Own blog vs Linked-In

Every week (or at least that's the plan) I post a blog post, both on my own site and also on Linked-In.  These are about whatever has piqued my interest that week - an eclectic approach that, I hope, reflects my style.

Without having done any serious analysis (Ain't nobody got time for that, as my daughters would assert), I have been mildly interested in some posts getting far more views on my blog than on Linked-In, whilst others are the reverse.  I should add, we are not talking huge numbers in any case: my most viewed post only got 705 hits, and that is far higher than the average.

This reflection was prompted by my last post, on Insights from Transactional Analysis, which got an average number of views on my own blog, but four times the average number on Linked-In.  I can't see that it has been widely shared, so can only assume there was something about it that caught peoples' eye.  And looking back, I think that on balance the posts that get lots of hits on Linked-In are ones that refer to known models or theories (Conversational Intelligence,  More Time to Think,  Non-Judgmental Coaching, The Dynamics of Confrontation, The Problem with Learning Styles), offering new perspectives or insights on something already vaguely familiar.



Whereas the posts that get more hits on my own blog are typically more individual (Strategic Five Marketing: A Scam?, Scotts Law, In Defence of MBTI (sort of), On the 50th Anniversary of the Abortion Act, and [the only one to get unusually high hits on both platforms] The Problem with Learning Styles).

So what do I conclude from this?  Is it that people who read my own blog are more likely to be interested in me personally, and therefore be interested in the more individual-sounding stuff?  Is it that people use Linked-In to look for new takes on familiar topics? Is it that I am seeing patterns that aren't really there - making up a story based on inadequate and selective viewing of low-grade information?

I don't know - but I thought it interesting; at least interesting enough to give me a subject for this week's post. And even as I write this, I am already recognising the flaws in my approach here, which are many. But I've written this now, so will put it out there anyway, rather than bin it and think of something new - ain't nobody got time for that...

And I will watch with interest to see how many hits this one gets - and on which platforms. 

Insights from Transactional Analysis

It has been a while since I did much with Transactional Analysis, though it remains on my radar as Keri Phillips, who has supervised our Coaching Supervision Group, is an expert in the field. 

However, it was on the agenda to discuss with some university Deans attending a leadership programme in Cardiff, so I brushed up my thinking, and led a brief conversation, touching on Games People Play, but really focusing on Ego States and the famous PAC (Parent, Adult, Child) model.

They found it very interesting and it provoked a lot of insight - a useful way to analyse some conversations (both real and virtual) that had not gone as expected.

As they were talking, I too, had an insight. Recently, I had received an email from a senior person at another university about a day we were co-facilitating. He was saying his diary had been filled and asking if it was OK if he joined the programme at lunch time.

I looked at the morning programme, reckoned I could run it solo, and started to draft an email back to him to say of course I could make that work.

And then I caught myself: was that really what I wanted? Was that really best for the participants' learning?  The answers to both questions were 'No.'  So I ditched that email, and wrote another, explaining what I wanted, and why I thought it would be better for participants. He graciously agreed, rearranged his diary, and attended the morning session too, as originally planned.

What I want to be very clear about is that his original email to me was absolutely Adult - Adult.  Yet I was on the verge of sending a Child - Parent response. And that was my stuff: my relations with figures whom I see as authoritative.  

I've been aware of that for many years, and in my coaching and other practice have, by and large, managed to overcome the habit of being 'courteously deferential.'  But in an unreflective moment, it was still there: the desire to please (and a misplaced desire, at that: I am sure that the individual concerned would far rather have received what he did: an honest email outlining what I really felt and thought, so he could make a better-informed decision).  And the PAC model was helpful as a way of provoking and framing that insight.  I should revisit it more often. 

Sauce for the goose...

Some colleagues and I were discussing coaching supervision, and someone raised the question: Do Coaching Supervisors Need to be Coaches?  We didn't address the question there and then, but we have it on the agenda for future discussion.

But in the meantime, I was interested in my own response. Firstly, I was surprised by the question (which is often the sign of a good question, in my view). And I was surprised, I think, because it seemed so obvious what the answer was: Of course supervisors need to be coaches. How else could they understand the work we do and the supervision we need.

And then I started to reflect a little more. I remembered being irritated at the claim in Blakey and Day's book which I am reading at the moment, that coaches to executives need to have had similar business experience. I, for example, coach senior academic leaders, and senior professional practitioners, and have no such experience in my work history. And I would (and do) make a strong case that coaches can work effectively in that way.

