16
Coaching from a Dialogic OD Paradigm
Welcome to an exploration and unpacking of the possibilities and practices of Dialogic OD in the field of coaching. This chapter is informed by narrative practices (White and Epston, 1990; Swart, 2013) that grow from social constructionist (Burr, 1995; Gergen, 1994; Gergen and Gergen, 2003) and poststructuralist (Foucault, 1977, 1980) ideas within the postmodern paradigm. Chapters 3 and 4 discuss similar and supporting ideas.
We will explore questions like: What is a narrative? Why do narratives matter? What is coaching within this understanding? How does narrative coaching work? How does narrative coaching fit in Dialogic OD? What are the outcomes of these collaborative coaching journeys? How is the world of the client or the client’s relationship with the organization influenced by these practices of coaching?
You are now invited to step into the values of emergence and collaboration that lead to transformational ways of being in a coaching relationship within the Dialogic OD approach.
What Is a Narrative and Why Does It Matter?
Clients are connected to and shaped by the multiplicity of narratives of their own lives: the relationships they value, the communities and histories they come from, and the cities, nations, and economic systems that have formed them, as well as the narratives of the global world that they form part of through access to technology.
In the coaching conversation the multiplicity of narratives of the client are invited, welcomed, and explored, with all their ambiguity and competing natures, to come and be told, retold and re-storied. As we do not judge or discriminate the usefulness of narratives at first sight, we allow whatever arises to be told and heard. The client is seen as the expert of all the richness of the multiplicity of narratives that he or she brings as well as the sponsor or author of his or her own life and narratives.
Narratives are formed through the storying of our lives. As we make meaning of the events and actions of our lives, we weave them together in coherent storylines that end up as “identity conclusions” (White, 2004, p. 31) of who we are as individuals or teams. These conclusions may sound like these examples: “We are the fragmented team,” “I am not a good leader,” or “I am just a dreamer.” The power of the storying capacity of our humanity is that we draw conclusions about our identities, our relationships, and our reality through this meaning-making practice.
These conclusions of our identities are further supported (or not) by another layer of narratives called “taken-for-granted beliefs” and ideas, or “prevailing narratives,” that are socially constructed in the families, cultures, communities, organizations, and nations we come from and are informed by. These beliefs and ideas may sound like these examples: “If the manager is not at the meeting it is not worth attending,” “If actions do not affect the bottom line they are not worth doing, “If you do not give your everything to your work, you will not be given a promotion, “Success is measured by how you dress and what you drive.”
Prevailing narratives, which explain how things are, are shared by a group of people, help them make sense of their world, and provide a rationale for decisions and actions. These prevailing narratives have shaping and constitutive effects and therefore influence the lives of clients (White and Epston, 1990; White, 1991; Freedman and Combs, 1996) in ways that sometimes invite them into disconnection with their own humanity, identity, and preferred narratives. They can leave clients feeling that their actions are nothing special, maybe even normal or common, or that things can never change or be challenged. With individuals or teams the coach engages with the client’s day-to-day meaning making, exploring the effect and influence of the client’s relationship with prevailing narratives that are no longer sustainable or useful and sometimes even detrimental.
Narrative Coaching in Dialogic OD
Dialogic OD consultants are engaged when the client’s preferred ways of being seem unattainable without help and when alternative narratives, possibilities, or patterns are required. The client may enter the coaching conversation with problem stories or concerns, or may have an intent or general outcome he or she seeks, and knows or does not know exactly what change or practice will address the concern or create those preferred outcomes.
Coaching within the Dialogic OD paradigm
provides coconstructed conversations and relationships between coaches and clients that are respectful and generative as collaborators in the journey
assumes clients create and sustain their reality through the narratives they construct to explain their daily lives
supports clients to be reflective about the narratives that are shaping their thoughts and actions
engages in collaborative conversations that stimulate the emergence of new or transformed narratives and vocabularies that intend to lead to new possibilities, new meanings, and new actions
establishes client-centered, collaborative relationships in which the coach is part of an ongoing conversation and not an objective diagnostician.
Because of the pervasiveness of coaching in so many companies, it provides a unique opportunity to introduce Dialogic OD ideas and practices through the experiences, actions, and transformation of clients. In the sections that follow we will see how the democratic, humanistic, and collaborative values of Dialogic OD can manifest themselves in the practice of coaching. In coaching from a Dialogic OD stance we need to address the following questions: How do we see the client? What becomes possible in the relationship with the client? What are the practices and questions that create and cocreate these coaching journeys? What kinds of questions do we ask and how do we listen?
