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Coaching in the Workplace

Coaching

CoachingIf coaching in the workplace seemed like no more than a trendy idea put about by a few business gurus and trainers in the 1990s, think again.

The upward rise of the trend has stabilised. And today, over 25 years from the publication of John Whitmore’s ‘Coaching for Performance’, the discipline is in rude health.

From my perspective, coaching is here to stay.

Continue reading Coaching in the Workplace

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Timothy Gallwey: Inner Game

What better way to start a new year than with a management thinker who showed us how to perform better in all walks of life: Timothy Gallwey, founder of the Inner Game.

A Happy New Year to all of our readers.

Timothy Gallwey is best known for his Inner Game books about tennis and golf. They transformed the approach of a million weekend sports enthusiasts. But these were no limp self-help manuals. They were equally lauded by sports performers at the pinnacle of their sports internationally. And they remain so today.

And it was not just sports people who found power in Gallwey’s advice. Quickly, business seized his ideas and called on Gallwey to show them how to play the inner game of work. In so doing, Gallwey became the progenitor of business coaching, and therefore of executive coaching and its domestic relative, life coaching.

Timothy Gallwey
Timothy Gallwey

Short Biography

Timothy Gallwey was born in 1938,in San Francisco. He attended Harvard Business School, majoring in English Literature. But his academic work sat alongside his tennis playing and in 1968, he was captain of the Harvard tennis team.

His direction remained academic until 1971, when he took a sabbatical, during which he acted as a tennis coach. It was on the court that he started to realise how impoverished were the traditional approaches he was using. Telling the sports person what to do would distract them from all else. And it would introduce new anxieties to their play.

Gallwey started experimenting with new ways improve tennis performance. Instead of telling a player to watch the ball, he asked them to vocalise sounds at the moments when the ball struck the ground or the racket. Of course, this required them to watch the ball too. Later, he shifted his instruction to noticing where the ball landed,or where it struck the racket face. Gradually, Gallwey developed the principles he still teaches, as do many coaches the world over*.

During the early 1970s, Gallwey also learned meditation, which he suggests improved his game and influenced his thinking. That thinking came together in what was to become a million selling book, The Inner Game of Tennis (1974). It remains a best seller today. This was followed by Inner Skiing (1977), The Inner Game of Golf (1981), and The Inner Game of Music (1986).

But it was not to be long before weekend tennis players and golfers in the upper ranks of business started to wonder if Gallwey’s coaching principles could apply to the workplace. By the late 1970s, he was a much in demand speaker and through the 1980s, he spent more time advising business on using inner game principles to boost management performance.

Also in the 1980s, Inner Game coaching was in full flow in the UK. There, Inner Game sports coaches like Graham Alexander, Alan Fine, and Sir John Whitmore started to see the wider application of the principles too. They articulated what is perhaps the best known management coaching model, the GROW model, and took their sports experience into business* too.

It was not until 1999 that Gallwey relieved business people of the need to read about tennis or golf, to gain business performance insights. The Inner Game of Work took inner game principles and all Gallwey had learned from his consulting experience, and consolidated it into a marvellous book.

The Principles of the Inner Game

At its heart, the ideas of the Inner Game are simple. I shall present what I consider to be the core:

  • One big idea
  • One important conclusion
  • One simple solution

Gallwey’s Big Idea

Gallwey’s big idea is this. When we are focused on achieving something that is important to us, there is a constant dialogue in our head. And, motivated by self doubt and fear of failure, one part of our mind provides a constant and undermining commentary. It issues instructions and deals out rebukes. It warns and it threatens. It praises (rarely) and chastises us for our failings.

Who is this part of us addressing? It’s the part of us that would otherwise get on and perform. Gallwey calls these to selves,

  • Self 1: which is logical, critical, fearful and dogmatic
  • Self 2: which is instinctive and contains your know-how

If this all sounds familiar, compare it to today’s psychological concept of System 1 and System 2,   popularised so powerfully by Daniel Kahneman in his wonderful book, Thinking: Fast and Slow.

Gallwey’s Important Conclusion

If you have an instinctive self that is capable of doing stuff and figuring out how to do it well, then why do we take so long to learn and become excellent. Gallwey says that Self 1 gets in the way. Its constant directions, critiques and berating interfere with our performance. Gal;wey characterises this in a simple formulation:

Performance  =  Potential  –  Interference

Consequently, the Inner Game is all about removing that interference from Self 1, and allowing our performance to rise to the level of our potential.

