Outline:
1. The origins, development and current state of coaching
2. The content of coaching training
3. Differences between coaching and psychotherapy
4. The overlap between psychotherapy and coaching
1. Der Beginn, Entwicklung, heutige Situation von Coaching
The demand for psychological support has risen steadily since 1990, and this also marked the rise of coaching as a practice
Whilst at that time coaching was almost the exclusive preserve of senior managers, it increasingly became a necessary means of discussing the complex interrelationships involved in leadership tasks, reflecting on one’s performance in a leadership role, and acquiring the psychological skills needed to resolve conflicts within teams, right through to dealing with crisis situations of all kinds.
Psychologists alone were increasingly unable to meet this psychological demand. Professional groups with very different backgrounds – such as lawyers, doctors and business graduates – found themselves confronted with fundamentally psychological issues and procedural challenges within human resources departments. Similarly, psychology was required in schools, government departments, public administration, organisations, and across every professional field and hierarchical level.
In addition, needs arose across all high-performance disciplines and in sport. The idea quickly took hold in sport too: the outcome of a competition is decided in the mind.
However, just as diverse as the needs were, so too were – and still are – the educational backgrounds of the professionals who wanted or needed to engage with these issues.
There were no training courses in ‘psychology for non-psychologists’, and there still aren’t any today.
Consequently, everyone is entering this field via further training courses that admit participants without any prerequisites. This means that people from various professional backgrounds sit alongside psychologists who have already completed a degree.
Naturally, something can only be understood against the background of one’s own prior knowledge. Added to this is the fact that, particularly amongst professionals with no prior experience, there arises an understandable desire for a quick-fix tool, without knowing or being able to apply its underlying principles and rationale.
Ideally, one would need a degree in psychology as a cross-disciplinary foundation, which would help put things into context – so that we recognise we are dealing with people, their experiences, how they make sense of things, their perceptions, their thinking, their focus, their social structures, etc., and the phenomena that arise within them. We are dealing with such a high degree of complexity that a degree in psychology could provide the necessary foundation.
After all, it is important to have an overview of what is involved, if only to be able to choose a training programme.
This is because coaches – and those who wish to become coaches – are faced with a vast, confusing market full of training promises that are difficult to assess, leaving them to choose at random.
Training programmes vary in length, cover a wide range of content and come at a wide range of costs.
And whilst the training programmes for coaches themselves are open to scrutiny, so too are the various services they subsequently offer to people who turn to them as coaches.
Even though it is well known that this title is completely unprotected, people still book their services.
2. The content of coaching training
The broad content of coaching training courses includes:
1. Coaching training courses usually begin with ‘psychological communication’ – which is, of course, only to be expected – namely Schulz von Thun’s four-sided model, Paul Watzlawick’s four axioms, and the psychological iceberg model.
2. It is then important to have practical knowledge of the field in order to understand the context of organisations: their systemic contextual embedding in roles, functions and shifts in perspective; the nature of the organisation; organisational developments, from their origins to their evolution over time; and the market contexts of demand, customers, competitors and rivalry, whether international or national. After all, coachees come from these situations and their issues are affected by them, at least indirectly.
3. Training programmes then go on to incorporate psychological approaches to explain and resolve problems. This aspect usually forms the content of further training, and trainee coaches tend to spend most of their time searching for quick-fix tools to put into practice.
These stem from psychodynamics, humanistic psychology, positive psychology, systemic thinking, TA, NLP and even theories based purely on physical and neurological approaches, etc. However, this is often done without deriving them, without highlighting options or even being aware of them, and frequently without broader background information. Yet these psychological approaches differ greatly in what they focus on and entail significant distinctions that shape the entire coaching process, its progression and its outcomes, such as:
• whether the focus is primarily on emotions, needs or specific current situations and interactions
• whether the approach is biographical or future-oriented
• the extent to which the focus is on the individual’s intrapsychic processes or on their systemic interrelationships
• whether structural interrelationships are taken into account or only individual ones. There are coaching approaches that operate entirely separately from the organisation.
• the extent to which systems are comprehensively incorporated and worked with, for example, when clarifying the mandate in a round-table discussion and throughout the process.
4. It is also essential to understand the tasks involved in delivering the coaching, as well as those of the coachees who are receiving the coaching. The structure, sequence and process, and how this is embedded within organisational contexts, illustrated through examples and practical implementation. Difficult situations, such as starting and concluding sessions, and the involvement of relevant stakeholders, including the clients.
5. It involves understanding the differences between coaching and other formats such as supervision, counselling, specialist coaching, mediation, or even their combination with coaching.
6. And alongside all this theory comes the practical aspect: conducting practical coaching cases and their supervision, as well as personal experience. It also involves learning organisational professionalism.
7. etc.
Naturally, every training programme markets itself as the best and even bills itself as ‘integrative’, which to me is by no means a mark of quality. I shall not go into this point in detail here, but will move straight on to the difference between psychotherapy and coaching.
In doing so, I will focus primarily on the systemic approach, as this takes contextual differences into account at a higher level within the process itself, given that its focus has always been on embedding an issue within systems and contexts.
3. Differences between psychotherapy and coaching
In a systemic approach, the key difference lies not only in new methods but also in the systemic context – which is, in any case, always taken seriously – that guides their application.
Systemic thinking was the first approach to specifically address this point.
It defines the overarching context as shaping the communication that takes place within it.
In this regard, the difference between private and professional contexts must be borne in mind.
It lies in the fact that people in organisations are interchangeable, whereas in a family they are less so, or not at all.
An organisation is therefore an established structure comprising important functions and roles for people who take on tasks within it and earn their living there.
The aim is, first and foremost, to keep the organisation alive through the work of its people. To this end, there is also a constant need to drive process innovation.
