Brief Coaching

A Solution Focused Approach

Chris Iveson, Evan George, Harvey Ratner

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136503092
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Business
• Sous-sujet: Human Resource Management

Brief Coaching offers a new approach to coaching by considering how the client will know when they have reached their goal, and what they are already doing to get there. The coach aims to work towards the solution rather than working away from the problem, so that the client's problem is not central to the session, but instead the coach and the client work towards the client's preferred future.

This book employs case examples and transcripts of sessions to offer guidance on:

• looking for resources rather than deficits
• exploring possible and preferred futures
• examining what is already contributing to that future
• treating clients as experts in all aspects of their lives.

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This practical guide includes summaries and activities for the coach to do with the client and will therefore be a useful tool for both new and experienced coaches, as well as therapists branching into coaching who want to add to their existing skills.

1

Introduction

The Beginning

In 1986 a group of therapists at the Brief Family Therapy Center in Milwaukee published a paper outlining the beginning of a new and revolutionary way of working (de Shazer et al., 1986). The team, led by Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg, drew on a range of sources including family therapy, the hypnotherapy of Milton Erickson, Buddhism and the work of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein to develop an approach to problem solving that turned traditional thinking on its head.

It is difficult to overestimate the radical significance of the changes that have flowed from de Shazer’s reformulation of the accepted truths upon which most therapeutic endeavours had been based until that time. Therapists had generally assumed that they needed to know the nature of the problem that the client brought to therapy, and indeed to understand something of that problem in order for therapy to be effective. Challenging this idea, de Shazer asserted, instead, that the therapist needed only to focus, firstly, on discovering how the client would know the problem had been solved and, secondly, on what they were already doing about it. The therapeutic process that had typically been constructed as a moving away from the problem is reconstructed by de Shazer as a process of moving towards the solution. This fundamentally called into question the nature of the therapist’s expertise, much of which had traditionally been based upon a claimed ability to understand what was causing problems in the client’s life. The professional therapist ‘saw’ beyond the surface presentation to a hidden world concealed from the eyes of the untrained. It was this claim to esoteric knowledge, not available to the layperson or client, which represented a large part of the therapist’s claim to professional status.

A further challenge to the received wisdom of the time, and indeed, to the assumptions that most clients have about the therapeutic process, related to the focus of the therapeutic conversation. In the past it had been assumed that the greater part of the talking that client and therapist did together should relate to the problem. Even when the therapist was not trying to understand the cause of a problem it was assumed that it was somehow good for the client to talk about it, ‘vent’ and unburden in order to move on. The usefulness of such ‘problem-talk’ as de Shazer and his team described it (Lipchik and de Shazer, 1986) was challenged. Instead the Milwaukee team proposed that change is more easily brought about by maximising what they termed ‘solution-talk’, which they defined as talk that involved a focus on the client’s goals, the client’s resources and what the client was already doing that was working. This proposition was to transform the nature of the talking that goes on between the client and the therapist, challenging the therapist to develop a whole new repertoire of techniques to support a radically changed focus.

Another idea that echoed way beyond Milwaukee and whose ripples are still spreading related to the idea of ‘resistance’, the idea that therapy can be framed as a struggle between the therapist, on the side of change, and the client, whose unspoken agenda is to keep things the same. de Shazer chose to assume that clients genuinely want to make the changes that they describe and he reframed all the behaviours that are typically grouped together within the description ‘resistance’, as the client’s unique way of cooperating (de Shazer, 1984), thereby challenging the therapist to come closer to the client’s frame of reference. By placing the onus on the therapist to find a way of adjusting to, and fitting with the client’s response, whatever that might have been, de Shazer called into question another of the fundamental premises upon which the therapeutic relationship had been constructed.

From Problem to Solution

These simple, and yet radical, ideas led to the development of a therapy that has challenged many long-held beliefs about the therapeutic process (George, Iveson and Ratner, 1999). Rather than trying to understand and fix problems solution focused brief therapy works by exploring, in detail, a client’s preferred future, a description of a time when the problem is solved, and then identifying whatever it is that the client is already doing that fits with the attaining of that future. Thousands of successful cases, many of which have involved clients hitherto seen as untreatable, have confirmed the belief that everyone has a potentially different future and everyone has resources.

The essence of solution focused brief therapy, and solution focused coaching, is therefore:

• to look for resources rather than deficits;

• to explore possible and preferred futures;

• to explore what is already contributing to those futures;

• and to treat clients as the experts in all aspects of their lives.

From Therapy to Coaching

The shift from a model of therapy to a model of coaching was initially a gradual process. Work is a large part of many people’s lives so it was inevitable that relationships and progress at work would be part of many ‘therapeutic’ conversations. Sometimes a person would have heard about BRIEF on the grapevine and come along specifically for a work-related issue. To the ‘therapist’ there would be no distinction: work or life, the conversational process is the same.

The second influence on the shift to coaching was the professional advancement of practitioners who had trained in the solution focused approach who were finding their therapy skills useful in other areas, especially management. They began asking for solution focused training more related to their current responsibilities especially in relation to staff supervision and development. Anecdotal evidence suggested that solution focused practice was transferable to many aspects of the manager’s role.

