GM585 Unit 10 Coaching Philosophy Paper Example

The Relationship, Their Goals and What I Cannot Keep: A Unit 10 Coaching Philosophy

[Student Name]

Purdue University Global

GM585: Mentoring and Coaching

Unit 10 Coaching Philosophy Paper

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The writer's firm, colleagues and examples are composite; the research cited is real.

My Philosophy in Brief

I coach the people I manage, mostly audit associates and seniors, in short conversations during the work and in longer sessions a few times a year. My philosophy rests on three commitments. First, the relationship does more than the model, so I will spend more effort on trust than on choosing the right framework. Second, the goals belong to the person I am coaching, so I will start from what they want rather than from what I think they need. Third, because I am also their manager, I will set out, before the first session, which things I cannot keep private, and I will keep to that line. Each commitment comes from the reading and from my own coaching this term, and each has a limit.

Commitment One: The Relationship Does More Than the Model

The commitment. I will invest first in the working relationship: agreement on goals and tasks, and a bond of trust.

The evidence. Erik de Haan and colleagues studied more than a thousand coaching relationships, gathering ratings from clients and their coaches, and found that clients' ratings of the working alliance were strongly related to coaching outcomes, while the match between coach and client personality was not (de Haan et al., 2016). Clients' self-efficacy was also related to outcomes. Their findings suggest that how well the coach and client work together matters more than which techniques the coach uses.

The example. This term I used OSKAR with Dana, a new audit senior, and the model helped. But looking back at the transcript, the moment the session opened was when Dana told me about Rachel, the senior she had learned from as an associate. She told me that because she trusted me enough to say she had been taught well and was not teaching her own associates that way. The model gave the conversation a shape, but the trust made it useful.

OSKAR told me which question to ask next; only Dana's trust made her answer it honestly.

The limit. A relationship cannot replace skill, and the research does not claim it can; de Haan and colleagues found the alliance mattered alongside other factors, not instead of them. Their study was also correlational: it shows that strong alliances and good outcomes go together, not that the alliance causes the outcome, since a coaching relationship that is going well may simply feel like a better partnership. My Unit 2 recording showed that I talked for 58 percent of a session with an associate who liked and trusted me. Trust did not stop me from teaching when I should have been listening. A good relationship makes coaching possible, but I still need to practice the skills.

Commitment Two: The Goals Belong to the Person I Coach

The commitment. I will start from the coachee's own picture of the work they want and keep their words in their goals.

The evidence. Tim Theeboom, Bianca Beersma and Annelies van Vianen's meta-analysis of coaching in organizations reported gains across five kinds of outcome, from performance and well-being to coping, attitudes toward work and goal-directed self-regulation (Theeboom et al., 2014). That fifth outcome matters most for my philosophy: coaching seems to help people set, pursue and adjust their own goals. Richard Boyatzis's intentional change theory explains why starting from the person's ideal self, rather than from a list of gaps, creates the energy that sustained change requires (Boyatzis, 2006).

The example. Every goal in Dana's development plan was written in her own phrasing, starting with her goal about returning workpapers. Her goal of leaving by seven most nights was not one I would have chosen, since it is not a performance goal. But it was the goal she cared about most, and working on it made her more willing to work on the others. Her progress review showed one goal above the expected level, one at it and one below, and the one below was the goal she cared about most, which she still chose to continue. A goal she owned survived a bad season; I doubt a goal I had assigned would have.

The limit. As a manager, I cannot let every goal come from the coachee. Some performance expectations are set by the firm and by professional standards, and if an associate's goals ignore them, I have to say so. My approach is to keep the firm's expectations separate and clearly labeled, so that the coachee knows which goals are theirs and which are mine.

Commitment Three: Say What Cannot Stay Private

The commitment. At the start of every coaching relationship, I will say what I can keep confidential and what I cannot, and I will keep to that agreement.

The evidence. The International Coaching Federation's Code of Ethics requires coaches to agree on confidentiality and its limits with clients at the start, and to refer clients to other professionals when their needs go beyond coaching (International Coaching Federation, 2020). Writing on coaching ethics, Iordanou and her coauthors observe that a coach employed by the same organization as the client carries loyalties an outside coach does not (Iordanou et al., 2017). As a manager-coach, I hold the most conflicting role of all.

The example. The Unit 8 case, in which an associate disclosed that she was caring for a parent with dementia and asked me not to tell the partner, showed why the agreement matters. Because I had stated limits at the start, I could tell her honestly what I would keep and what had to change. I did not have to invent a rule in the moment, and she did not feel betrayed when I said human resources would need to know she might want to talk to them.

The limit. No agreement can anticipate everything. The associate's situation fell between the limits we had written, a health concern that was not a safety risk. I had to make a judgment. The agreement gave me a starting point, not an answer.

What I Will Do Differently Next Busy Season

Next busy season I will make three changes. I will spend the first session with each new coachee on the relationship and the agreement, including confidentiality and its limits, before any goal is set. I will ask each coachee to write their own goals before our second session, and I will add firm expectations separately, labeled as mine. And I will record one coaching conversation each month and check my talk share, because the relationship and the coachee's goals both depend on my listening, and my recordings show that my listening slips when the topic is one I know.

References

Boyatzis, R. E. (2006). An overview of intentional change from a complexity perspective. Journal of Management Development, 25(7), 607-623. https://doi.org/10.1108/02621710610678445

de Haan, E., Grant, A. M., Burger, Y., & Eriksson, P. O. (2016). A large-scale study of executive and workplace coaching: The relative contributions of relationship, personality match, and self-efficacy. Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 68(3), 189-207. https://doi.org/10.1037/cpb0000058

International Coaching Federation. (2020). ICF code of ethics. https://coachingfederation.org/ethics/code-of-ethics

Iordanou, I., Hawley, R., & Iordanou, C. (2017). Values and ethics in coaching. Sage.

Theeboom, T., Beersma, B., & van Vianen, A. E. M. (2014). Does coaching work? A meta-analysis on the effects of coaching on individual level outcomes in an organizational context. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 9(1), 1-18. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2013.837499