William Bergquist and William Carrier
We need to know more about what we are doing as professional coaches working in a complex and highly dynamic environment. This third issue of The Future of Coaching (like the second issue) is devoted to addressing questions associated with this knowledge gap.
Francine Campone: Real World Coaching: Real World Research
Jonathan Sibley: What is Coaching? What Isn’t Coaching? Where are the Boundaries?
William Bergquist: Evidence-Based Coaching–Does the Evidence Make Any Difference?
Margaret Cary: Coaching in Medicine
The Book Shelf: Books in the LPC Writer’s Cottage
The challenge is significant. Using a term that Donald Schon applied many years ago, valid and useful research on professional coaching will inevitably be “messy.” We can’t do tidy, controlled experiments in a university laboratory when seeking to find out what makes professional coaching work (and not work). We don’t get to run multiple trials in clean rooms to see what makes particular coaching strategies effective (or ineffective) in addressing specific issues that are being presented by a coaching client. Life and business—and the need to provide first for the client, not the research—don’t work like that. Together, we need to make a mess—but a purposeful, organized mess, the kind of mess that, in accumulation, actually clears things up.
Ample research has been conducted on professional coaching – as evident in the extensive list of publications cited by Lew Stern and Sunny Stout-Rostron in the second issue of The Future of Coaching. Their list contains only those articles and reports that are peer reviewed and published in major journals. There are many more that have been published in other journals, in books and on many websites. The problem (and challenge) that we are pointing out is not in the quantity of publications. It is not even in the individual quality of the work involved (which, of course, ranges broadly). It is the collective quality of work being done in producing the results being reported.
This is not meant as a critique of the work that has been done to date, for as mentioned above, we are facing the challenge of “messy” research that is being conducted in the field rather than in a laboratory. To exaggerate the problem in metaphor (which is likely a literary double-murder): It’s as if we are trying to complete a picture in a connect-the-dots book—but we keep turning pages every time we connect a pair of dots. We’re making headway, sure, but never on any one picture enough to resolve it to an image that makes sense. As one of us [WB] noted in an essay published in a previous issue of The Future of Coaching, the challenge is even more nuanced and complex. Who is determining the type of study being conducted, the nature of the evidence being collected, the criteria for determining effectiveness or motivation? The answers to these questions in turn shape the research questions themselves. To push our metaphor even farther—sometimes we aren’t even using the same book.
Specifically, we suggest that the answer may have to do with establishing a common set of paradigms and a database that is sufficiently large and diverse to warrant conclusions that are robust (if not definitive). We are in need of some kind of taxonomy or at least stable set of terms and definitions so that the findings are anchored in a base of shared understanding among those working in the field (as professional coaches, trainers of coaches, coaching authors, and those doing the research). This is about taking up the next stages of the work of the International Coaching Research Forum and the Dublin Declaration.
Research on Coaching: Five Articles
As we did in Issue Two (with the Lew Stern interview), we turn first to the wisdom and recommendations offered by one of the major researchers in the field of professional coaching: Francine Campone. She comments on what it takes for good research to be done, describes what a “culture of research” would look like in the field of professional coaching, and offers a brief case study of her own work with several colleagues (based on the remarkable, collaborative research on psychotherapy led by David Orlinksy at the University of Chicago). Francine’s study (Campone and Awal, 2012) focused on the reasons why someone would enter the field of professional coaching and is based on results from a survey completed by more than 170 coaching practitioners.
Francine Campone: Real World Coaching: Real World Research
As the co-editors of The Future of Coaching, we not only commend the work done by Dr. Campone and her colleagues, we have also joined with the Library of Professional Coaching (LPC) in a commitment to extending her study–by gathering additional data (using her survey questionnaire) and initiating comparable studies on other aspects of the coaching profession. We will soon be announcing further details regarding these additional studies and will be inviting our readers and the users of LPC (and their colleagues) to complete the survey.
