What Makes Coaching 'Developmental'?

Typically, coaching focuses on supporting clients to reach their goals. (Vertically) Developmental coaching does that AND supports the client's growth towards later stages of maturity in the process.

I came into coaching about 16 years ago after noticing how confining and limiting my previous role as a soft-skills trainer had become. I was disheartened by the lack of impact, as people attended workshops on everything from ‘effective communication skills’ to ‘delegation’ to ‘stellar customer service’ and seemed unable to translate into action the behavioural tools and techniques they were learning. Leaders knew perfectly well the steps to delegation or to constructive feedback, but they were still over-managing and avoiding giving feedback or giving it in ways that sparked defensiveness and push-back from their teams.

Why was it so hard for people to turn inter-personal knowledge into action?

I soon realised that people could not bring themselves to do what they knew to be right by their teams/clients/colleagues not because of any intrinsic fault, but because there were powerful, unacknowledged psychological mechanisms at play that prevented them from changing. Beyond the individual, such patterns ran in teams, fuelling miscommunication, lack of trust and at times outright toxic environments. I also noticed that, more often than not, the broader organisational culture/system actively worked against the most positive intentions for change - in a company where mistakes are routinely sanctioned and leaders’ standing depends on their teams’ measurable success, constructive feedback quickly turns into harsh criticism and delegation is way too risky, so everyone just hoards information and strives to show they did a good job so they can’t be blamed if something bad happens.

So it seemed to me that the ‘immunity to change’ was individual, collective and systemic. I believed then, as I do now, that all dimensions need to be addressed for sustainable change to happen. I chose to focus on first two dimensions in my own work, as I felt that was where my own skills and capacities could be put to best use. That’s when coaching entered the stage.

Coaching as a vehicle for transformation

Back then, in the market I was operating in, topics such as self-awareness, self-regulation or systems thinking were fringe concepts and coaching was in its infancy. I was simply blown away when I came across coaching as this dialogical art designed to empower people or groups to reach the goals that mattered to them through a curiosity-led process that purposefully avoided telling them what to do and intentionally pushed them to reflect on what they were actually doing, why and with what impact. I loved the power of coaching to nudge people into thinking beyond action/reaction and diving more deeply into exploring how their own beliefs, assumptions, worldviews were informing their actions every day. I noticed very quickly that coaching is much more than a goal-achievement tool. It can be a powerful human transformation tool.

I got exceptionally lucky to do my first ever coach training with Sir John Witmore, who was (and remains to this day, despite having sadly left us years ago) one of my best models for embodied wisdom. He walked the talk in being as non-judgemental, curious, insightful, deeply listening in his interactions with his students as he told us we could be in our coaching with our clients. Later on I would realise he gave my my first lesson in developmental coaching:

You, the coach, ARE the Instrument that facilitates your clients’ growth!

Or, as Otto Sharmer so beautifully puts it:

“The success of an intervention depends on the interior condition of the intervenor.”

This means that whatever your blindspots, unacknowledged patterns, projections may be, they directly impact your efficacy as a coach. I loved coaching both because it opened up a pathway to facilitate others’ learning in a whole new way, but also because it became a profession which forced me to constantly look in the mirror to know and grow myself.

Becoming a coach completely changed how I engaged with groups. It turned me from a trainer into a facilitator. I started to listen more and talk less. I started to question my assumptions. I started to notice not just what people said, but how they said it. I started to get more and more curious to learn how people had come to the ‘truths’ they held or what pay-offs they had for not changing their minds or their habits, even when they said they desperately wanted to change. Coaching taught me to look beneath the surface.

Coaching also gave me a renewed respect for other people’s freedom to choose for themselves. Instead of trying to get leaders to become better delegators or feedback-givers, I started to inquire what it was that mattered to them and more humbly walk with them side by side towards goals they had identified and cared about, rather than goals others imposed on them.

Over the years I started training and mentoring coaches and learnt immensely from being invited into the sacred spaces of other coaches’ sessions. I noticed, both through my own work and through the work of others I mentored, that certain coaching processes seemed to lead to incredible breakthroughs for clients while others’ didn’t - all while the coach was seemingly following the same fundamental principles/models/skills. That too intrigued me.