The Client as the Expert
In Narrative Therapy the word knowledges is often used to foreground that clients are richly resourced not only in the narratives that inform them but also in ways of knowing. Hancock and Epston (2008) refer to these knowledges as “insider knowledges” that have the following qualities:
Insider knowledges are local, particular and at times unique as they often arise from imagination and inspiration, not the usual technologies of scientific knowledge-making…. Because they are, in the first instance, the intellectual property or otherwise of the person(s) concerned, outsiders cannot rightly claim either invention or ownership of such knowledges. “Insider knowledges” are modest and make no claims beyond the person(s) concerned. They do not seek any monopolies of “knowing” but sponsor many kinds and ways of knowing. “Insider knowledges” do not provide grand schemes as they are far too humble for that … and are carried best by and through stories. (pp. 485–486)
Table 16.1 Dialogic OD Coaches Avoid or Don’t:
This conception of clients and their knowledges runs counter to the way coaches are often seen: as the person who must teach, guide, correct, and support a client who is in need of all these services and actions. This conception of client dependency can lead to a relationship with power and knowledge that strongly privileges the coach. In the Dialogic OD paradigm this conception is challenged. Instead, clients are assumed to possess many insider knowledges and therefore when the word client is used in this chapter it implies that clients are the experts (Anderson and Goolishian, 1992; Morgan, 2000) concerning the rich treasure chest of gifts, skills, competencies, hopes, beliefs, values, abilities, dreams, commitments, histories, narratives, and knowledges of their lives.
The Coach as Listener
In the Dialogic OD approach the coach is always open to learn about and from the client (Anderson, 1997), and is open to being transformed him- or herself in the conversation.1 Each conversation is focused on deepening the coach’s understanding of the life and narratives of the client from the client’s experience and perspective. This enables the coach to come alongside the client’s meaning making by using his or her vocabulary, so that this decentered stance privileges the voice and experiences of the client.
In contrast, when coaches engage in the practices shown in Table 16.1, they are not trying to understand, but are imposing their beliefs, or even societal ideas, on the client. These practices prohibit curiosity because they are ready with the right answers. In addition, these ways of being assume that what was useful and helpful to one client would also be helpful to others.
Being aware of the stance we take as coaches and what informs us as we are listening creates the container we coconstruct with clients that allows for the emergence of new possibilities. Consequently, the Dialogic OD practices of listening listed in Table 16.2 invite transformation out of isolation into connectedness and community, as the client dares to say and is heard in speaking what may have previously been unspeakable.
Table 16.2 As Dialogic OD Coaches Our Role Is to:
See the client as the expert/author
Ask when we are not sure
Be curious
Be willing to be transformed in the conversation
Ask questions that we do not know the answer to
Be enchanted by the multiplicity of narratives
Think of the narrative in the past, present, and future
Be passionately interested in what the client is saying
Listen for and use the vocabulary of the conversation
The practices listed in Table 16.2 also reflect democratic, humanistic, and collaborative values such as respect, constant engagement with the power relationship between client and coach, and the belief that clients have the capacity to change and develop in a supportive environment.
The Coach as Questioner
The second important vehicle for exploring the narratives of clients is the art of questioning.2 I provide examples of questions for the coaching process later in the chapter to give the reader a sense of how the conversation unfolds, but agree with Harlene Anderson (1997, p. 126) when she explains, “I cannot know my questions ahead of time; I cannot choose words to produce a specified outcome. I want to participate in the kind of process I am describing naturally, not artificially. For I am inside, not outside, the process I am trying to create.” The questions that are crafted in this coaching process honor the coconstruction of knowledge, language, relationship, and connection that is negotiated between the coach and client and is therefore always contextual.
The Dialogic OD approach is concerned with what questions do or do not do, the qualities of the questions, and what they produce and generate. Given this concern, Tables 16.3 and 16.4 provide descriptions of the kinds of questions or stances to avoid and to adopt.
What Transformational Questions Generate
In Dialogic OD work the questions are intended to be transformational and generative by inviting alternative possibilities and emergence to enter into the conversation. These kinds of questions invite clients to explore and tell narratives in a new and different way and to access narratives that might have been long forgotten, thereby generating new or transformed possibilities for action. Transformational questioning yields answers that matter deeply to participants, are slow (like the speed of nature, which is contrary to the fast-track speed of modern culture), and are an outflow of the conversation. It generates continuing conversations from a desire by both the coach and the client to know more and to continue the conversation.
Table 16.3 Dialogic OD Coaches Avoid or Don’t Ask Questions That:
Assume to know anything about the client, without asking
Jump to conclusions
Judge participants
Know what is right or best for the client
Belittle clients
Trick clients into answering in a particular way or giving a sought-after answer
Leave clients guessing or wondering what the questions are about
Invite clients to answer in ways that support the beliefs and ideas of society
Fall back on the privilege of professional status with sentences like: “In my professional opinion….”
