This laboratory setting provided interpersonal support and encouragement for these faculty members. Their anxiety was contained within the safe boundaries of the laboratory. They controlled the nature and scope of the feedback they received and knew that they would be protected by the lab coach/facilitator along with carefully crafted guidelines and norms established for these teaching labs. With their experience in this educational laboratory, the faculty members participating in the workshop could return to their classroom with more self-assurance and a strong feeling of support from their fellow faculty members. Follow up “home trios” involving other workshop participants (similar to those described with regard to Principle Two) further reinforced the support and provided an additional and ongoing “container” for each faculty member’s anxiety.

Principle Five: Complexity

Learning is often complex and related to multi-dimensional and paradoxical problems or mysteries (rather than uni-dimensional puzzles).  The colleague has someone with whom she can sort out and make sense of this complex material. The coaching relationship keeps the process of learning moving forward. I bring forth an example of complexity that is particularly salient, for it involves establishment of an executive coaching program in a major utility company in the United States. As you may be aware, utility companies throughout the world are currently undergoing profound changes. They are becoming self-sustaining businesses that often have to compete with unregulated competitors. This is the case whether we are talking about telephone companies, energy companies or sewage treatment facilities. There are many stakeholders that have considerable influence in these 21st Century utilities. I have described these organizations elsewhere as “intersect” organizations, for they operate at the intersection between private and public and between profit and non-profit.

Those who must lead these organizations are faced with enormous complexity, as well as unpredictability and turbulence. Those who are preparing to assume positions of leadership are similarly faced with the task of assimilating a vast amount of information. The leadership development program being offered by the utility company with which I worked was very demanding and graduates from this program were often overwhelmed by what they had to retain and transfer to the workplace. I suggested that each of the newly minted leaders who participated in this program be assigned a coach, who could assist in this assimilation and application. We trained more than two dozen coaches to provide executive coaching to each leadership program participant—much as in the case of the Yukon government program that Richard Wale describes in the International Journal of Coaching in Organizations.