Coaches can learn from exploring how narratives unfold

The findings of my academic research into the use of narrative in coaching have been published by the International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring. I interviewed six coaches whose approach is informed by a sensitivity to stories.

The project was an opportunity for me to take further my life-long interest in narrative. My background to this was as a journalist who naturally makes sense of things through shaping events and information into stories. When I first experienced coaching, I was drawn to becoming a practitioner because I noticed an affinity with my earlier career as a reporter – asking challenging and open questions, cutting to the chase, synthesising and summarising on the fly. While my approach has changed since then, I realised that this story-driven frame of reference was still influencing my style as a coach, even though I wasn’t consciously nor explicitly make it a part of my coaching model. So I decided to use my research project to bring some rigour to my belief in the relevance of narrative to coaching.

Some of the coaches I interviewed drew on a different tradition, that of oral storytelling, and for them narrative was a much more intentional act of creating emotional connection. Other influences that I discovered included the mythologist, Joseph Campbell, and the narrative therapy movement which took inspiration from the ideas of Michel Foucault.

As a result of the study, I still wear lightly the affiliation of a narrative coach. I am not drawn to encouraging clients to think of their coaching challenge as the fashioning of a new story. I might use narrative techniques – such as encouraging someone to imagine their story from another person’s point of view – to help clients gain a fresh perspective on things. More generally, I find myself listening for the narrative that unfolds between coach and client and reflecting this back as a means to improve the quality and depth of the client’s self-awareness. I am very conscious that every time a story is told it is unique to the specific circumstances of the telling and that this puts an onus on me as a coach to be sensitive to my part in its narration. This is not to call into question the coaching doctrine of non-directiveness. Rather, it highlights for me what is involved in maintaining a non-directive stance.

Story matters: an inquiry into the role of narrative in coaching (pdf) is in International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring, Vol 10, No 1 pp. 1 – 13.

My thanks to the coaches who participated in the study: Jackie Bayer, Lisa Bloom, Karen Dietz, Cliff Kimber, Judy Rosemarin and Limor Shiponi. Also, to Ian Wycherley, my supervisor, and to David Drake, who was a generous expert informant.

A healthy emotional climate is a competitive advantage

Cross-posted from the Valoro VGW blog.

Some organisations have a knack for creating great places to work which get the best out of their people.

John Timpson, the chairman of the Timpson chain of shoe repair shops, swears by his system of “upside-down management”.  He believes the people in his shops have the best knowledge about the business and that it is his job is to get management out of their way.  He insists on as few rules as possible and gives staff the freedom to set prices, deal with complaints and decide their own training needs.

The John Lewis Partnership makes everyone in the company an owner, conferring on each of them a responsibility not just to do their jobs but to contribute to the leadership of the firm.  One John Lewis employee – quoted in The Guardian – speaks of:

The “passion and commitment” that come from “being engaged, because you have a vested interest in making sure it works, for you and for the people you work with.”

These companies – both doing well in difficult economic circumstances – are successful examples of what the writer, Bob Garratt, calls the emotional climate of an organisation.  They make the emotional climate a source of competitive advantage, by ensuring that employee behaviours deliver excellent customer experience.

In The Fish Rots from the Head, Garratt emphasises that it is the responsibility of the board to set an emotional climate that helps an organisation succeed.  The emotional climate covers many things: sharing a clear sense of what the organisation exists to achieve, beyond making money for shareholders; alignment behind the values that shape behaviour – such as excellence, creativity and risk-taking; and the ethical base of the enterprise – how you determine what is right and wrong.

One of the most important functions of a healthy emotional climate is to enable the organisation to learn from its experience.  Garratt concurs with Timpson that the most important knowledge is held by people who are low in the hierarchy but responsible every day for the customer interactions by which a company makes its name.  The insight they hold cannot reach the leaders of the organisation unless there is a mature emotional climate which allows people to have honest conversations about their experiences.

It’s 15 years since emotional intelligence entered the lexicon of corporate life, popularised by the writing of Daniel Goleman.  Yet few organisations give serious consideration to the emotional factors that shape their success.  Corporate culture operates in a rational, logical paradigm that is driven by numeric data and a quasi-scientific model of management.  This has its place.  But it is only part of the story.  In Western culture at least, organisations operate in a context in which the emotional dimension is increasingly important.

Given that most people’s basic material needs are well-met, people bring to their jobs and to their choices as consumers a higher-level need to express their sense of self.  The way they respond to situations at work is in large measure emotional.  But the instrumental nature of organisations – their focus on the task and the bottom line – makes them ill-equipped to to accommodate this aspect of human existence.  Workplaces on the whole are directive, command-and-control environments, in which people are expected to know their place and keep their heads down.