Invite answers that are ready, easy to access and waiting, like a takeaway meal
Are about giving or retrieving information
Table 16.4 Dialogic OD Coaches Ask Questions That:
Are transparent, as clients are given the reasons, purpose, and direction of the conversation
Grow from the vocabulary of the conversation, that is, the language, text, ideas, images, narratives, replies, and questions
Cannot be prepared in advance and are freshly constructed
Flow from the reply and the context of the conversation
Seek the help, assistance, and participation of the client
Respectfully appreciate the ideas of the client
Create equal participation, where the questioner is led by the client and the client is led by the curiosity of the coach
Seize the imagination
Explore the richness and multiplicity of narratives
Invite clients to respond with willingness, excitement, and readiness to participate
Carry and convey the fascination and curiosity of the client
Transformational questioning invites narratives to be unpacked and told in the language and vocabulary of the client. This vocabulary is then woven into the questions. In crafting the question, the client is situated as separate from the narrative that he or she is in relationship with, a practice called externalization (White and Epston, 1990). If the client has named a problem narrative such as “I struggle to be successful in this company,” we can externalize with questions such as: When did you first notice the struggle to be successful? What does it mean to be successful in this company? What is on the other side of being successful in this company?
After unpacking the meaning and ideas and beliefs that support the narrative, the client can be asked to give the narrative a name like the title of a book. The unique vocabulary shows up as we engage with the naming of the client’s narrative and use it in the questions we later ask. For example, if the client has named the narrative, “The Struggle to Be Successful,” we might ask, “How does ‘The Struggle to Be Successful’ influence your development in this company?” Clients cannot but pay attention to the question, because they have chosen the name of the narrative. This has a very different impact from using a language and way of speaking that is familiar mainly to the coach.
These kinds of questions might sound like this:
What would you call this narrative if you had to give a name to it, like the title of a movie or a chapter of a book?
When “The Struggle to Be Successful” goes on holiday sometimes, as you say, what is the first thing you do?
We ask these kinds of questions because we believe that narratives are created through language; therefore language is the medium for looking again at the narrative to rewrite it. When the narrative is named in the vocabulary of the client, transformational questions focus on assisting it to be retold, so that it becomes more richly described and therefore open to re-authoring.
When clients and coaches are aware that they create their worlds through language, the coach and the client become more attentive to the way they speak and conscious that as they speak and ask questions, they are creating a world through words, actions, and relationships. Given that we negotiate the meaning of our world through language (Anderson, 1997), questions have the potential to open up new worlds of possibility to us as we are invited to think in unfamiliar ways. When clients are questioned within the language and vocabulary they have offered and created, a new, magical world of meaning becomes available to them.
One client told how a lot of good things were happening in his role as executive and called this practice “being on the front foot.” As he made meaning of the practice of “being on the front foot” he was reminded that this practice was not really new, that there was a rich history to this practice that he could draw on and from. This realization helped him to no longer just take the relationships with his senior executive, his peers, and team, as well as their opinions about problems in his department, as the way things are but to take more initiative with direct engagement and conversations with all the relationships that matter in his role, clearly communicate what is happening and how he is proactively addressing matters in his part of the business, and get solid reports out that were constructed in joint effort and conversation with the appropriate executive for that area.
The quality of the transformational questions takes the coach and client down a rabbit hole of possibility where the imagination is unlocked and alternative realities can be explored. For example: “If the ‘Struggle to be Successful’ were to go on a holiday, how would it influence the way you think about who you are and what you can become?” The Dialogic OD approach is mindful of how questions impact the kind of stories, conversations, actions, possibilities, and ways of thinking that are constructed. Questions are not innocent; they carry tremendous power and have real effects on human beings. The coach is aware that clients may wish to please them or otherwise do or not do what they think the coach wants. Consequently ethical coaches are constantly mindful of what they say and why they say it and what they ask and why they ask it. In other words, the ethical coach is also self-reflective about his or her own narratives, stories, and vocabularies, posing questions such as:
Why is it important for me to ask this question?
Who benefits from this question?
Whose voice is silenced by this question?
Which ideas in society inform this question?
Cocreating the Coaching Relationship
The coach has the responsibility to welcome and craft the invitation for participation as an equal in the coaching relationship so that it honors the richness of the human experience and narratives, the vocabulary the clients bring, and the knowledges that are coconstructed within the power relations in which the coach and client stand.
