Evidence Based Coaching Handbook

CHAPTER 5

Psychoanalytically Informed Executive Coaching

SETH ALLCORN

 

 

EXECUTIVE COACHING IS, if anything, an intensely personal dyadic relationship between the executive and the coach. Unlike coaching a team of individuals, executive coaching has as its singular focus aiding the executive to perform better. This appreciation directs our attention to the interpersonal nature of this transaction and, like all relationships, it is the subjective, out-of-awareness, unconscious, and very often hard-to-discuss aspects of the relationship that count. Understanding these dimensions of the interpersonal world requires a theory such as psychoanalytic theory that provides in-depth insight into human nature. This insight yields a form of executive coaching that encourages understanding the executive’s inherently complex sense of self and that of the coach as well. Sensing the executive by using oneself as an instrument of knowing requires the development of reflective insight that permits locating and interpreting self-experience generated within the coaching context as well as within daily life.

Psychoanalytically informed executive coaching requires context setting. A psychodynamic approach to executive coaching is a collaborative process between the coach and the executive. The approach attends to the executive’s unconscious attachments and emotional investments relative to the organization, its workers, and the coach who assists the client in seeing more clearly how his or her internal ...