So the whole question of sauce for the goose arises...

Which made me reflect: what do we need from a good coaching supervisor?

In broad terms, we need someone who is skilled to listen to and understand the issues we are addressing in supervision, and to ask challenging questions; who has good knowledge of the coaching profession, to provide both the quality assurance and developmental role that are part of the supervisory process, as well as notice any blind spots etc; and also who has high levels of empathy to provide the support that is also part of the deal.

And, I realise, people may come from other backgrounds and have all of those requirements. I could imagine people from many of the helping professions, having most of them, and acquiring the necessary coaching-specific knowledge by study and experience of supervising.

So I have done a volte-face on this question, and now believe that a coaching supervisor need not necessarily be a practicing coach.

It will be interesting to learn what the others think when we return to the discussion.

Person Centred Coaching and the Risk of Collusion

As my regular readers (if such there be) will remember, I am a big fan of Nancy Kline's work - the Thinking Environment and how valuable that is in (inter alia) a coaching context. Click here for examples of my posts on the topic...)

Indeed, having done the Thinking Partnership Programme with Nancy a couple of years ago, I am now booked on to the Time to Think Coaching Course in a few weeks, with her colleague, Shirley Wardell. 

However, as I recently mentioned, I am currently reading Blakey and Day's Challenging Coaching, and one of the issues they raise is the assumptions we work with when we are coaching. 

They point out that the coaching profession derives much of its theoretical stance from the related counselling and therapeutic professions, and particularly from the work of figures like Carl Rogers and Gerry Egan. The question is whether all the rich legacy we inherit from them is equally appropriate in the context of coaching.

A key issue here is the person-centred approach. In this style, a style which many coaches see as a sine qua non, the coach's job is to work on the agenda set by the coachee, and to facilitate growth and development by establishing extremely high levels of rapport and empathy, providing an environment in which it is safe for the coachee to pursue his or her thinking to new, risky and possibly fruitful places. Whitmore's GROW model is one example of this approach: focused on the coachee's goals as the context for the discussion; and Nancy Kline's approach is, at least in part, a more sophisticated version.

Nancy is fond of talking about helping them go beyond what they normally think, and beyond that; and the assumption is that most people have the solutions to their problems available to them, if they are suitable supported (and challenged - eg by challenging the assumptions that they are making).  

However, the risk of such an approach, as I was discussing in supervision last week, when reflecting on a particular coaching session, is that one can end up colluding with a client who, consciously or subconsciously, doesn't want to talk about a particular issues, or even has a massive blind spot about it.

An example might be someone who seems unaware that his style of interactions is quite intimidating to other people, and who is looking to improve his effectiveness by addressing other, more trivial issues. If the coach is aware of the impact of the individual's style, but is bound by a person-centred approach, and feels unable to raise it unless the client does first, then it may never be addressed; and that would seem to me to be a failure on the part of the coach. This is particularly likely to be a problem if the coach believes that rapport and empathy are so vital, that saying or doing anything that jeopardises them is unthinkable.

So that is one of the questions I will take to the Coaching Course next month: it may be that I am missing something in (or some understanding of) the Time to Think model. I will doubtless blog further about this in due course.

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Incidentally, and à propos absolutely nothing at all (except, possibly, the reflection that this, and all my posts, might reasonably be dismissed as first world problems) I was re-visiting The Gulag Archipelago recently, and was struck forcibly by this passage:

I just turned my handle and thought to myself: How quickly a zek gets cheeky - or, putting it in literary language, how quickly a man’s requirements grow! I was dissatisfied because they had torn me away from the play I was writing in my dark hovel; dissatisfied because they had not given me a job in a school; dissatisfied because they had forced me - to what? to dig in frozen soil? to mix mud for bricks with my bare feet in icy water? No, they had forcibly put me at a clean desk to turn the handle of a calculating machine and enter the figures in columns. At the beginning of my time in the camps, if they had ordered me to do this blissful work twelve hours a day, without pay, for as long as I was inside, I should have been beside myself with joy! As it was, they were paying me 450 roubles for it, I should be able to drink a litre of milk every day, and I was turning my nose up and wanting more.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago,  

Part 6: Exile, Chapter 6: The Good Life In Exile. 

Translated by Harry Willetts