Invitations to Deconstruct Power
One of the first acts to invite participation, collaboration, and coconstruction is the deconstruction of the power associated with the role of the coach. In this regard the coach can ask questions such as
What are the things that would be important to know about me as the coach that would help you to participate fully in this coaching relationship?
What are the knowledges that you bring around your experience of coaching that would be important for me as a coach to know and to understand?
Invitations for Coconstruction
In the initial conversation the coach inquires about the client’s intentions for the coaching relationship as well as the kind of relationship, conversation, and outcomes that the client will find useful. The coach is also curious about the meaning the client brings regarding coaching and the expectations for outcomes that flow from these meanings. Here are examples of questions the coach can ask:
What is your understanding of a coaching conversation and relationship?
What would be important for you to address in this coaching relationship/conversation?
What would be an important place to start the coaching relationship for you?
What are the kinds of outcomes in the coaching relationship that would have meaning to you?
If we think of coaching as something we both take responsibility for, what do you see as my responsibility as the coach in this relationship and what is the responsibility that you are willing to take for this coaching relationship? What are the things we have to jointly take responsibility for?
If you spoke to your best friend a year from now about the things you valued in this coaching relationship, what would you be talking about?
If the desired coaching relationship can be captured in a song, an image, a metaphor, or a place in nature, what would it look or sound like?
After the client responds to the questions the coach also reflects on his or her understanding of the coaching relationship, the responsibility that he or she is willing to take, and what struck him or her in the conversation.
Once the invitation to participate has been accepted, the client and coach have signed up to collaborate in the coconstruction and co-design of the coaching relationship. As equal partners they take responsibility for this relationship as they are cocreating knowledge, learning, teaching, and transformation together. This implies that the coconstructed conversation and relationship has fluid lines that breathe with the conversation as it moves, shifts, and pauses as required.
When clients are invited to be co-designers of what would be useful to them in a coaching conversation, they return to the conversation with an agenda of the challenges they experience, the narratives that they want to unpack, difficult meetings or conversations that they are facing, celebrations that they want to share, or problem narratives they want to rewrite. Clients now take ownership of their own development and what that means for them, and no longer wait for the coach to develop them, to give them homework, or tell them what should be accomplished by the next coaching session. In this way they are invited and encouraged to take responsibility for authoring their lives going forward.
Invitations to Coconstruct Knowledge
The coach and client cocreate the conditions for the conversation with careful curiosity and collective inquiry that is built on their shared knowledge and how they do knowledge together (Burr, 1995). Knowledge is not seen as something outside of the conversation, but as something they do together as coach and client. As they do knowledge together it passes through the conversation and invites alternative stories, practices, and insights to emerge that potentially transform both coach and client.
Invitations for Human Aliveness
The coach is also entering into a relationship with the client that draws on their human connectedness. As relational beings we construct collectively what it means to be a coach and a client and therefore also what it means to be human together. Coaches are invited to see clients as human beings who are gifted, resourceful, knowledgeable, resilient, competent, and “narratively resourced” (White, 2004, p. 90).
From the Dialogic OD Mindset the coaching conversation is not an intervention in which the coach is required to diagnose or fix the deficiencies and weaknesses of the client. Coaches create opportunities for the multiplicity of expressions and connections as well as a client’s “multi-intentioned lives” (White, 2004, p. 86) to enter. Therefore the physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual constructions of identity are welcomed as expressions of human aliveness that sometimes go beyond words, as clients can bring the telling and unpacking of identity through music, art, and movement, for example a song that a client has written. Here are some example questions:
If you look beyond the role you are fulfilling in your work, family, life, organization, or community, where else would you draw your identity conclusions from?
When have you experienced aliveness and human connection the most? Which event, relationship, moment, or narrative would you tell me about?
If you bring me a piece of music, or tell me about a place that has significant meaning for you and that captures something that speaks of your understanding of human aliveness, what or where will it be?
Showing up as human beings who are gifted, competent, and skillful with hopes and dreams for the future enables clients to again tap into narratives and relationships that might have been long forgotten or hidden and now emerge as possibilities for alternative preferred narratives.
Invitations to Reflect
The client remains the expert on the value of things that touch him or her deeply and can be asked the following questions at the end of each session and also at the end of the coaching journey. These questions do not focus on the coach or the client individually, but on what has been cocreated collectively:
What struck a chord with you in the conversation we just had?
What fired your curiosity in the conversation?
What caught your imagination in what we spoke about?
What questions did the conversation evoke in you?
What have you learned in the conversation?
