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How big’s the appetite among coaches for a deeper grounding in science? One answer comes—fittingly—in the form of a number: 700.
The 2010 Harvard Coaching Conference, billed as “the nation’s only academic-based coaching conference,” has upped its capacity from 450 attendees last year to 700.
“It’s growing,” said Margaret Moore, co-director of the Institute of Coaching at Harvard and a c0-director of the conference. “The first year we were jammed into a small space, bursting at the seams. It created a sense of constant frenzy—you really got the sense this was the place to be.”
In its third year, organizers say the conference’s rising registrations show a continued interest among coaches in doing what the Harvard Coaching Conference set out to do at its inception: elevate coaching’s professionalism through scientific, evidence-based research.
“We are the only organization to bring together the world leaders in coaching and coaching research and address the educational and training needs for such a diverse audience that include executive coaches, health and wellness coaches as well as physicians, psychologists, healthcare providers and those interested in leadership development who want the latest theory, research and practice breakthroughs,” said Christopher Palmer, MD, director for the McLean Hospital Department of Postgraduate and Continuing Education.
“We see this conference as the leading opportunity for people to be exposed to the highest caliber of coaches and to learn the latest and best in the field,” said Philip Levendusky, director of Psychology at McLean.
Who are the best in the field—the highest caliber of coaches?
The lineup in Boston includes Sanjiv Chopra, a dean at Harvard Medical School; Sir John Whitmore, author of Coaching for Performance; Barbara Frederickson, director of the Positive Emotions and Psychophysiology Lab at the University of North Carolina; and Richard Kogan, author of Resiliance and Transformation: George Gershwin.
“These are the experts in human change,” said Moore. “And we’re bringing them to coaches, who are agents in human change.”
The lineup of presenters includes an illustrious collection of academics and thinkers. But as Fran Dutton, a self-described coach and critic pointed out on The Coaching Commons, none of the Harvard keynoters have “coach-specific training and none of them hold any type of coach certification. They mostly come from psychology.”
Are Harvard’s high-caliber presenters out to—as Dutton suggests—“(hijack) the coaching agenda?”
Not at all, says Moore. Instead of a takeover of coaching by psychology, or a blurring of the boundary between the two disciplines, Moore suggests the conference will address the line between therapy and coaching “head on.”
“We’re going to show you how therapy models are used in coaching,” said Moore. “So they’re not therapy, but they’re useful in coaching.”
Moore says attendees will get a solid understanding of what therapists do, what they’ve learned, and how they spot the “hidden wounds” in patients—the very same people (with the very same wounds) who are coaches’ clients.
“We can’t coach without bumping into them,” said Moore. “It’s part of what we do. So we have to get good at understanding what therapists do.”
So organizers of the Harvard Conference have keynote speakers like Richard Schwartz, creator of IFS (Internal Family Systems) theory and technique, which was devel0ped for use in the mental health community but many believe has tremendous potential in coaching.
“IFS is extremely valuable in this context,” Schwartz has written, discussing his work with pilot programs teaching IFS techniques to executive coaches. “I’ve been looking for ways to bring IFS to larger systems so it can have increased influence and, for better or worse, the values and atmosphere within corporations have the most impact on the most people in our culture.”
“You’d have to travel somewhere to take an expensive training” in techniques like IFS, said Moore, who believes having so many leading thinkers and scientists in one place explains the increased demand, even in a tough year for conferences.
“There’s a great yearning by coaches to be more legitimate,” said Moore, explaining the process of selecting speakers who can do more than simply inspire. “(We’re) digger deeper and bringing these folks to the coaches that they won’t see anyplace else.”
NOTE: The Harnisch Foundation is the founding funder of The Institute of Coaching. The Coaching Commons is a project of The Harnisch Foundation.
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There are 4 Responses so far...
A new wolf has entered the forest of coaching. Psychologists have descended on coaching disguised as rigorous scientists eager to raise the caliber, standards, theory and research aspects of coaching. But in reality they are just hoping to cash in on vulnerable coaches just like the hundreds of others who market services to coaches.
Just re-read the article above and see if any of the conference organizers want to learn anything FROM coaches. Nope, they’re only interested in telling coaches what’s missing, what they need. When one of the people interviewed says, “we’re going to show you how therapy models are…useful in coaching,” isn’t a statement that says, “we want to learn how coaching can improve therapy.”
This conference is mostly attended by academics or those who have bought into the myth that psychology is a science and that these late comers to the coaching world, the positive psychologists, the neuropsychologists, and others, have the real answers about coaching.
As Vikki Brock has pointed out in her history of coaching, psychological practice was one of the foundations for the development of coaching, and it can and does have value for coaching practitioners. There is clearly a solid relationship, but can that relationship exist without psychology attempting to mold coaching in its own image?
I love concepts/ models/ techniques/ methodologies/ processes/ systems, no matter which domains (psychology, leadership, counselling, engineering, artistic expressions, philosophy, etc. etc.) they come from.
I see coaching as using concepts/ models/ techniques/ methodologies/ processes/ systems from many domains.
Key to me is whether all these will enhance impact, performance, development and transformation for the client/coachee. If that happens, then that helps the coaching process.
More often then not, in any coaching conversation, the coach will use/map the coaching conversation along the line of a ‘structured model’ for example: the GROW Model. However, as the conversational flow evolves, the coach will bring in appropriate ‘sub-models or sub-techniques’ that would facilitate the conversational progression, for example: the Power Zone technique.
So in a nutshell, the coach uses a range of concepts, models, techniques, methods, processes, etc. from many different domains, appropriate to facilitate the attainment of the coaching goal/outcome.
Wouldn’t it be great to operate from an ‘open mind’ and reap & leverage from the best of all available domains to make our coaching practice efficient, effective, and impactful?
Billy C H Teoh
Malaysia.
Billy makes a good point. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. There are many useful concepts, methodologies and techniques that can add value to coaching that come from other disciplines. After all, coaching itself, as Vikki Brock, has so comprehensively documented, comes from several sources.
However, I think the point that Fran D. is making is not to reject the value but to be cautious about something more subterranean or unintentionally hidden about the attention coaching is getting from psychology and psychologists. The psychology horde wants to apply their model of psych practice and its emphasis on “standards,” licensure, certification, and theories and it’s cloak of “scientific rationalism.” All of these can be pretty overwhelming, confusing, or even shaming for coaches.
While coaches and coaching have been doing a great job of standing on their own up until now, the influx of psychologists will move coaching towards an exclusionary practice where only those with the “right” credentials will be considered credible. This completely contradicts not only the evolution of coaching till now, but also contradicts the majority of research on why and how people select coaches to help them.
I’m with Fran and Rey on this one.