The influential psychologist, Carl Rogers, was one of the great advocates of the view of people as essentially self-directing, able to form their own standards and values on the basis of their own experience.  He insisted that people were inherently resourceful.  Timpson and John Lewis seem to understand this psychology.  They have high expectations of their people, inviting them to focus their imagination and initiative on the big picture not just their immediate job roles.

If work fails to find a way to draw out employees’ potential, they are likely to develop negative emotions towards their organisation and disengage their commitment.  The result is the opposite of an organisation that learns; it is one where insight stays where it is and the organisation hampers its own potential.

This is how organisations can preside over disasters even though the knowledge of something awry may have been widely grasped but never quite articulated.  The rational-logical paradigm is impervious to intuitively known truths that find scant expression in management data.  Neuroscience is demonstrating that the greater part of what we process of experience is unconscious.  If we are aware of it at all, it is as emotional reaction, gut instinct, possibly a sense of ease or unease about something.

Leaders of organisations need to find ways to tap into this kind of knowledge.  To access it is more of an art than a science.  It resides in the unofficial organisation: the subversive or irreverent stories that people tell each other; the informal sources of leadership to whom people listen.  Stories are vital to understanding what’s going on.  As the management theorist, Yiannis Gabriel, writes,  “Stories open valuable windows into the emotional, political and symbolic lives of organisations.”

For stories to be heard, there needs to be a safe environment for them to be disclosed.  It often takes people with specialist skills, such as journalists, coaches or academic researchers, to encourage people to share what is normally tacit knowledge.  But it is incumbent upon boards to ensure that – in the long term – emotionally honest conversations can flow without the intervention of specialists.

An organisation’s reputation is a direct function of the emotions it stirs up, good or ill.  The board needs a 360-degree understanding of what is happening if it is to apprehend hidden vulnerabilities and opportunities in the organisation.  If it can’t create a culture in which emotionally-laden messages can be communicated and understood, it may shut itself off from some of the most important information it needs to hear.

Image courtesy Seattle Municipal Archives.

What's the story?

Are you a coach whose practice draws on a narrative perspective, or explores how clients make and tell themselves stories? If so, can you help with my research project?

I’m doing a Masters dissertation on how an awareness of stories can help clients. I want to talk to coaches who work with a narrative perspective. I’d particularly like to hear from you if your approach resonates at all with what I describe below.

I bring a particular interest to the subject as a coach whose practice draws on an earlier career in journalism. I retain the journalist’s habit of viewing events as stories and instinctively try to tease out the stories represented in coaching conversations. But narrative has a broader relevance to coaching than this.

Stories are how we make sense of the world and together make our social world. With the fading of the grand narratives which traditionally provided meaning and direction for people, individuals are challenged to create their own personal narratives to make sense of their life’s purpose. I’m interested not just in the outcome of story creation, but also the process – since a story is always materially affected by the circumstances of its telling.

My impression is that coaching can help individuals understand the narratives which shape their expectations of themselves. Some people also suggest that coaching can help clients construct narratives which can give them a more positive sense of self and direction. I’m open-minded about this.

In my view, the narrative perspective can foster reflexivity in coaching, providing a language to enable coach and client to see their own conversation as collaborative story-making. This can help clients see beyond the perception of reality as a given, and see themselves much more as the author of their own meaning. I want to test these assumptions in my research project.

I’m also interested in exploring a narrative-based approach as creativity. It can help elicit resourcefulness in a coachee: triggering things like memories, lateral thinking and imagination – insight that may be embodied in an individual but not always readily accessible.

I link this to a view of the mind being developed by neuroscience (and here I’m at the limit of my intellectual competence). This sees the mind as largely unconscious and comprising diverse mental models of the self, which are activated and synthesised in different ways according to different perceived triggers. Narrative inquiry can encourage a client to explore a story from different perspectives. This can mobilise the client’s imagination to bring more of the mind’s stored experiences to bear on the subject at hand than might otherwise be the case, for example helping the client more easily to empathise with a difficult colleague.

I see a further link between narrative and a developmental view of the self as a process of evolving meaning-making. The narrative perspective provides a way to think about how the self is influenced by each experience incrementally. If a story is always unique to the circumstances of its telling, we are also slightly changed every time we tell or hear a story. Even where a story is retold between narrator and listener, it is different the second time since the way both individuals interpret its meaning will be influenced by the first telling and whatever experience has occurred in the interim. So how a story unfolds in a coaching conversation will itself have an impact on how the coachee perceives it. What does this mean for how coaches should work with stories, and how will stories developed between coach and coachee stand up in the coachee’s life beyond the coaching sessions?

I am interested in testing these thoughts-in-development by talking to other coaches who draw on narrative, and exploring how they use it. I’d like to understand: what you consider narrative and story to be; how you apply these concepts in your coaching; what outcomes you think are brought about for your clients by drawing on a narrative perspective; and what are the avenues for further developing your narrative-informed practice.