Gallwey’s Simple Solution

Gallwey’s solution is simple and (I can say from experience) highly effective. If we can focus you awareness on what is happening, that focus will still Self 1’s voice long enough for Self 2 to gain insights into how to modify our behaviour.

Gallwey calls non-judgmental observation and the role of a coach is not to tell you what to do, but to direct your attention. This directed focus allows Self 2 to learn, and Self 1 to think it is occupied with the noticing.

Gallwey’s insight is to transform coaching to a process that centres on awareness raising. The skill of a coach is first, to direct attention to the most pertinent events, and second to reinforce Self 2 in its quest to act on what you learn.

Gallwey’s Legacy

The R of the GROW Model is Reality. Giving you enough time to fully understand what is going on is the single most valuable role of a coach. And when you have articulated your Options, a good coach will cycle back to Reality, to help you test those options out. Gallwey does not use the GROW model explicitly. It isn’t his model. But it grew from his thinking.

And, while we are on Gallwey’s legacy, let’s cycle back to his experience of the early 1970s – he learned to meditate. And I am convinced that this impacted on his practice by placing awareness at the centre of his approach to coaching.

Let’s just remember what the flavour of the year was two or three years ago, in the world of personal development: mindfulness. Emerging from meditative practices, what is mindfulness all about? Focused awareness.

Timothy Gallwey in his own Words

Here is a 12 minute interview with Timothy Gallwey, filmed in 2012


 

* Including me. I was privileged to be taught coaching by Sir John Whitmore and David Hemmery and to have attended a masterclass and an informal dinner with Timothy Gallwey.

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An Infinite Number of Coaching Acronyms

Coaching seems to be one of those disciplines that everyone likes to invent their own process.

I’m not sure if it’s because I like systems, or I like to collect, or I’m just a coaching ‘geek’, but I have been collecting coaching process acronyms ever since I did my first coaching training with Sir John Whitmore in the late 1990s.  So here’s a survey of some of my favourites:

One of the first, one of the simplest and one of the best: GROW

Developed by Graham Alexander, Alan Fine and John Whitmore, GROW is fully described in ‘Coaching for Performance’ by Sir John Whitmore.

Goal
Reality
Objectives
Will – Way forward

CoachingSession

ACHIEVE

Dr Sabine Dembkowski and Fiona Eldridge developed the ACHIEVE Model to make the details of the steps more explicit.  It is one of many, many variants on GROW.

Assess the current situation
Creative Brainstorming of alternatives
Honing goals
Initiating Options
Evaluating Options
Valid action plan design
Encouraging momentum

OSKAR – a Solution Focus Approach

In their book, ‘The Solutions Focus: Making Coaching and Change SIMPLE’, Paul Z Jackson and Mark McKergow introduce the OSKAR Model, which introduces the importance of getting a perspective on the scale of the problem to GROW and its many variants:

Outcome
Scaling
Know How
Application
Review

Don’t confuse this with Worth Consulting’s OSCAR model

Outcome
Situation
Choices and Consequences
Actions
Review

Many, Many More

Here are some more I have inventoried – you may like to look some up on your favourite search engine: WHAM, OUTCOMES, PIDREF, STEPPA, FLOWS, CLEAR, ACHIEVE, ARROW, ACE.  I don’t have the space to spell them all out for you, but if you get really stuck, do feel free to ask in the comments.

Two more – called COACH

Coincidentally, our very own Pocketbooks have two more models to offer you, that are both called COACH.

The Coaching Pocketbook, in the Management Pocketbooks series offers:

9781903776193C – competency – assessing current level of performance
O – outcomes – setting outcomes for learning
A – action – agreeing tactics and initiate action
Ch – checking – giving feedback and making sense of what’s been learnt

.

And my own current favourite (if it isn’t a little disloyal to the Pocketblog) comes from the Teachers’ Pocketbook series, and The Coaching & Reflecting Pocketbook:

9781903776711 Clarify the Issue

Open up Resources

Agree the preferred future

Create the Journey

Head for success

.

Add your own …

If you have a favourite coaching model or process, please do add it, using the comments section below.

So here’s the deal

No one process is better than the others, so you pays your money (or you get the basics free, online) and you makes your choice.

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