Why leaders who coach are more important now than ever

In 2020, Ann Knights joined a group of Hult Ashridge Center for Coaching (HACC) accredited coaches offering pro bono coaching for NHS and social care staff during the pandemic. Many coachees were under enormous pressure, while also leading others delivering care in a resource-constrained environment. In this article, Ann highlights the value of coaching in times of complexity.

The term VUCA, first coined in the late 1980s by Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus, seems apposite here. The now-familiar acronym stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity and was taken up by the US Army War College as a response to the collapse of the USSR in the early 1990s. Suddenly, there was no longer only one known enemy, but a much more unpredictable environment, resulting in new ways of seeing and reacting.

In the midst of the complexity and uncertainty of their environment, NHS clinicians and managers came to coaching wanting a space to think and make sense of their challenges and their responses (emotional and practical). More often than not, they also wanted to think about how they supported their staff. We very often ended up talking about how they might support their people through coaching conversations (although not always did we use the word coaching). How do leaders lead well when they themselves do not know the answer? Or help their team to deal with stress when they themselves are subject to the same stresses?

People define coaching in different ways – with varying degrees of complexity, and attention to the relationship and the task (performance). I enjoy Denham-Vaughn and Gawlinski’s (2011) idea that “coaching is a collaborative process” which “helps others to experience their situation from a new perspective”. This new perspective opens up the possibility of relevant action, reframed thinking, or feeling differently. The collaborative part is important.

We think of coaching as joint inquiry, with the leader and colleague working out together what is going on in a given situation and what that means in terms of learning and/or action. This means that leaders don’t need to know the answer or be immune to the same stresses that their colleague is experiencing, to be helpful. Instead, it opens up the possibility of the leader learning alongside the coachee.

However volatile, uncertain, complex or ambiguous the environment, leaders’ coaching conversations often have simple aims in mind: helping their colleagues to “do well” (solve problems, do a good job, get things done, have good working relationships, progress their career, etc) and/or to “be well” (feel supported, resilient and fulfilled, handle stressful environments/situations, grow personally, understand themselves, flourish). This might be the “will” (hard edge) and “grace” (responsive side) of coaching (Denham-Vaughn 2005).

At our Centre for Coaching, we hold some assumptions about organizational life and working relationships in the VUCA world that impact our way of working with leaders who coach.

With all this in mind, we encourage leaders to look for opportunities to coach in all their existing relationships and situations where it might be helpful; not just to save coaching for formal performance management conversations. We take the view that all leaders have inherent relational skills and personal strengths which they can bring to coaching. The challenge for leaders is to let go of the idea that they need to be clear about how to solve a problem or even what technique to use to help a colleague to do so. Instead what matters for leaders is attunement; to themselves, their colleagues, and the situation they find themselves in together. This provides the ground for a collaborative conversation where new understanding can emerge.