We turn next to both a look backwards and a look forward regarding research on coaching. Our look backwards is to a 2005 article prepared for the International Journal of Coaching in Organizations by one of the pioneers in the field, Vance Caesar, and his colleague, Leslie Evans. They review then-current themes in coaching research and offer a methodological critique. As we consider their work (written almost a decade ago), it is worth asking: (1) how have we done since 2005, (2) have their methodological concerns been adequately addressed, and (3) what might a review in 2014 look like? While the field of professional coaching (by many accounts) is still in its early adolescence, there is already a history that must not be ignored if we aren’t to repeat the same mistakes.
As we look to the future of coaching research, there are several fundamental concerns that must be addressed. First, are we even clear about what the term “professional coaching” means and doesn’t mean? What are differences in the definition of this term and what coaches actually do? Jonathan Sibley has conducted research on the ways people in the field conceive of coaching and he writes about his research in this issue.
Jonathan Sibley: What is Coaching? What Isn’t Coaching? Where are the Boundaries?
One of us [WB] pushes even further in the fourth article, asking: Do research findings make any difference? Our readers are invited to consider ways in which research outcomes are actually influencing coaching practices. Could the research findings be more influential with regard to professional coaching practices if we were engaging all of the four major knowledge-utilization strategies described in this article?
William Bergquist: Evidence-Based Coaching–Does the Evidence Make Any Difference?
We conclude the main section of this Future of Coaching issue with an example of the use of coaching research in a specific field where research findings are taken quite seriously: medicine. Maggi Cary, who is both a physician and professional coach, describes some of her experience and offers insight regarding the importance of leveraging research in the actual coaching conversation. Maggi finds that hard research on soft skills can be compelling support for behavioral change in leaders who are taught to be skeptical of opinion.
Margaret Cary: Coaching in Medicine
Coaching Tool and Book Shelf
As we have done in previous issues of The Future of Coaching (and will do in future issues), the second section provides both a practical tool for professional coaches and a look at the coaching book shelf. Our practice tool in this issue is called the Balint Method. It is a tool that is most often used in the supervision of medical interns and in the reflection of senior physicians on their own ongoing, complex practices. We suggest that the Balint Method (as revised for use by coaches) can be of great value for professional coaches in reflecting on their own practices (in collaboration with their coaching colleagues) and in their work as a coach with client teams and groups. The Balint Method is also a superb research tool, yielding qualitative data regarding effective coaching practices–that is why we included it in this issue (with a focus on coaching research).
The book shelf is a bit different in this issue. Rather that reviewing a specific book, we are opening the door to a significant new development in the Library of Professional Coaching (LPC). While LPC has been in the business over the past 6 years of providing an extensive digital collection of essays, reports and video clips, it is now also in the business of providing an extensive collection of printed books regarding professional coaching and related fields. Located on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean in the State of Maine, The LPC Writers Cottage provides a collection of more than 2,500 volumes that is available to those users of LPC who sign up as patrons of the newly-created 1K Club.
The Book Shelf: Books in the LPC Writer’s Cottage
The LPC Writers Cottage will be used by coaching professionals and researchers who wish to spend several days or a week preparing articles, reviewing literature, or simply finding a lovely sanctuary where they can think and write. We open the door to the Writers Cottage for LPC users by providing an Excel spreadsheet in this issue of The Future of Coaching that is a partial list of the LPC collection. This list contains the books generously donated to LPC by Vikki Brock, the author of a major book on the history of coaching (title and link). In coming issues of The Future of Coaching we will provide additional lists of books in this extensive collection.
We invite our coaching colleagues to consider becoming a 500 club patron–which not only opens the door to our Writers Cottage, but also provides entry into the digitally-convened Writers Circle and free download of three substantial books on professional coaching. We also invite those who use the Writers Cottage to submit their work (in preliminary or finished form) to the two of us as co-editors of The Future of Coaching. We are looking for new authors, new perspectives, challenging critiques, and useful coaching tools. We are looking for help with our book of coaching connect-the-dots.
Come, make some mess. Please join us in ensuring that the future of coaching is secure–and filled with great promise and benefit.
Bill Bergquist
Bill Carrier