Generativity and the Greater Good: The Life and Work of Two Professional Coaches

• Coaches can help leaders plan for organizational transitions to minimize the stress placed on the workforce and themselves.
• Coaches can help leaders improve critical emotional and social effectiveness skills necessary to engage people and create positivity in the workplace. . . .
• Coaches can provide important support to leaders faced with change and crisis. . . .
• Coaches can help leaders become more aware of their stress and develop a stress management plan need to regain and build mental, emotional, physical and spiritual balance. This can lead to improvements in work-life balance. They can help leaders develop resiliency necessary to build a sustainable leadership. . .

These lessons all relate directly to outcomes that were produced by the services that Lee and his coaching colleagues provided to federal government executives. These lessons are of value to other coaches doing similar work. However, as a Generativity Three “guardian” of the professional coaching field, Lee was not content to focus just on the kind of work and kind of institution which employed his services. He wanted to assist a broader coaching audience. We see this in the further lessons being offered by Lee.  His suggestions have a much broader application (Salmon, 2009, pp. 74-75):

• Add questions to evaluation surveys to better quantify return on investment and return on value and conduct longitudinal studies of the long-term impact of coaching.
• Require form assessments as part of every coaching engagement, including more attention to assessing participant emotional and social effectiveness skills.
• Develop mentoring programs for new managers and provide coaching skills for mentors.
• Within budget constraints, expand coaching availability to other managers and levels within the organization. This could include expanding the internal coaching cadre within the organization.
• Provide an opportunity for coaching participants to meet periodically as a learning group in order to share experiences. This could begin to create an ongoing network of support for developing future leaders.

In this listing, Lee is revealing that he wishes to be a guardian to assessment processes that he believes should accompany coaching initiatives. He is also advocating for mentoring, creation and training of internal coaching cadres, and collaboration among coaches. He is quite an ambitious Generativity Three guardian.

Generativity Four: It is interesting to note that Lee introduced the theme of Sustainability in his list of lessons learned. He clearly is motivated by Generativity Four.  For Lee Salmon, outcomes related to the Greater Good should ultimately be aligned with Sustainability. And it is not only the sustainability of one’s role as a leader. Lee’s outcomes also address the role that federal government leaders can play as global citizens who focus on preservation of the environment. The Greater Good might begin in a single organization (small or big). However, the vision inherent in this initial offering of coaching services can readily expand to a much more comprehensive and globalized sense of what is possible—as we find in many of the interviews posted in this issue of The Future of Coaching.

There is yet another way in which Lee Salon is expanding the outreach of professional coaching. He looks not just at the environment as being within the purview of coaching, but also at philosophical perspectives and non-Western practices that reside outside the rather narrow boundaries of Western coaching. He is particularly interested in the introduction of these diverse perspectives when addressing the issues of stress, mind-body interaction and positivity. I quote once again from Lee’s IJCO essay on coaching in government (Salmon, 2009, pp. 71-73):

Learning happens in and through language and the body, as well as its moods and emotions; it is a structural and biological transformation (Maturana & Varda, 1987). Our internal thoughts and the language we use to describe our world influences our ability to experience a new way of being. Linked to the mind and emotion, the shape of our body, including its level of tension and stress, can affect our ability to contain and learn new emotions and to manage stress. . . .

Mind-body practices include various form of meditation such as Zen, yoga, breathing, chanting, visualizations, centering exercise, therapeutic massage or combinations of thee to accelerate and deepen overall relaxation. . . . One of the spiritual practices to help leaders overcome negativity, fear and increase their positivity ration is the simple Japanese practice of self-reflection called Naikan.

What a remarkable expansion of the coaching field! Lee Salman is truly to be acclaimed for his expansive generative vision of what professional coaching could be. Furthermore, his Generativity Four role is firmly grounded in and builds on what he has already done with Generativity One, Two and Three.