What has become possible because of the conversation we had? (White, 2004)
The coach also answers these questions because he or she is equally moved, touched, or transformed (Anderson, 1997; White, 1997) by the conversation and is not only an onlooker or audience but a participant, collaborator, and coconstructor.
Invitations to Transformation
The most important transformational outcome of the work is that clients talk, think, and act differently daily as the new or alternative narrative further ripples out into different attitudes and assumptions. This new or alternative way of thinking and talking allows clients to make new choices and alter their beliefs, ideas, and narratives about their identities and about what is possible and desirable.
Documentation That Extends the Coaching Conversation
The notes that are taken by the coach during the coaching conversation are the property of the client, who can take them if he or she wants to reflect further on the conversation. These notes are a way to help the coach document the unique vocabulary, narratives, and ideas of the client.
Sometimes the coach uses these notes to write the client a letter (discussed in Epston, 1994) as a reflection of a coaching session and to stimulate generativity. The letter then serves as a retelling of the client’s narrative and is open to be changed and challenged by the client. As the coach writes the letter, it is important to stick to the vocabulary and language of the client. These letters are written in externalizing language, which means that the client is spoken about as separate from the problem. In the practice of narrative work, the person is not seen as the problem; the problem is the problem. In conversations about problems, the client is invited to unpack the relationship with a problem narrative in which the client is not seen as the problem. For example, when a client says, “I am a bad leader” the coach can ask questions such as: When did you first become aware that bad leadership has come into your work life?
The documentation can also take the form of a song, a poem, a certificate, or a video clip and can be written, sung, or presented in the form of a narrative. The client is cast as the main actor along with the events and incidents that inform the narrative. The narrative is a rich description of the problem and preferred alternative (with names for each chosen by the client), the different beliefs and ideas that inform the story, and how these stories influence the main character’s life, as well as the dreams, visions, and hopes that flow from the preferred alternative narrative. Here is an example of a paragraph out of such a letter:
The story that you hold about yourself is that of John the Fireman. The Fireman hears about problems too late and is therefore always fighting fires. The narrative of the Fireman is strongly influenced by the drive to push yourself in the pursuit of managing the fires and possible fires. You are however deeply aware that if you are not able to depart from the current relationship with the Fireman narrative to the Blue Sky leader narrative, then you will never improve the work/life balance practice and the hours you spend at work will carry on getting worse and worse at the expense of your family and your social life.
In addition, some transformational questions are offered in the letter:
Would it be in order with you if I ask you some questions? Why does improving your work/life balance matter to you so much? You mention that you are not willing to let the Fireman narrative get a hold on your life in such a way that your family will pay the price. I was wondering if there is a price that the Blue Sky leader is willing to pay to enjoy the balance of a family life and a social life.
The letter can be sent to the client after the coaching session and the client can be invited to respond via email or reflect together with the coach in the next session. In the next coaching session the letter is read by the client and then becomes the text that informs the coaching session. Clients have reported that one such document is worth many sessions with coaches.
Unpacking the Multiplicity of Narratives
In the coaching conversation the multiplicity of narratives of the client are invited, welcomed, and explored through a process of “unpacking.” The client is invited to explore where these narratives come from, what sustains them, and what impact they have on the client and others. Ultimately, the client is seen as the expert about all the richness of the multiplicity of narratives that he or she brings as well as the sponsor or author of his or her own life and narratives.
Unpacking Prevailing Narratives
Taken-for-granted beliefs and ideas, or prevailing narratives, are very powerful because they offer clients ways of being and identity conclusions about themselves that are within the accepted and valued beliefs and ideas of a particular community, culture, organization, nation, continent, or worldview. These prevailing narratives derive their power from being so well known and accepted that people would say, “this is just the way things are.” Clients are therefore invited to unpack and explore the effect and influence of their relationship with prevailing narratives that are no longer sustainable or useful and sometimes even detrimental. We can ask the following kinds of questions about prevailing ideas and beliefs:
Where does the idea that you should be giving your life to the company 24/7 come from?
Who advocates the idea that you should be giving your life to the company 24/7?
How do you think this idea that you should be giving your life to the company 24/7 developed?
What do you think this idea that you should be giving your life to the company 24/7 has in mind for human beings?
The kinds of inquiries that Dialogic OD practices generate disrupt the socially constructed way things are, the language of the way things are, and challenge those who are perceived to have power in constructing the way things are. By deconstructing the influence, history, and ideas of prevailing narratives we are destabilizing ideas that seemed to be fixed and “the truth,” so that new possibilities and patterns can emerge. These practices of disruption are unpacking and “taking apart” (Morgan, 2000) the dominance of prevailing narratives that are not moving the client into his or her own preferred ways of being.
