Collaborative Coaching
What's the best
way to work with business people who want their problems solved, when our goal is to help
them learn how to solve their own problems? Social science research suggests they'll learn best if we collaborate with them instead of offering "expert"
recommendations. The more the change process is self-defined, self-monitored,
self-evaluated, and self-reinforced by those who have to make the changes,
we've come to believe, the greater the likelihood of
enduring effects.
These same values predominate in other fields,
as well.
Collaboration has been embraced by many practitioners of medicine ("mutual
participation"), leadership ("motivational management"), teaching
("student-centered"), and psychotherapy ("client-centered"). Why? Because taking the
expert role in any of these situations
can stifle self-initiated action. Medical patients, for example, are less
likely to comply with a treatment regimen if they're told what to do without
being involved in the process.
But there's
a problem. If we value collaboration, we
expect to work conjointly with people to diagnose, plan, and carry out actions that will "solve" their problems, resulting (we hope) in their greater
commitment to the process of change and stronger ownership of results. We also assume
the process of collaboration itself will generalize to other working relationships.
Historically, however, most organizations have been competitive in orientation and
authoritarian in implicit expectations (some organizations still use such
terms as "chain of command").
Thus, if a client system is hierarchical and authoritarian, we
might as well
acknowledge that we're attempting a revolution.
As it turns out,
that's not an issue very often, because we often fail to
develop the kind of collaboration we believe in. And when we
fail, we too often blame our clients – citing their
"resistance," for example. Instead, we need to look at the
subtle ways we contribute to the problem by unwittingly
taking an expert role.
The dictionary defines
"collaboration" in two ways:
It is in this
second sense that collaboration in coaching situations can be
compliance
with the coach's wishes, because our organizational clients often operate implicitly from more
traditional, hierarchical modes of interaction.
How does that happen? Because we value collaboration so much we tend to insist on it,
missing the point that this very behavior constitutes a bid for dominance. Telling someone "We're going to collaborate" is a paradoxical
communication: clients are damned if they do and damned if they don't. If they
"collaborate" by going along with us, we may be praising them for in fact
doing
as they're told (this is a "do as I say, not as I do"
scenarios). If they choose not to collaborate, we give them a negative label
("resistance") for taking self-initiated action, the very outcome we say we're
seeking. Hello? No wonder our clients sometimes seem confused.
I recommend working
with clients to create an integrated set of values, building on
the initial beliefs and expectations of both. It's possible, then, to negotiate an
approach where collaboration occurs in the
process
of uncovering and integrating differences.
