The coach/mentor as role model for humility and authenticity

Jim Collins, the US researcher on leadership describes amongst the key qualities of authentic leaders the balance of personal humility and professional will. Personal humility involves, amongst other attributes, “quiet, calm determination”. Humility is equally an important characteristic of the effective coach, because:

• It prevents us from dominating the coaching / mentoring conversation and the process of learning dialogue
• It helps us listen more deeply and with less ego-interference
• It encourages us to question assumptions and beliefs
• It enables us to be more realistic about comparisons between ourselves and others
• It makes it easier to admit and address weaknesses and mistakes
• It helps us be more honest with ourselves and others

The danger is that we are either insufficiently humble, or far too self-effacing. At a relatively recent coaching and mentoring conference, one of the speakers spent 45 minutes in self-aggrandising monologue, then announced that “When I’m with clients, I never talk about myself!” – blithely unaware of the incongruity. Fortunately, such low self-awareness and bombast is relatively rare in the worlds of professional coaching and mentoring. More commonly, professional coaches undervalue their wealth of experience and expertise.

We have found the following questions to be helpful in gaining an appropriate balance between arrogance and humility.

• What am I particularly proud of having achieved lately?
• When my clients achieve am I more proud of them or of myself?
• What has made me feel humble lately and why?
• What did I do (could I do) to savour and engage with that humble feeling?
• How can I expose myself to suitably humbling experiences?
• What happens if I underplay or overplay humility?
• When does humility become a virtue and when does it become a vice, in my role as a coach/ mentor?

Useful questions to explore one’s own authenticity include:

• How succinctly can I describe my personal values and how they contribute to my identity as a coach?
• When do I most live up to those values and my aspired identity? (What is happening within me and around me?)
• When do I least love up to them? What is happening within me and around me?)
• How do I calibrate how authentic I am being?

This last question is particularly interesting, because it gets to the heart of ethical psychology. Human beings have an in-built set of scales linking their behaviour to the values they espouse, and they unconsciously seek to maintain an equilibrium. So for example, if we have just done a good deed, we tend to be less inclined to generosity in the period following – and vice versa. A little painfully honest reflection can help us understand how this compensating mechanism works in our case – and hence recalibrate to become more consistent with our authentic self.

Another significant issue for coach authenticity is how we constantly question our own practice. Are we genuinely living up to our ethical standards, or are obfuscating the grey areas? One such issue we have explored is the question: “Could leaders and managers be using having a coach as an excuse to abdicate their responsibilities for their self-development?”

There’s no obvious source of empirical research around this issue, so we started to raise the issue with coaches , individually, in groups and in larger forums. The result? Both an admission by many coaches that this is one of the great taboo topics in coaching and a concern to develop more effective ways of ensuring that they recognize and avoid such collusion. In particular, many of the coaches expressed the view that collusion was deeply prevalent in the relationships between many (often high paid) coaches working with leaders. Absolving the leader’s guilt about not paying sufficient attention to their development, they proposed, is fertile ground for a dangerous co-dependency – one in which the coach consciously or unconsciously agrees to limit the level and scope of their challenge and the client provides a long-term relationship , with all the attendant financial benefits. Indeed, some senior coaches perceived that long-term coaching assignments (more than a year) were almost by definition collusive.

Yet at the same time, very few of the coaches had directly confronted the issue with clients, even though they may have felt at times that the client was using them to assuage their guilt at “developmental avoidance”. This was all the more surprising, given that most were also aware that executives are frequently not very self-development oriented. (The study by Clutterbuck Associates, Ashridge, Career Innovations and the Talent Foundation in 2010 revealed that leaders generally attached little priority to their own learning and development.)

So what kind of approaches might coaches adopt to address this complex issue? Some of the ideas generated include:

• Include some discussion of this issue in the initial contracting conversation
• Focus assignments less on single, specific goals and more on fulfilment of a more comprehensive Personal Development Plan (PDP), of which those goals are a part
• Review progress against the PDP as a regular agenda item
• Help the client understand and work with their personal learning styles/ approaches to learning. If possible, help them expand the range and flexibility of their approaches to learning.
• Encourage them to keep a learning diary and to share this, as appropriate, with you and with other key stakeholders in their development
• Help them develop a more systemic view of their learning – to recognise how dependent sustainable individual change is on learning and adaptation by others around them. How can they take greater responsibility for the collective learning of the leadership team? Are they willing to do so?
• Look out for signs of hidden procrastination – lots of verbiage about how they perceive they are changing, with little real evidence that is in anything but superficial. Have the courage to call this!
• Early in each coaching conversation, ask questions such as: “What has changed noticeably for you since we last met? How much of that change have you initiated?”
• Explore the issue of pace of learning. How fast does this business need to change to compete? How fast does that mean that the leaders have to change? How fast does that mean you have to change?
• If you suspect that the relationship is being used for development avoidance, explore what might enable and motivate them to spend more of their time in learning mode. What deeply held values can they associate with such behaviour?

The fundamental principle that emerges, however, is that, if a coach does not at least address these issues in their own mind, they are tacitly laying the foundations for collusion. A sobering thought, perhaps, but an important one in grounding our coaching practice!

© David Clutterbuck, 2014

Prof David Clutterbuck
Coaching and Mentoring International Ltd
Woodlands, Tollgate,
Maidenhead,
Berks, UK. SL6 4LJ

www.coachingandmentoringinternational.org
e-mail: info@coachingandmentoringinternational.org
Company registration number : 08158710