Higher education institutions recruit talented research students from around the world as they contribute to human resources, income generation, innovation, and research outputs. Research degrees require research students to work independently, with some support from research supervisors. Students tend to face different kinds of challenges that might be beyond the role of supervisors and mentors. In addition, completion rate and empowering research students to achieve the best outcomes during their research journeys is at the heart of institutes' research agendas. Coaching can be a very powerful tool to support this talented group in higher education to help them in overcoming obstacles and/or raise performance to achieve the best outcomes during research projects timeframes. This chapter explores the use of coaching to raise awareness about research project planning and management, proposing a planning and delivery model for group coaching for raising awareness known as the grow group awareness model.
TopBackground
One of the roles of coaching is to improve self-awareness, which enhances self-knowledge of skills and abilities, and helps in self-development. This can empower clients to understand their communicative style and interactions with others, avoiding errors and breakdowns in communication to achieve intended goals. relations with others, as the person become more able to understand his/her way of communication with other and change positivity to avoid mistakes/ weaknesses might upset or misinform any party and derailed reaching intended goals . In Psychological Dimensions of Executive Coaching, Bluckert (2006, p. 5) adumbrated the following coaching dimensions:
- 1.
From tell to ask.
- 2.
Performance and potential.
- 3.
Awareness and responsibility.
- 4.
Building self-belief.
- 5.
Business focus.
- 6.
System perspective and coaching as mind-set.
Bluckert (2006, p. 5) considered awareness to be “the starting point for growth and change”. Whitmore (2010, p. 50) also saw it as a central concern to increase coachee self-awareness, which in turn empowers coaches to consider various options and operationalize previously untapped abilities (Bower, 2015). As shown in Figure 1, maintaining the conversational, basic level, the coach does not enlarge self-awareness, keeping coachee relations confined within a narrow radius. The coach thus fails to visualize the Reality in terms of the Grow Model (Nelson, 2012), remaining unable to provide stimulating feedback and challenges to promote coachee awareness and expand the circle, comprising poor quality coaching effectiveness. A Simon (2009) observed, “The quality of the coach/client relationship first and foremost determines the effectiveness of the coaching”.
Figure 1. Illustration of low and high levels of coachee self-awareness
Coachee self-awareness is thus a fundamental indicator of coaching outcomes, and the success with which the coach has been able to support the coachee’s self-awareness and timely (unrushed) progress toward resolution. The resolution the coachee arrives at might not necessarily be the optimum one relative to the underlying issues, which is why coaches can find the drop-down approach useful. This enables coachees to explore issues in depth and the subsequently determined well-informed resolution options. Figure 2 shows that accelerating coachees from A to C permits only surface-level engagement, lacking in-depth awareness. Conversely, moving down from A to B, and then to C, engages coachees and galvanizes their awareness, manifesting more effective outcomes of coaching. Naturally the success of this depends on client readiness and coaching skill, particularly in terms of the coach being able to determine and ask effective questions (Nelson, 2011).
Figure 2. Drop-down approach (Nelson, 2011, p. 62)
In coaching psychology there are two main paradigms for increasing self-awareness, the Gestlat and person-centered approaches (Bower, 2015). Classical Gestalt psychotherapy has been extended to other applications because it offers a philosophical basis for learning and comprehending contextual relationships. It is conducive to innovative decisions and self-confidence, associated with awareness and contact, making it highly conducive to coaching success. Gestalt promotes trust and contact with clients, which are essential for coaching success (Simon, 2009).