal skills, be savvy about political structures, and have generally high intellectual horsepower.

I also think an effective coach needs to be well-educated.  Most executives I encounter have a graduate degree themselves so I think a psychologist’s advanced training and generally high intellectual capacity – when combined with high emotional intelligence – makes fertile ground for the development of the particular competencies needed for an effective coach.

Pamela:  In short, an effective coach needs to be self-aware, well integrated, knowledgeable with a broad range of conceptual models and orientations, and possess excellent communication skills and emotional intelligence. Our programs are targeted at the ‘seasoned professional’, the individual who has a portfolio of experience, success and knowledge.  We screen through an application process which allows us to work with professionals who already possess a strong skill set in a related area.  Some competencies we focus on in our training program include: using change as a resource; forming and sustaining a coaching relationship; tapping into an individual’s purpose and vision; aligning roles with values;  guiding resistance work during the change process; illustrating the advantages of age; facilitating scenario development; and facilitating development plans for the future.

What specific contributions have you and your organizations made to the field of coaching?

Jeffrey:  We have a variety of training programs and products for coaching skill development.  The book Personal and Executive Coaching: The Complete Guide for Mental Health Professionals outlines the process for becoming an effective coach.  In addition, some of our faculty are leaders in Division 13 and are internationally recognized as thought leaders of the executive coaching field.  For example, Randy White’s Glass Ceiling and David Peterson’s Leader as Coach, are major contributions in the executive development literature.

Pamela:  During the past fifteen years, we’ve been developing and refining a conceptual framework for understanding how people manage their change process throughout their adult years. It’s our strong belief that most of us in western cultures are managing more and more change at a faster pace all the time, all the while desperately holding on to an outdated linear model of predictable change.

Our contributions to the field of coaching include our particular orientation to the change process in the lives of individuals and organizations.  We have also spent years developing and refining a highly dynamic and interactive self-directed learning model for adults that is the bedrock of our coach training endeavors.  I recently authored a chapter entitled “Transformational Learning” in the Learning Encyclopedia just published by Sage Press and edited by The Fielding Graduate Institute in which I write about the key ingredients of a learning process that allows the adult learner to acquire new knowledge viscerally, intellectually and practically. 

Our books include: The Adult Years: Mastering the Art of Self-Renewal, an articulation by Frederic Hudson of the change process throughout the adult life cycle; Lifelaunch: A Passionate Guide to the Rest of Your Life, a practical application by myself and Frederic on the transition planning process in our adult years, and The Handbook of Coaching, a summary of the history of the emerging arena of coaching, an outline of our model as it pertains to coaching, and a resource compendium for anyone engaged in coaching.     

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