If the focus is solely on maintaining the organisation, it tends to be an administrative organisation governed by ‘guiding codes’ (Niklas Luhmann) of legislation, directives and implementation – and, of course, today this also involves the digitalisation of these tasks.
If the organisation’s task continues to be its expansion, then it would be a market-based enterprise. This would then operate within the surrounding market system alongside competitors, suppliers and customers. It requires a development department, production, sales, decision-makers, etc. And it requires a human resources department to handle all matters relating to the staff and managers working within it.
Coaching is often requested by the personnel department – that is, the human resources department – for example, in cases of workplace bullying, illness, recruitment, assessment, staff turnover, promotion, outsourcing, workplace risk assessment, occupational health management, and so on. All these issues require psychological expertise, which must be provided and regulated in accordance with the law.
And if such tasks cannot be resolved satisfactorily, they later resurface in coaching as underlying issues.
Every large company today has what is known as a ‘coaching pool’, from which it offers coaches to its staff, who can then choose from this pool.
In companies, coaching assignments are limited to a specific number of hours.
Sometimes coaching is an urgent necessity. Sometimes it is an incentive; sometimes it is the last chance before dismissal; and sometimes it is merely a pretext for subsequently carrying out the dismissal.
There are in-house coaches whose deployment must be weighed up against the advantage of their practical expertise and the disadvantage of their compromised independence.
If the broader systemic dimension is not utilised in coaching, there is a risk that the work will benefit the company less and, ultimately, the employees as well.
Unfortunately, taking a broader systemic view of an issue is not always the obvious choice, as people often believe that, due to time constraints, they can simply delegate a coaching assignment based on their own definitions of the problem. This is not the case, as issues are always embedded in the wider contexts of leadership and team development. Failing to take this into account does not save time or money; it creates detours and comes at the expense of development.
It is therefore sound advice to request a consultation on the situation itself before commencing a coaching programme. This can lead to a shift in the questions being asked and may also reveal that coaching the manager themselves would be a more appropriate approach.
The Bonn Resource Model also serves as a helpful framework for implementation in this context.
With its three dimensions, it enables:
1. First, to examine the process at the relevant point in time, contextualise it and align it with future development.
2. Second, to take into account individual characteristics and opportunities to be utilised.
3. Last but not least, to facilitate a systemic overview with its diversity of perspectives.
4. The intersection of psychotherapy and coaching
It is clear from the situations listed that it is inevitable that the individual themselves forms the interface between the professional world of work and their private life. Private spheres, such as the family, particularly affect managers who are completely absorbed by their work. D
Achieving a work-life balance is difficult; burnout and exhaustion always stem from both organisational and personal reasons and decisions.
They arise in life situations and phases within family dynamics that run in parallel. This can lead to the threat of divorce, family issues and, naturally, this in turn also affects one’s commitment to work. Conflicts, illness affecting oneself or the team, and confrontations within the team, in turn, force the manager to reflect on their own role and increase the overall pressure of work.
When coaches say they refer people on to psychotherapy if necessary, I always wonder how they can possibly know what is appropriate if they do not have a proper overview of both aspects.
Furthermore, my belief is that constructivist work differs only in terms of contextual conditions. However, one must be familiar with these conditions, as well as the approach to take, when clients classify themselves as having a pathological condition or come from clinics and previous treatments that have made such a classification.
This was exactly the case with a long-serving member of staff who developed depression, was then absent for a long time due to rehabilitation and therapy, and, naturally, encountered a less-than-enthusiastic team upon her return. Being able to support her in this situation, both personally and professionally – that is, at the interface between coaching and psychotherapy – was important for the whole department.
Reintegration following mental illness is an obvious issue that requires expertise in both coaching and psychotherapy. But even before it reaches that stage, it is, of course, necessary to examine private, personal attitudes, classifications and reaction patterns that become attached to stressful situations and organisational tasks and are triggered by them.
Conversely, however, coaching knowledge is also important in psychotherapy. For example, if, during the supervision of a psychotherapy case, I come across a case history in which the psychotherapist treats the depression solely through psychotherapy on a personal level, whilst the most significant problems at work were practically crying out for coaching to be initiated here through a discussion with the line manager.
If this cannot be carried out as a systemic round-table discussion, it should at least be prepared through role-play, so that the employee is supported in being able to conduct it themselves on the spot. In this sense, a strict separation between psychotherapy and coaching is not only inappropriate but also counterproductive.
One can always ask which came first: the difficult work situation or the depression. However, being able to recognise both and bring them together is certainly beneficial. In this regard, I would like to see psychotherapists developing their coaching skills. I am convinced that many work-related coaching issues arise during psychotherapy that are not addressed there. Yet these could significantly improve both the personal and professional situations of the individual and all those involved. They could shorten the course of therapy and make it more effective.
Then there are cases where patients are also undergoing coaching at the same time, with the drawbacks we are already familiar with from the well-known saying about ‘too many cooks spoiling the broth’.
Human situations – including those that take place within organisations – remain complex; they cannot be divided up, isolated or reduced.
Enabling a person to regain their ability to shape their own path within their organisation or system makes them more resilient both personally and professionally, and naturally benefits the organisation as well.
And it remains important that the organisation recognises the value in keeping its staff healthy and ensuring they feel supported by it.
Literature:
„Ressourcen für die Wirtschaft“ Publisher Anne M. Lang DPTV Verlag
„Konstruktivistische Psychotherapie- prozesshypno-systemisch. Das Bonner Ressourcen Modell, Anne M. Lang, Elsevier 22
About the author
Anne M. Lang
Dipl.-Psych., Licensed Psychotherapist, Senior Coach, Trainer, Educator, Author
Director of the AML Institute Bonn
Institute for Systems & Milton Erickson Institute
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