If you can’t measure coaching skills, how will you improve?

This article is a reprint of a Coaching Research in Practice (Jun, 2015).

In an effort to gain professional recognition, the coaching field is working towards higher professional standards. Standardized benchmarking is one sign of a mature profession and both coaching associations and training schools are improving their benchmarking for consistent measurement and assessment of coaching skills.

This issue of Coaching Research in Practice reports on one coaching community’s process of benchmarking coaching skills. Many practicing coaches may pass this off as irrelevant and only concerning those who make the rules. Yet, as this research highlights, the benchmarking process offers coaches some valuable insight, the least of which may be the criteria used to identify best practice.

Coincidentally, this research also focuses on an NLP coaching community, so it offers further insight into last month’s (somewhat controversial) article “How valid is NLP and how does it relate to coaching?”

COACHING RESEARCH:

Using a qualitative research methodology, through document analysis and semi-structured interviews, Susie Linder-Pelz’s (2014) research aimed to understand how the benchmarking of coaching skills occurred in one coaching community (Meta-Coaching) and how robust the process was.

The process of benchmarking the coaching standards of competence began with modelling, using recorded coaching sessions (presumably of best practice coaching). Next, seven basic skills of coaching were identified from a combination of the modelling, a review of the literature and the ICF core competencies. These skills were defined as “listening, rapport, questioning, inducing states and giving feedback, . . . meta-questioning and receiving feedback” (p. 50). From here, the behavioural equivalents of these skills (p. 51) were explored and identified:

Support: The state of the coach is warm and caring, while supporting the coachee, so the coachee feels cared for and believed in by the coach.
Listening: The state of the coach involves compassionate attention to the person, while listening to the coachee, so the coachee feels deeply understood and ‘heard’.
Questioning: The state of the coach is respectfully curious, while questioning the coachee, so the coachee feels the questions are respectful and in service of actualising his or her highest and best.
Meta-Questioning: The state of the coach involves revealing the client’s empowerment, while meta-questioning the higher frames of meaning, so the coachee feels led on an inward journey of discovery, expanded self-awareness and a safe vulnerability to the coach.
Receiving Feedback: The state of the coach involves respectful reflective openness, while receiving feedback from the coachee during the session, so the coachee feels safe to disagree, to correct the coach and able to express his or her self in a completely open way.
Giving Feedback: The state of the coach involves fierce succinct compassion, while giving feedback to the coachee in a session, so the coachee feels seen, exposed and fascinated by the mirroring of the coach.
Inducing States: The state of the coach is expressively persuasive, while inducing a coachee into states, so a coachee feels connected, open, respected, understood, safe, curious, engaged, responsible, appreciated, motivated and solution focused.

Finally, the process of benchmarking these skills involved “indicating the different levels of competency for each skill” (p. 51). Although problematic, this was considered important as one participant highlighted, “if you can’t measure skills then how do we improve” (p. 51). The benchmarking process was extensive and lasted years, as levels were iteratively tested and retested in practice to result in a scale of competency. As one participant noted, this was particularly valuable, as “it is quite obvious what ‘not listening’ is; it’s interrupting. But what is less obvious is what’s level five?” (p. 52)

IN PRACTICE:

Hall (in Linder-Pelz, 2014, p. 51) suggested “that the more often one observes the behaviours of competency in a coach, the more likely a coachee will evaluate the coaching to be successful in facilitating their goals for coaching.” According to this hypothesis, a coach would aim for the highest skill level, not to pass an exam or to achieve a particular title, but to facilitate optimum success for the coachee. Thus a set of benchmarks that indicate where a coach is in the progression towards best practice would be highly valuable, not only to coaches, but also to coachees.

While the actual skill levels were not revealed in the paper, the summary above gives us a preview into how valuable benchmarks with such precision could be to practicing coaches. Not only would they offer a scale for coaches to progress along, but they would also provide a structure for objective feedback – both invaluable learning tools. Thus, the process of benchmarking coaching standards not only supports coaching in becoming recognized as a profession, but it also offers coaches the opportunity to:

understand what best practice is;
see the best expression of the skills and learn to demonstrate them;
work up a lowest to highest scale of improvement and distinguish the indicators which define them; and,
receive and give feedback and “communicate this process with precision” (Hall in Linder-Pelz, 2014, p.49)

Seen in this light, it is not surprising to see the ICF engaging in benchmarking with the release of the PCC markers. If you haven’t yet seen them, they offer the kind of clarity one would expect of a rigorous benchmarking process like that described in this research. The release of the ICF PCC markers, in itself a measurement tool of one level of coaching skills, gives us a preview of what might be yet to come in the field of coaching regulation.

Do you have experience, knowledge or opinions to share about benchmarking coaching skills (or perhaps about the lack of it)?
Share it here.

Reference:

Linder-Pelz, S. (2014). Steps towards the Benchmarking of Coaches’ Skills. International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring, 12(1), 47-62. Retrieved June 1, 2015, from http://ijebcm.brookes.ac.uk/documents/vol12issue1-paper-04.pdf

Translating coaching research into coaching practice,

Kerryn Griffiths (PhD – The Process of Learning in Coaching)
Global ReciproCoach Coordinator

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