Evidence Based Coaching Handbook

CHAPTER 3

Adult Development Theory and Executive Coaching Practice

JENNIFER GARVEY BERGER

 

 

PERHAPS ONE OF the most exciting elements of coaching is that it allows one person (the coach) to specifically and individually target professional development opportunities for one other person (the client). Coaching is perhaps the most customized way possible of working to help improve the achievement and satisfaction of another person at work. Its success and worth depend on a variety of factors—most particularly, on the relationship between the coach and the client and on the ways the coach is able to ask questions, offer insights, and help the client develop new skills, perspectives, and understandings. One of our biggest challenges as coaches, then, is to keep our focus firmly on the experience of our clients—and to understand the current situations as our clients understand them, in addition to the way we understand them. It is this combination—of holding our own perspective while we hold the perspective of our clients—that makes coaching so powerful. It is also one of the things that makes coaching so challenging.

To ameliorate some of that difficulty, there are myriad theories we can draw on to help us understand other people while holding on to our own perspective. Theories of individual difference give us a way to make sense of the different meaning making of another person. Theories of personality, race, class, gender, or cultural difference (e.g., Gilligan, 1993; Heath, 1983; ...