Interrogating Coaching Through the Lens of Critical Leadership Perspectives

Introduction

Coaching, leadership coaching, mentoring, and other conceptualizations for one-on-one supportive relationships have been popular for a very long time. Coaching is now a global phenomenon used throughout the world to help leaders and people achieve their goals, become better leaders, and solve challenges. Indeed, many of the people receiving the coaching have lauded the benefits of the model for their own leadership and personal development and achievements. Similarly, leadership has been a popular concept among both scholars and practitioners. Leadership, as a concept and practice, has been critiqued and interrogated over the years pushing the field forward in new and exciting directions. Coaching is just now going through a similar process with critical theory being applied to the coaching model and the practice of coaching. The history of coaching and its development is interesting. Some unexamined aspects of coaching are surfaced and critiqued when the history of coaching is uncovered. By examining the history of coaching and applying critical theory to it, we begin to see its limitations. Coaching and leadership are connected in many ways. A few of those connections include coaching as a tool for leadership development, the coaching style of leadership, and the more recent development of managers being trained as coaches. This chapter offers a critical perspective and interrogation of coaching through the lens of leadership critiques to further inform those connections. The work of interrogating, examining, and critiquing is necessary to surface and name the problematic issues around coaching so that it can be liberated and opened up for more folks to participate in, but also to open coaching up to problems at the systemic and structural level.

One of the authors shares a personal narrative that highlights the impact that representation, or lack thereof, has. The following anecdote discusses some key features of one coaching training experience, but we believe that it will also shed light on issues that arise for many other people of color who enter the coaching field.

After more than 60 hours of training for the International Coaching Federation credential, I realized that the model of coaching was not created for people like me. There are three reasons why I came to this conclusion. First, it was hard to see myself as a coach due to the lack of cultural diversity among the trainers. Throughout the training, I only encountered one coach who was a person of color. Due to the nature of my job at an international organization, most of my coaching opportunities are in the Spanish language. In order to practice the concepts that I was learning, I needed a mentor coach who spoke Spanish. The training institute was unable to find a credentialed coach who was also bilingual, but they found someone who had served with the organization in another teaching capacity. As someone going through the program, it was hard for me to see myself reflected in the other coaches conducting the training, including the words they used, their tone, and more. As a coach, authenticity is important to the practice, but seeing facilitators who all shared the same ethnic background, made me question whether or not my authentic self could be accepted in this field.

The second way that I felt alienated by the coaching profession was by the training program’s lack of cultural awareness. While in the coaching training, I noticed that some of the concepts might not translate - linguistically or culturally. In Spanish, for example, even the word coaching has no translation. The use of the anglicized word might make one think that the English-speaking world developed the concept, but Latin America has long used the methods associated with coaching in order to enhance productivity in the workplace. When participants who speak Spanish enter an institute that refuses to explain what coaching is, outside of the unknown English word, those participants might not fully understand the concept or worse, they might believe the practice to be rooted in another culture alone.