‘Through a glass more clearly…’
Chris Blackburn, Oxford Brookes University Business School
 
Context/situation/challenge
With a view to establishing a centre for coaching and mentoring practice within my institution, I had volunteered, along with other colleagues, to undertake an ‘M’ level qualification in coaching and mentoring.
 
Having previously spent around twenty years in management roles both in the commercial and in the HE sectors, I had undergone the ‘usual’ training in, for example, leadership & motivation; performance management and been engaged in the personal development & review process. Particularly as a University lecturer it had been my role to make direct, guiding interventions in the progress of students towards pre-defined goals and/or learning outcomes.
 
However, I'd never knowingly been provided with a context or set of tools through which I can facilitate the development of others by majoring their own ‘resourcefulness’. I had tried ‘instinctively’ to support colleagues and students in their development but was now seeking some more ‘grounded’, practically and experientially-derived guidelines on which to base that support. 
  
Characteristics of the situation that engaged me in an immersive way.
Although reflective practice has become an integral part of the HE agenda, like most practitioners I seldom created the time or space to undertake such reflective practice myself. Coaching would allow me to create reflective ‘psychological space’ to ‘stand back from the workplace’ not only for coachees but also for myself.
 
The learning (immersive) experience I was about to embark was about my own personal development in understanding principles and processes of coaching & mentoring and from that base developing the knowledge, understanding, skills and confidence to become a reflective practitioner both as a coach and a manager.
 
A second aspiration was related to a career-change I had recently made. One of my main role objectives is to widen the scope and opportunities for work-based learning for our students.
 
A criticism of Business education is that it can become ‘decontextualised’ and that appropriate employability skills can only be assimilated in a working environment through, say, work placement, short internships and in-company project work. However, if students are fully to benefit from such off campus opportunities, a comprehensive support system of workplace mentoring has to be in place. To that end, I decided to include a number of work-place based students as my ‘coachees’
 
As part of the course, over a period of six months I had to coach a number of individuals in a minimum of six, extensive and in-depth sessions. In doing so, I had to get ‘inside their lives’: this would include gaining their trust, learning a little of their personal history but above all to share their aspirations and seek to support them in aiming to achieve through their own ‘resourcefulness’ .
 
At the end of my story (postscript 1) is one of the ‘artefacts’ drawn up by a coachee in describing their life to me. When seeing the enthusiasm and commitment with which people describe their lives and aspirations – how could you not get immersed!?
 
What forms of learning / personal development / change emerged from the situation?
A key context for my learning has been structured reflection with my coach-mentor. In that relationship, there were/are two aspects critical to my personal development and understanding of the coaching process. The first was the opportunity to discuss issues – and crucially my reflection on issues - which had arisen during the course of my 'practice' and often to which I had initially felt unequipped to respond. (Or rather, I probably would have responded, but in a text-book based and hence rather mechanical way). It was useful to receive not only feedback on how I had approached my coaching relationships, but also to talk through possible further ways of developing those relationships without straying towards my natural inclination to directiveness. The insight provided by my mentor threw a lot of light for me on how much of an effort I had made to move away from natural inclinations to adapt to individual coaching situations but equally underlined the importance of avoiding the pitfall of remaining 'static' in coaching relationships.
 
As a consequence, I felt more self-aware and confident to act in a facilitative fashion both with coachees and colleagues. Such a view would appear to be supported by coachees where qualitative feedback in particular focussed on my skills in ‘tuning in’, helping to consider exploring alternatives and challenging ‘avoidance measures’. I feel I can now operate following the dictum, ‘The art of good [coaching] is to wait for the learning moment, and notice it when it arrives’ (Cavanagh 2006)
 
Allied to this area, I have become interested in exploring models which place emphasis on the coach’s need to be mindful of the contexts in which coaching occurs and the differing and revelatory perspectives which this can bring to the process.
 
The second key learning element of both the coach-mentor relationship (and undertaking the course more generally) was the creation of a space and time in which I was able to do some structured reflection on how I operate as a manager and as an individual. This provided the impetus to appreciate reflection as a practitioner far more constructively than hitherto - and within that to recognise the importance of both peer feedback and an understanding of peer perspectives. Experiences in coaching maintained my questioning and exploration of self 'vividly' throughout the eight months of the course and continue to do so. In work relationships in particular I have come to observe I had been operating in a very reactive and process-, rather than, self-aware, interactive and people-focussed way for a long time.   
(I also had a ‘pragmatic aim’ of coaching undergraduates in the work place. Having now ‘problematical’ this aspect of my practice and reflected with my coach-mentor, my view is that individuals in a similar situation are probably more likely to benefit from a specifically work-related mentoring experience than the all-encompassing and possibly overwhelming way in which coaching might manifest itself to them. )

 

What words/concepts/feelings would you use to describe the immersive experience? What did being immersed mean to you?

Literally life changing, I believe I now understand the power of reflective practice
Insightful
Engagement
True facilitation
Privileged and trusted at the same time

 

What principles or lessons can be drawn from this story?  For example, how could this story inform designs and enrich opportunities for learning through immersive experience in higher education?

 

Although I know that temperamentally, I will never be an inveterate and meticulous reflective diarist, it is not a cliché to say that the purpose and values of being a reflective practitioner are now a fundamental underpinning to the way I operate as a coach, a manager and an individual.
 
In providing with a context which literally allows an individual to create time and space to reflect on all key actions and activities, I find all aspects of my role in HE to be more thoughtfully and indeed enthusiastically approached
 
Reference
Cavanagh M (2006), ‘Coaching from a Systemic Perspective: A Complex Adaptive Conversation’ in Stober, D. & Grant A. (eds), Evidence Based Coaching, Hoboken NJ: John Wiley, pp 313-354
 
 
 
 
 



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