Studying Leadership Coaching in the Workplace
In this post, co-authors Tatiana Bachkirova and Peter Jackson reflect on coaching and other factors that led to the publishing of their research article, “What do leaders really want to learn in a workplace? A study of the shifting agendas of leadership coaching,“ found in Leadership.
We are really interested in coaching: what it consists of, how it works, where it fits in the context of other organizational, economic and psychological concerns. This study was initially designed to look at what people actually talk about in coaching sessions. We didn’t feel this had been done before in any formal way, yet it is critical to understanding in what way coaching is useful to leaders. What emerged were some interesting observations both on coaching and on leadership and particularly implications for a current discussion in the leadership development literature questioning the specialness of individual leaders (Haslam et al., 2023; Fischer et al., 2024) – a discussion that can be thought of as an awakening from a dream of heroic leadership.
To collect the data on what actually gets discussed in coaching interventions, we designed a platform that allowed coaches to record the topic of coaching conversations at the beginning, middle and end of their working coaching engagements with leaders. As it is conventional in coaching that leaders themselves define the coaching agenda, we reason that the topics of such conversations indicate leaders’ developmental needs – what they want to learn when they act as leaders in real life contexts.
Looking through the lens of Lev Vygotsky’s socio-cultural theory and his concept of perezhivanie we investigated the emergence of coaching themes and how they developed through 153 different coaching engagements. The most surprising findings centered around the way in which leaders turned the intervention from an organizational narrative of development to a much more personal one. In amongst the predictable leadership competencies at the start of the interventions there was also a significant concern with lack of confidence. At the later stages this focus on confidence seemed to be transformed further into the need to further understand self and identity.
These findings question the idea of leaders’ specialness that is embedded in both coaching and leadership literatures. Our analysis suggests a different stance to leaders, one that refrains from seeing them as heroic and special figures ‘doing leadership’, but instead as human beings doing their best under difficult circumstances that often stretch them to their limits. This is where Vygotsky’s concept of perezhevanie is useful: a prism representing the meeting of individual psychological factors and the environmental context through which the leader’s experience is transformed into contextually sensitive learning. Very much a human being doing their best under difficult circumstances.
In this way our study supports the call for an awakening from false images of positive leadership (Fischer et al., 2024), and hero narratives (see Haslam et al, 2024). This awakening implies both a radical re-conceptualization of the role of leaders and rethinking leader development. Hence, we would argue for a more intimate understanding of leaders themselves, their experience and what they want to learn in the context of the work they do. Our paper offers a model of how workplace learning can be understood in this way.
