To what extent do professional coaches enter the business of “cooling off the mark” when they begin working with clients inside organizations? Is this particularly the case if coaching is being offered as part of an outplacement package for employees who have been victims of downsizing, outsourcing or reorganization? Pain is reduced and the “mark” is appeased – but what about the legitimate grievance and deep-rooted organizational problems that need to be addressed? The social-critical school of organizational analysis (for example, Foucault, 1965; Sennett, 1981) poses just such a question. This school is often identified with the nee-Marxist perspectives of many European theorists-such as Foucault, Adorno, and Hocheimer–as well as a few North American analysts-such as Sanford, Lasch and Sennett.
While this “Continental” school is rarely found to be influential in the work being done by most organizational (or personal) coaches, the questions that it generates are certainly consequential and should be addressed at least tangentially by Natalie and John. Professional coaches and their clients should consider how the client’s organization and its leaders can avoid the organizational convulsions that often lead to very painful job loss and life displacements? There is no need to “cool the mark” if the organization’s leaders are making thoughtful decisions based on principles of equity and fairness. An organization can address the immediate concerns and stresses experienced by organizational “marks” through personal coaching (related to career counseling and life planning)-but what about these broader, organizational issues? Are the right men and women being served by the coaches?
Should Natalie be working with Kurt, the seemingly ambivalent President of John’s hospital, rather than working directly with John? Is Kurt really the unrealistic visionary that John describes? Does he escape from important organizational issues by going visionary and requiring John to remain grounded? Perhaps the issue resides at an even higher level. Should Natalie be working with the hospital’s Board of Directors? Should she encourage the Board to come to a clear decision regarding the priorities to be assigned to not only profit and quality, but also the welfare of their hospital’s employees? How might the visioning processes of the hospital be more broadly shared – so that Kurt isn’t the only one who can “blue-sky” the conversations about current and potential crises?
Is such a shift in perspective appropriate? Natalie was brought in to help John, not change the world (or at least the operations of the hospital). In taking such actions, Natalie could move into the role of advocate—and this could expose Natalie’s social-political biases. Is this really appropriate for an organizational (or personal) coach? Several decades ago, Warner Burke (I987) made a strong case that the field of organization development is not neutral but is very much a “normative” field of human service, with definite and highly influential values regarding collaboration, openness and related matters. This normative foundation can, in turn, be traced back to the writing (and active engagement in society) of that titan of American pragmatism and liberalism, John Dewey (1922), and to the highly influential work of a European immigrant and social psychologist, Kurt Lewin (I997). In more recent years, these values can be traced back to the origins of organization development theory and practice in the engagements of people throughout North America in sensitivity training (T-Groups) and related team- and community-building activities. The roots of organization development can also be found in the soil of social activism and, more specifically, in the struggles against racial, religious and gender biases that began in the 1930s and remained prominent in the civil rights and women’s rights movements of the late 20′” Century.
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