Organizational Coaching and Professional Development: A Valuable Partnership

Eight Principles Regarding Development through Coaching

I will briefly describe each principle and then illustrate its use in a coaching process by pointing to one of my own experiences as a coach, trainer or consultant to a professional development program.

Principle One: Refreezing

All learning, according to Kurt Lewin, involves three steps: unfreezing, learning (change) and refreezing.  Coaching enables the third step to take place (the step that is often forgotten). I was working with a major educational unit of the United States Federal Government. Men and women were being trained to assume high levels of responsibility in their specific branch of government. This meant that they would soon be engaging with the American press—which is not an easy assignment! They received considerable training in working with the press; however, the lessons learned in this training program were soon lost when they actually faced the press corp.

I was involved in setting up an organizational coaching program to support these new government leaders after they left the training program and as they prepared for their first press conference. This involved rehearsal, feedback (including video-recordings) and debriefing after the first conference. Each of these activities was a form of performance coaching and each helped the learner refreeze (stabilize) her learning and maximize the transfer and retention of her learning from the training program.

Principle Two: Focused Attention

The coach encourages a client to keep the learning she has obtained from the training/education at the forefront. The client continues to work with this learning through interactions with her coach. Over a period of ten years, I offered a program at my graduate school (The Professional School of Psychology: PSP) that involved the training and certification of executive coaches. It was a long and somewhat drawn out process, involving a five day intensive training program, followed by a six to eight month practicum. It is easy to lose focus over this extended period of time. To sustain the attention—which, in turn, encourages both retention and transfer (use) of the learning from the coach training program—we introduced an ongoing coaching process into the program.

Each participant joined with two other participants to form what we called a “home trio.” The three members of each trio met in person or by phone approximately every three weeks. This hour-long session usually focused on the coaching process that was being engaged by each member of the trio; it also was often devoted to other issues that emerged in each trio member’s life. Thus, each member of the trio was being coached by the other two members at both the performance (behavior) and executive (decision-making) levels. In addition, the home trios allowed each participant to observe the coaching strategies being used by two colleagues who have participated in the same coaching program. This learning-from-one-another was particularly appropriate in our training program, because we took an appreciative approach that highlights strengths and encourages peer learning among participants.  These trios often continued after the practicum was completed—for the participants gained much from their interaction and from the high quality coaching they were receiving from one another.