Thoughts about the role of coaching in adult development

You have probably heard many myths and also some truth about the value of coaching for individuals and organizations. I will not repeat them, but I will try to highlight those which are the most interesting in my opinion. I like to dig deep into the nuances, and I would also like to invite you to think below the surface.

Let’s start from the most common, well researched and backed with a lot of data truth: coaching really works and a coaching culture has a big impact on the engagement, performance and profit of the company. It also raises the quality of the competencies and skills (hence the improvement in the performance), and it changes people’s thinking, mindset and the quality of the conversations.

However, it doesn’t make life easier. It doesn’t make the conversation and the employees easier and more convenient. In fact, good coaching makes everyone more uncomfortable and everything more challenging.

Still, it is worth welcoming that discomfort, because it will make your organization more viable, adaptable, agile and more innovative. It will make you more capable to influence and empower different people, because you become more competent using yourself as an instrument for transforming human behavior. You also become smarter and wiser just by listening to yourteammates’ideas and cognitive processes.

What are the benefits for the employees? 

They gain self-awareness and a better understanding of their context. They become more independent and efficient in their thinking and therefore more adequate and accountable in their actions.

So what coaching is from a different perspective than the usual definitions?

Coaching is in my experience the most effective adult-adult interaction. Its magic lies in its inherent philosophy, values and competencies, which are the result of an interdisciplinary synergy of adult development, psychology, Eastern and Western philosophy, sports, management, consulting and hippie movements.

How it works?

It changes the leaders’ and employees’ sense making and makes them less reactive, automatic in using old, outdated assumptions without situational adequacy. It makes the sense-making more nuanced, creative and fit to the context. It changes how people perceive, interpret and handle the situation. Based on decades of research by W. Torbert and Adams&Anderson, the effectiveness of adults depends on their maturity (action logics, sense-making). For example, organizations led by leaders with more nuanced and complex sense-making outperform several times the organizations led by leaders with more conventional, reactive mental models.

It is very popular today to take a variety of different courses, however many of them provide new knowledge, but do not change the mindset and the mental programs. It might take years of deliberate practice and self-work to change the deeper layers of our cognitive and emotional wiring. Some parts of the human development are not just about the learning, but also about the unlearning.

Since we are human designers, this quote resonated with me today:

“A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”(A. de Saint-Exupery)