When coaching someone, the hardest thing in my experience has been bringing genuine curiosity to your coaching. Genuine curiosity seems to sit at the heart of coaching because coaching is the art of asking questions and drawing out the answers and the expertise from the person receiving the coaching. While this sounds great and ‘easy’ enough in theory, it has definitely been something that I’ve experienced a learning curve in, in my own practice. Going into conversations, even with the best intentions, I have found myself making snap judgements or feeling the pressure of helping move the person being coached forward, ensuring that they progress in their work, which can lead to giving advice or asking leading questions. And this has at times held me back from just being curious or just wanting to learn more about the other person/group. It takes intention and intentional practice to be fully present and engaged and to be curious about what the other person is sharing. Otherwise, you will be stuck in the loop of just asking or sharing whatever is coming up for you and your own interpretation of what the other person is sharing.
Working as a Teaching Fellow for the course: Public Narrative was an incredible opportunity to both learn and practice this craft. Learning from Professor Marshall Ganz and our Head Teaching Fellow Lacey Connelly allowed me and my colleagues to explore the idea of vulnerability as the first step of coaching. The coach needs to model vulnerability to create a space for the person receiving the coaching to feel safe to be vulnerable themselves. The last semester was wonderful in getting a hands-on learning experience with this craft.
Working with the teaching team of the course — Organizing: People, Power, Change at HKS over the last few weeks allowed me to see experienced coaches in action and to observe their craft. I do think engaging in this work myself before observing them was essential to be able to understand the details of their craft (like David Perkins’ idea of ‘playing the whole game’). It has been so helpful to shadow coaches these last two weeks and I think this is a really effective way of honing your own craft — while being careful of who it is that you are shadowing. And then there’s a balance to how you imbibe what you see into your own practice. Because each coach has a different style, a different personality, and a different flavor that they bring to coaching, it is important to reflect on what you’re taking away from observing them and that you’re not just trying to copy what they’ve done. This has been harder to do in practice. Anytime I’ve seen a great coach in action, I have wanted to copy their ‘coaching moves’ and I’ve seen others in the class (and outside of class) do this as well. When we see someone modeling coaching and ‘good questions’ to ask, we tend to use the same questions or copy the same dispositions, use the same humor, or whatever it is that the model coach did. And it takes practice and time to dig deeper into this and to understand who you are in this.
At its core, I feel that coaching really has a lot of similarities and overlaps with the character and skills that lifelong learners have. You need a similar set of skills or dispositions and both of them are really about building up on your background knowledge and the skills that you have. They also both emphasize genuine curiosity and a learner’s mindset where you go into situations not feeling like you are the expert or you have the answers, but wanting to learn more from each situation. This in turn helps to see struggle as a constructive part of the coaching process, both for the coach and the person receiving the coaching, instead of tagging mistakes as things not working right. Of course, it is important to be able to distinguish when something is not right and when something is really about learning — but the assumption that this work requires practice and time is important to do this work.
And this is how good learning also takes place as you approach this work not from an outcomes-based perspective but from a process-based perspective. And so you are really trying to understand whether the people that you are coaching are engaging with the process authentically and are learning from that process. And wherever they are getting stuck in the process, that is where you want to be asking questions to uncover what they’re thinking and feeling and what’s underneath that. The way to do that — genuine curiosity!
