The Coaching Conundrum
摘要
What is executive coaching all about? Generally, coaching can be considered a specific type of intervention carried out strategically with individuals, teams, or the organization with the aim of directing a person/group toward a specific mutually determined goal. First, it is suggested that the role of present-day executive coaches no longer only concerns identifying and dealing with dysfunctionality but is about assessing where executives are positioned within an organization and their aspirations. Coaches must nurture a systemic outlook, develop a helicopter view, and provide structures for goal-setting and accountability standards via dealing with emerging resistances, helping create realistic action plans, and focusing on follow-up. Second, a comparison of individual and group coaching is given, particularly the challenges faced by group coaches—greater complexity, psychodynamic and systemic forces, making sense of individual needs as well as the group-as-a-whole simultaneously, recognizing groupthink and conflictual situations, and identifying “undiscussables”—culminating in the myriad benefits of a holistic individual coaching approach. Fundamentally, however, it is proposed that successful change management concerns not only doing new things but is about new ways of looking at things and, whatever type of coaching used, when individuals and groups perceive change as a threat, they will resist it.