Why did some clients seem to fly towards their goals and experience profound insights in the process and others ran around in circles, stuck in patterns they could not control, nor change, despite (often) being aware of them?

Through developmental research, I started to better understand the deeper mechanisms at play in human growth. I became aware of the readiness factor in coaching, as well as the idea that the coach’s developmental lens plays as powerful a role as a coach’s skill in picking up (or missing) subtle cues that can completely shift a coaching process towards deeper impact. Along the way, a few interesting insights emerged, which are now informing and enhancing the way I coach, as well as my practice as a coaching mentor. They have helped me sense into what developmental coaching might be and what it has to offer.

I’ll share them not as certainties, but as invitations for reflection for you reading this. Please test them against your own experiences as either coach or client (or both) and notice what emerges for you.

When clients are ‘stuck’ - an opportunity, or a problem?

When I say a client is ‘stuck’ I mean they don’t seem to be making much progress towards the goals they said were important to them. Often we coaches think of ‘stuckness’ as a problem to be solved. From a developmental perspective, we might think of it as a cue that more profound growth is afoot.

Kegan and Lahey’s notion of “immunity to change” is a powerful explanatory theory for why clients often act against their best interests or stay stuck in behaviours they consciously want, try (and yet fail) to change. Their research shows that humans often have ‘hidden agendas’ (Kegan and Lahey call them “hidden competing commitments”), unacknowledged needs to protect something that is in fact very important.

For example, a leader might consciously want to encourage their team to be confident and empower them to work independently or try new things, but instead finds themselves always micro-managing and controlling, having the last word and pushing the team to do things as they have been done before. Upon reflection, the leader might discover that while their conscious commitment is to empowering the team, their unconscious commitment is to avoid failure at all cost. These two needs/commitments create a tug-of-war and lead the leader to constantly sabotage their own best intentions of being more encouraging and supportive.

Digging even deeper, the same leader might discover that their hidden commitment to avoid failure at all cost might be rooted in an old (and likely unexamined) “big assumption” - such as “I am nothing without my professional success”. As long as they are ‘held captive’ by this assumption, never acknowledging or questioning it, they cannot shift their behaviour in the desired direction.

So we might say that when coaching helps make our hidden assumptions visible it becomes, at the core, developmental. Such coaching helps clients ‘look at’ that which before we were ‘looking through’ and turning a mindset we were ‘subject to’ into an ‘object’ they can investigate, inquire into and question. As they go through this process, they change as their whole worldview shifts. We develop ‘vertically’.

Challenging emotions in coaching - something to manage or something to utilise?

I have written about this before, as it was the core discovery of my doctoral research. I encourage you to read the previous article - “The Way Out is Through” - to better understand the theory I will be mentioning here.

The Way OUT Is THROUGH: Contrasting Emotions and Vertical Development

The gist of it is that whenever we are in the process of changing or growing, we inevitably feel very powerful, very unpleasant feelings (also called ‘edge emotions’): confusion, anxiety, fear, anger, shame. Most people would do anything to avoid such emotions, most of the time. Most coaches are trained to hold space for them when they arise, but they are not trained to harness them in the service of a client’s growth.

What I found in my research was that when leaders allowed themselves to slow down, feel their painful feelings (instead of avoiding, numbing or rationalising them), and then chose to become curious about what that emotion might teach them, some very interesting things happened. Curiosity seemed to tame the intensity of painful emotions by creating a “contrasting emotions space”. In turn this helps unlock powerful, often transformative reflection, new insights and then the motivation to turn the light bulbs into action.

However, not many people are able to bring curiosity to their pain all by themselves, and here is where coach with a developmental orientation might make the difference. This discovery made me way more open to introduce somatic approaches in my coaching and way less likely to simply ‘talk through feelings’ the way I used to before.

A coach’s attention - mere tool or transformative super-power?