Unpacking Problem Narratives
The unpacking of narratives is not focused on diagnosing or solving any problem or fixing any deficiency or finding a solution. The coach does not decide which narratives are right, correct, or best. Instead, she or he invites clients to understand the consequences, influence, history, and usefulness of the relationship with the narratives told and lived. In addition, coaches provide the means to see which narratives are privileged, preferred, and dominant, and cocreate conversations to support the emergence of new or alternative narratives. For example:
When was the first time that the idea of giving your life to the company 24/7 made an appearance at work?
What has been the success rate of the idea and story of giving your life to the company 24/7 at work?
How has giving your life to the company 24/7 influenced the relationship with your team at work?
Unpacking Alternative Narratives
Because narratives are created through language and meaning making, they can shift or transform whenever new or alternative evidence, language, knowledge, relationships, ideas and beliefs, or meaning making emerge from the conversation. As the new and alternative ideas and images emerge, options for action that did not occur before and new ways to change become available as clients make personal voluntary commitments to new behaviors and projects. These are some examples of questions to encourage the emergence of alternative narratives:
When did you first notice this Passion for the African Continent?
Why was this passion so significant to you?
What made it possible for you to hold on to this Passion for the African Continent despite the prevailing narratives that constantly spoke about “dark Africa”?
Who dead or alive would not be surprised that you are talking about the Passion for the African Continent with me today?
The Dialogic OD practitioner also aims to thicken and enrich the preferred alternative or new narratives of clients’ lives as they emerge. This process is called the re-authoring of clients’ preferred narratives. The re-authoring of a client’s life (Kotzé and Kotzé, 1997) is an invitation to take back the pen in the writing of the preferred narratives as clients take back the storytelling rights of their stories and tap into stories and relationships that take them forward.
For example, in the exploration of alternative narratives, a client who felt very stuck in a problem story suddenly remembered an important relationship she had with her aunt when she was a child. The memory of this special relationship brought back the dreams she had for her future and helped her to access what she valued, what mattered, and where to go next. This gave her the confidence and evidence to again actively participate in the authoring of her life, inasmuch as this very important relationship invited her to take back the storytelling rights of her life.
Challenges and Possibilities in Organizational Coaching
Various opportunities and dilemmas can present themselves as coaches are invited to journey with clients in organizations. First we will look at the challenges, then the possibilities.
The Challenge of Negotiating Power in the Organizational World
In the traditional understanding of coaching, the coach has significantly more power in the relationship. This is amplified when the coach is paid by an organization to develop the client and bring the necessary change that the organization has in mind. Stepping into the coaching relationship as the one being paid to come with the expert knowledge in fixing and helping the client can be quite daunting, for both the coach and the client.
When the coach is set up as the expert who must help fix whatever is broken, the expectation and responsibility lie on the coach, sometimes without any cooperation or help from the client. If the client thinks that the coach is the one who knows things about them, might have even been told things about them, and is here to fix them, the relationship starts out on a bumpy path that sometimes invites a lot of distrust and suspicion. Therefore the invitation to the coconstruction of the coaching relationship as described earlier is of the utmost importance.
Negotiating the Coaching Relationship
It is particularly challenging when the client is the only person on a team assigned to coaching, or when the reasons for the coaching conversations have not been clearly communicated. Sometimes the clients have been told by their managers that they need coaching and the coaching relationship is therefore colored with sentences such as, “My boss thinks I need coaching, but …” When these situations happen, the first duty of the coach is to make sure the reasons are clearly communicated and the client actively decides, based on a clear picture, to commit to a coaching relationship. I have often seen suspicion, despair, and distrust enter the room with the client when he or she has not been briefed properly before entering the relationship with the coach. Questions that can be helpful with clients who are suspicious about the need for and assignment to coaching are
Tell me why you think you have been given the opportunity for coaching at this particular stage in your career.
How is the way that the coaching relationship has come about influencing your work, your relationships at work, and the possibilities of this coaching relationship?
After these initial questions the rest of the questions for the negotiation of the coaching relationship discussed earlier in the chapter can be introduced.
Prevailing Organizational Narratives
The client is in constant conversation with the emergence of all the layers of narratives of the organization, the leaders, the employees, and the team. In organizations there are a variety of different narratives about the same thing, sometimes even competing narratives about the same things. In coaching conversations the organizational realities or narratives are often described by clients through sentences that start or end like these:
“This is just the way things are”
“This is our reality in this organization”
“This is true; see, it happens again and again”
When the prevailing narratives of an organization are powerfully fixed as the truth and the only truth it creates a dilemma when the coaching process leads clients to challenge, question, or not comply with them. In these contexts clients might be pushed out of the organization or eventually fired. This creates an ethical dilemma for the coach who is paid by the same organization to journey with its leaders in line with its values and prevailing narratives. Although the coach is paid by the organization, the client and the trust relationship that has been established between the coach and the client need to be honored at all times.