Initially, I’m looking for a short exploration of your views. The methodology of my research after that will be influenced by the response I get to this request. Most probably, I’d be looking for about 90 minutes of your time for an in-depth interview (either in person or by phone or Skype).

If you’d be interested in finding out more, please get in touch via this contact page or LinkedIn or Twitter.

Image courtesy Julia Manzerova

Ella, Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter’s portraits are confusing. He paints from photographs – some taken from family albums, others found in newspapers and magazines – and strips away the context that provides meaning. He wants to confound interpretation. Yet time and again the viewer is drawn back to the original context – the story behind the picture. For me, it is this tension between the banal surface and the complex reality beneath that makes his work interesting. An exhibition of 35 of his works at the National Portrait Gallery tells us something about the importance of stories in how we make sense of the world.

Richter’s subjects at first glance are beguilingly mundane: a woman with an umbrella; a young girl with a baby boy. The detail is blurred away and the images seem like familiar, suburban scenes – reassuring representations of a world we think we know.

On closer inspection one realises that the woman with umbrella is Jackie Kennedy and the picture portrays her in mourning for her husband. The girl and baby boy turn out to be Richter’s Aunt Marianne and Richter himself as an infant. While the painting was made in 1965 it is from a family image taken before the war. Aunt Marianne had had a psychiatric disorder and had been murdered by the Nazis.

For many of the pictures then there is a temporal dislocation between when the source photograph was taken and when the painting was made. There’s also a thematic dislocation as detail in the original photograph gives way to an image which seems to make sense but is actually very hard to read. Richter seems to want to banish the cues which engage our empathy and which help us recognise the poignancy in life. “You realise,” he once said, “That you can’t represent reality at all – that what you make represents nothing but itself, and therefore is itself reality.”

And yet the exhibition keeps pointing us back to the original context. A booklet handed to visitors as they enter the gallery provides, apparently with Richter’s blessing, helpful explanations of what the source photographs actually portrayed. There is a recognition – by the curator, at least, if not the artist – that the stories behind the paintings provide a richer level of meaning than do the paintings on their own. The painting of Aunt Marianne subverts conventional accounts of German aggression under the Nazis and reminds us of the suffering endured by some of the German people themselves. A picture of two women on a busy pavement turns out to be Brigitte Bardot and her mother hounded by paparazzi. What seems like a picture of a routine shopping trip turns out to be a study of the loss of the mundane that accrues to the celebrity lifestyle.

What’s going on here? Is it that while the artist is trying to create his own reality – in work that represents nothing but itself – proper reality, the messy and complex social reality from which his source images are drawn, keeps reasserting itself? Or is the artist himself conniving to make us rediscover the stories which shape our lives?

Ultimately, I think Richter is more sensitive to the underlying contextual meaning of his works than his remark quoted above would seem to suggest. This is apparent in the paintings of his immediate family, particularly his daughters. Here, the abstraction disappears and we are presented with carefully controlled portraits in the conventional sense. The emotional engagement between artist and subject – father and daughter – breaks through. The images are at once protective and tender while searingly honest.

The paintings in this exhibition, far from representing nothing but themselves, strike me as being in continual dialogue with their source material. For all that they are gorgeous and engaging canvasses in and of themselves, it is their connection to their roots that, for me at least, makes them resonate.

Stories matter. We can’t brush them aside. If we try to we simply create new ones which fill the vacuum. But one story is not as good as another. Richter’s images are rich in narratives which we uncover beneath the surface obfuscation. Without the narratives, the paintings are less interesting precisely because they do not offer such rich meaning in themselves.

Beyond the gallery, one does not need to look far to see the consequence of paying insufficient attention to our stories. Think of the little Scottish banks which were once bywords for prudence and rectitude. Ignoring their roots, they took risks in their dash to grow into global players and ended up bringing catastrophe not only on themselves but the rest of us too. Or what about the internet search engine which once followed the mantra to do no evil but ended as a friend of Chinese censorship? It’s not that only one story is possible. If we allow for alternatives we can see things from different perspectives and envisage new options for ourselves. But if we brush aside our backstories and ignore our roots we can all too easily lose our bearings. Understanding where we have come from helps us stay true to ourselves even as we try to become something different.

Richter’s portraits bring to light our hunger for stories, our need to tell stories to make sense of what we experience. He plays with the human instinct to create meaning in what we see. In stripping away the original narrative behind an image he forces us to make our own stories around his work. But ultimately we are led back to the roots of the original image and we see that story afresh. In suppressing our stories, he encourages us to respect them.

Gerhard Richter Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery until 31 May 2009.