Adult development research taught me that ‘attention’ - what we look at (and for) in a coaching process - can be an incredibly sophisticated capability, which can be honed through practice.

William Torbert writes about 4 territories of experience - where our attention goes on any given moment. The first territory is the outside world - simply noticing what happens around you in this very moment means you are in this territory. The second territory is our own behaviour. Noticing how you are responding to the outside world places you in this second territory. The third territory encompasses your feelings, thoughts, assumptions - noticing what you think, feel, and what you believe (which informs your feelings) allows you to tap into this third territory. Finally, the fourth territory is both the capacity to observe all the other territories at the same time as being fully aware of your intention in the moment.

The way this translates in developmental coaching is that the coach might be aware of the client telling the story of an issue they are having at work with a colleague who obviously needs help but refuses to acknowledge that and keeps making costly mistakes which are impacting the client and the rest of the team. The client might be talking about how they have tried to help this person and their frustration at being rejected. They might talk about their worry those mistakes will have serious consequences.

In Territory 1 - the coach hears the client’s words and the content of the story itself, notices the client’s body language, the tension building, the voice raising, the client’s face turning red. As they shift attention to Territory 2, the coach might notice how they are nodding and listening, the questions they are asking to help the client find a solution. They might notice how the client refuses to reflect on themselves and continues focusing on the person that is frustrating them at work. If the coach shifts attention into Territory 3, they might notice their own breathing growing faster, the tension in their body, the panic rising as they have no idea how to help the client deal with what seems like a very unfair situation. The coach might also notice their fear of letting the client down, their need to say something relevant.

If the coach is aware enough, they might be able to zoom out into a ‘witness’-like perspective, taking it all in at once - the client speaking, the tension in the room, their own fear of not knowing how to handle and they might realise their intention is to be seen by the client as being in control. They might also notice a concurrent intention to help the client and a belief that ‘help’ means ‘solving the problem’.

If the coach is able to grasp all 4 territories at once, they might choose to breathe deeply, relieve some of the tension in their body and perhaps pause the conversation for a moment, inviting the client to notice their own feelings. They might draw the client’s attention to the change in posture and invite them to become curious for a moment as to what that might mean. The coach might also acknowledge their own impulse to help and might ask the client what their own intention is in that very moment.

The coach might realise that in that moment, both coach and client are ‘acting out’ the very situation the client is describing: a person needing help who refuses to see that and another person desperately wanting to help and fearing the consequences if their offer of support is rejected. The coach might notice how their client has just become the very person they are describing - one in need of help but oblivious to it. And the coach has started to do exactly what the client does with their colleague at work - trying to ‘save’ the client from themself.

When the coach is able to notice all of this and invite the client into Territory 4 - through a question or simply through an invitation to pause and notice the dynamic playing out in the coaching session then and there - the client might just become able to ‘look at’ that which before they were ‘looking through’. And in that moment, I would argue, the coaching becomes developmental, as both client and coach are slightly transformed by this moment, this encounter, this noticing.

If you are a coach, how are your clients ‘growing you’?

It is my belief that all coaching can be developmental, under the right conditions, which seem to occur in the liminal space between the client’s readiness, the coach’s maturity and their skill in noticing what happens beyond the words, within themself and ‘in-between’ them and the client. I hope you find the three insights I shared useful and choose to experiment with them in your coaching (or beyond it).

I know many experienced coaches are reading this newsletter and I’d love you to share in turn, if you’re so inclined, some of your experience and hard-won wisdom for the benefit of all the rest of us. And if you have a passion for adult development, alongside coaching, I’m keen to learn what do you believe makes coaching ‘developmental’?

Dive deeper

I hope you’ve enjoyed this article. If you are curious to dive more deeply into learning about Vertical Development and how it might impact your work and life, check out our online library of webinars and courses accredited by the International Coaching Federation. If you are seeking to train as a developmental coach and get your first ICF credential, note that next week is the final week of admission interviews for our upcoming Foundation Diploma in Developmental Coaching (the first developmental coaching training to be accredited by ICF as Level 1) - starting in February 2024.

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