In such circumstances the dialogic coach comes alongside the client to unpack the real effects of the prevailing narratives and journeys with the client in the decisions that flow from these insights. The client and the coach can also have a conversation about the necessity and importance of further conversations with other key players in the organization or on their team. If the client thinks that it would be helpful for the coach to have a conversation with other team members or leaders in the organization, it would always be with permission of the client to the extent that the client would assist the coach in what to say, how to say it, and who to say it to. It is also important that the client identifies a community that will help him or her make sense of the best decisions given the circumstances. This is discussed more below in the section on transforming dilemmas.
Different Paradigms
The Dialogic OD paradigm is a counter and alternative narrative to the currently prevailing narratives in the world of profit, speed, certainty, predictability, competition, compliance, value for the shareholder, the tyranny of the bottom line, endless growth, and production (Brueggemann, 1999; Block, 2008; Saunders, 2013). The theories and beliefs about social construction, emergence, conversations, narratives, and generativity that are part of the Dialogic OD Mindset and discussed in the theory chapters of this book are counter to the rational planning, controlled change, and objective realities presumed in most business approaches. This approach to coaching dares to ask questions, challenge the thinking and actions sometimes valued in organizations, and believe in the generativity of emergence that allows movement as narratives shift and change through the meaning making of experiences.
Entering as a coach working from the Dialogic OD paradigm into an organization that predominantly functions in a different paradigm can present a number of challenges. How we speak is as important as what we say because our words create the worlds that we come from and want to be part of. The different way of speaking about emergence and movement of narratives in the social construction of realities might invite many questions and frowns at first. However, I have often found that when clients taste and experience the work, they understand and participate fully in the journey. The kinds of questions that have been offered as examples in this chapter give a peek into the different way of speaking and the use of vocabulary provided to and by the client.
Despite the tasting of the work, however, some clients still prefer an expert telling them what to do and how to do it, and long for the stability that a structured, guided process brings. The Dialogic OD process of emergence, ownership, responsibility, and generativity is just too scary, chaotic, and uncertain for some. In my experience it takes a bit longer to start to cocreate the coaching conversation in these situations and I have sometimes asked the client if he or she would prefer to end the sessions or want me to find a different kind of coach for him or her.
Transformation Dilemmas
Another challenge unfolds when the organization invites only one or two managers or executives out of a team to enter a coaching process without it being part of a bigger organizational initiative. This can create various ethical dilemmas.
When the narrative of the client shifts or changes, the whole organization notices and recognizes the shift, especially the team that the client is part of. Although the team might have longed for and expressed the wish for the client to change and would therefore welcome the shift, the shifting and changing of narratives also has implications for the team. The client might shift in thinking and actions, but that might require others to move or shift in their identity and actions in ways they do not want. I have often seen how the rest of the organization or the team a client is part of waits for the client to “fall back” or “climb back” into the old role and actions or even encourages that.
I once journeyed with an executive who had excellent technical skills but whose relationships with her team and peers were not always respectful and created a lot of fear in most when they had to approach her. In the coaching journey she identified her preferred story of leadership and was starting to try out this new way of thinking, doing, and talking with her team. But unfortunately the team was not willing or ready for the change and shift. One can understand that it would take a while for a team to trust again and to participate without fear, but all of these practices also require the narratives of team members to shift. Although the team members longed for the change, the change of the client’s narrative meant that their way of being and narratives also needed to shift. They could no longer tell the stories of blame, of her inapproachability, the disrespectful ways she communicated, and the fear that a relationship with her created. Her small acts and practices of difference were storied as something that would not last. As she continuously bumped up against the stuck narrative of who she was in the organization, and would always be, she started losing hope that things would ever change.
This is why ethical Dialogic OD practice is to pay attention to the whole as well as the parts, and invite and ensure that the people the client works with become partners and supporters of the client’s transformation. The main work of the Dialogic OD practitioner is to provide clients with the space and curiosity that will open up their ideas for how to live their preferred narratives of work, leadership, and relationships. After the client has named the preferred narratives the coaching conversation creates the space to reflect on how the preferred narratives and identity conclusions are enriched. When the team or a preferred community is invited to journey with the client, they become witnesses to the transformation and their own narratives are then also enriched and transformed. The shift and support in the group’s or team’s narrative about the client is essential to the transformation of the client and his or her relationships at work.