The third influence was simply the growth of coaching as part of the support structure for senior staff, based on the realisation that in every company the most valuable resource is the staff team. Organisations that supported, valued and acknowledged the contributions of their staff were being identified by research as the most likely to survive and indeed to prosper in an increasingly competitive global economy (Buckingham and Coffman, 1999). Coaching, it was realised, could deliver benefits not just in terms of work satisfaction, but also in terms of productivity and workforce stability. Coaching was in the marketplace.

However, the success of the new product is evidenced by the extent to which it has now spread beyond the confines of the workplace. Life coaching, couple coaching and parent coaching are all examples of the spread of coaching into worlds previously the domain of counsellors and therapists. That success has been based largely on the extent to which coaches have differentiated themselves from their competitors. Whereas therapy and counselling have been inextricably tied to the idea of problems, to difficulties, to limitations and to some extent have become stigmatised and stigmatising activities associated with failure, coaching has hitched itself to a quite different wagon, to ideas of increased performance, to new futures, to an essentially optimistic world view that believes that all of us could perform better, that all of us have potential that is currently being unrealised. Indeed at times the marketing of coaching appears to suggest that not only could all of us perform better but that it is a new moral imperative, a duty to make the most of the possibilities that are open to us. The differentiation from therapy has been crucial to coaching’s success and yet when examined in detail how much evidence is there to justify the claims upon which the field has progressed? How different has coaching been from the approaches to personal change that have preceded it and what difference is there between solution focused coaching and other coaching models and approaches that have already found acceptance in the field?

What’s the Difference?

At first sight there is not much difference between the broad brushstroke descriptions of solution focused coaching and any other coaching model. Each purports to be future focused and to eschew the exploration of problems. The aim of coaching is to help the client ‘grow’ rather than solve their problems.

However, on closer inspection, especially with the eyes of a therapist, the similarities between most coaching models and therapy models are striking. The same psychological theories and associated problem-solving methods are lying, barely concealed, just beneath the surface. The fundamental ideas that shape the therapist’s relationship with the client emerge just as clearly in much of the writing that describes the coach’s interaction with the coachee.

Bruce Peltier (2009) is explicit in his identification of potentially useful models of therapy that can form the basis, in his view, of successful styles of coaching. James Flaherty (1999) is less explicit although he relies heavily on the principles of cognitive behaviour therapy, which is fundamentally problem focused in its way of approaching the difficulties that clients bring. Julie Starr (2003) adamantly claims that coaching is not a problem-solving process yet much of her description of what she does is problem identification (diagnosis in therapy) and problem solving. And the GROW (Goals, Reality, Options, Will) model (Whitmore, 1996) devotes considerable attention to identifying and resolving blocks to progress, again, not a million miles away from diagnosis. What all these, and most other coaching models have at their heart is the notion of ‘assessment’ and each in its own way sees accurate assessment as the way to effective coaching. It is this that places coaching alongside traditional therapy because to carry out an assessment the coach needs a way to make sense of what is going on in the client’s life and needs a way, in order to do this, to decide what data is relevant to collect. What they turn to is psychological theory (cognitive, systemic, learning, psychoanalytic or whatever) and although it may be used less explicitly than in therapy it will still be what helps shape the conversation.

This essential problem focus within so much coaching is in part hidden by the difference in starting points between coaching and therapy. A therapist is likely to ask ‘What brings you here?’ as an invitation to the client to describe the problem and its history whereas the coach is likely to ask ‘What do you want to achieve as a result of coming here?’ which is an invitation to talk about goals and the future.

It is when the coach starts the assessment process that they will inevitably be drawn towards problems and at the point in their work when they start to analyse blocks and pitfalls there will be little to distinguish their conversations from the sorts of conversations a therapist might have. This would be less of an issue if block-related conversations were not such a significant part of the whole process. Much coaching has been unable to resist the fascination of focusing on the question ‘What is it that is stopping this person fulfilling their potential?’ Once coaches go down this assessment route and once they see their task as helping their clients overcome the blocks to progress they will, in the most fundamental way, be acting like therapists however much they might choose to ignore this fact. Even Whitmore in his seminal work Coaching for Performance (Whitmore, 1996: 67) states: ‘That is the nature of coaching: it addresses cause, not only symptom’. Whitmore goes on to give an example in which he carefully analyses the problematic eating habits of his client thus demonstrating an approach that owes more to traditional therapy, identifying and fixing problems, than he cares to admit.

Solution Focused Therapy and Solution Focused Coaching

If there is a somewhat disguised similarity between most coaching models and therapy the opposite could be said of the relationship between solution focused coaching and its therapeutic counterpart: they are virtually indistinguishable and happily so. There is no question that might be asked in a coaching session that would not be equally at home in a therapy session and vice versa. This does not mean that all sessions are identical but rather coaching and therapy sessions follow the same principles and would almost always st...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Basic Principles
• 3. Establishing the Contract
• 4. Preferred Futures
• 5. What is Already Working?
• 6. Scales
• 7. Closing a Session
• 8. Second and Subsequent Sessions
• 9. Back to Work
• 10. The Manager–Coach
• 11. Last Words
• Appendix: Solution Focused Questions
• References
• Index