The coaching conversations within the Dialogic OD paradigm cannot be seen as separate from the changes that happen in conversations on other levels of the organization. The shift in one conversation will have a ripple effect into all of the others because the interconnectedness of the web of narratives moves the organizational socially constructed narrative. Given the impact that Dialogic OD brings, it is very important to know that the new kind of thinking that this paradigm introduces has ethical implications. The coach must assume responsibility for the real effects of the work (White, 1997). Practitioners should therefore constantly ask the following questions:
What is this new thinking creating?
Who benefits from the new way of thinking?
The Possibilities That Doing Knowledge Together Brings
When we are participants in the creation and doing of knowledge together in the coaching conversation, clients also become more open to listen and learn with others. This openness helps clients to be curious and ask questions about knowledges and also value the insider knowledges their team or colleagues bring to the organization. These insider knowledges are built on the practices, actions, and narratives as people in organizations do their work and possibly take for granted why and what they do. If clients are cocreating knowledge together with their team or colleagues in the organization it creates more openness if they ask when they do not think they know, implying a willingness to learn from anyone on all levels in the organization. This contributes to the transformational potential of this approach to coaching.
Power That Is Inviting
When clients are aware that they are “vehicles of power” who are always in the “position of undergoing and exercising power” (Foucault, 1980), it brings an attentiveness to what that power creates in their daily interactions, in the construction of their relationships, and in their organization. This altered thinking invites clients to use the privilege of their power to ensure participation (Kotzé, 2002) and open opportunities for others to speak. This awareness motivates clients to ensure that those with little or no voice get to share their knowledges and ideas, because so often innovation comes from the margins of the organization. Incorporating those voices increases the richness of the multiplicity of dreams, narratives, motivations, and commitments in teams and organizations.
Shifting from Isolation to Community
The willingness of the coach to take the relationship that is constructed within the coaching conversation seriously is an antidote to the isolation that is sometimes experienced by clients. Most coaching in organizations is done with the executives and senior managers. These clients do not always have the space to speak frankly about their meaning making of the prevailing ideas and narratives of the organization. Acting as someone to listen and explore with them what the prevailing narratives and practices mean and how they influence their lives and work, the coach becomes a witness to the preferred identity conclusions of the client. This position of witnessing sometimes makes the coach the first point and possibility of community and of breaking the cycle of isolation and loneliness.
The coach sometimes enters as the first community member in journeying with the client into their preferred ways of being in the organization, and because our identities are socially constructed in community it is very important to invite and include other members inside or outside the organization to journey alongside the client. The inclusion of preferred community members further opens up alternative narratives beyond isolation and loneliness that ripple into the relationships in the organization. These changes in the relationships and networks among people in the organization create new possibilities as new people are included in the conversations, new connections are made, and relations are re-storied.
Re-humanizing Relationships
Tapping into what matters and what brings clients alive also opens their eyes to the team members who surround them and how they can invite this human aliveness within the prevailing narrative of the sometimes dehumanizing practices of corporations. The shift in thinking is often that the personal is also the professional. Tapping into the huge treasure chest of our humanity changes what and how we see those around us, our work, our leadership practices, and the organization.
As part of the coaching relationship the conversations are also exploring how the preferred identities and narratives of the client are influencing and shaping all the relationships that matter to the client. The client might start to listen and ask more questions about things that really matter to peers or team members.
Re-authoring Organizational Narratives
The coach who is working in an organizational context becomes a cotraveler in the organizational journey and is often invited to be an audience, a witness, and a collaborator in the shifting of not only the narratives of the client but sometimes also the organizational narratives. In organizations where Dialogic OD conversations normally do not take place, it disturbs the way things are when clients engage in new ways of talking and thinking. Their agreements to talk and act differently not only bring about authorship of their own narratives but also coauthorship of the organizational narrative.
As the authorship of a client’s own narratives and coauthorship of the organizational narrative bring ownership beyond blame, clients see and recognize their own participation in the shaping, creation, and conveying of the organizational reality. Clients can now better perceive, seek to understand, ask transformational questions, and act on events and conversations because they are participants in the cocreation of emergence, generativity, and organizational meaning making. In addition, clients participate in the processes of generativity, especially as they invite the unique vocabularies and narratives of their team members to influence the ongoing construction and reconstruction of the social reality of the organization. All of these practices can present the gift of disruption that may lead to the emergence of new possibilities and realities in a significant way.
These coaching conversations are therefore never finished, as each conversation becomes a springboard for future ones (Anderson, 1997). Because of the continuous movement, an organization and client are always on the way of making sense as coaching conversations participate in re-authoring organizational narratives, one narrative at a time.
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