The Need for Relational Coaching

The Need for Relational Coaching

The term 'Relational Coaching' might seem to be synonymous to Coaching, since coaching always involves at least two people that communicate and form a relationship in some way. However, the term relational coaching refers to something more specific than creating and maintaining good relationships by listening well, being polite, and taking into account norms, values and ethics, cultural diversity, etc.

The term “relational” in relational coaching refers to the acknowledgement of the relational needs inherent to social processes and the subsequent importance of relationships in development and transformations. Relational coaching is thus used to articulate the importance of the relationship itself in any coaching appointment and the required responsibility and awareness that coaches will have.

The Attachment Theory of Bowlby (1988) highlights the importance of relational needs. According to this theory, our earliest built relationships will – at least partly – influence and determine the type of relationships, attachment, and way of living we'll have in the future. Coaches need to be aware of their clients’ early relationships and experiences (whether unconsciously or consciously).
A skilled coach that acknowledges and understands such relational needs is able to contribute to human development and will be more effective. Not recognizing such relational dynamics may lead to inefficient and even hurtful coaching encounters.

Source: Critchley, B. (2010) “Relational Coaching: Taking the Coaching High Road” Journal of Management Development Vol. 29 Iss. 10 pp. 851-863

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Jaap de Jonge
Editor, Netherlands

10 Commandments of Relational Coaching (de Haan)

In a 2008-book with the same name, Erik de Haan also emphasizes the interpersonal aspects of the coaching endeavor. He argues relational aspects of coaching lead to success and not the various models and methods that have been advocated by various proponents.
The book gives the modern executive coach 10 commandments to help improve his or her practice:

First, do no harm;
Have confidence;
Commit yourself heart and soul to your approach, even if you know that it doesn't matter which professional approach you choose;
Feed the hopes of your coachee;
Consider the coaching from your coachee’s perspective;
Work on your coaching relationship, discuss it explicitly;
If you don't ‘click’, find a replacement coach;
Look after yourself;
Stay as fresh and unbiased as possible;
Don’t worry too much about your specific behaviour in the moment.

Book: Erik de Haan, "Relational Coaching: Journeys Towards One-to-One Learning", Wiley 2008.

Rob Thompson
Coach, United Kingdom

Coaching Emanates from the Relationality

Working as a coach in English education I have for a long time seen coaching repeatedly come and go as a mode of professional development in schools. I don't mean that it's 'gone'; it rather waxes and wains quite rapidly after being introduced. Whilst of course there are counter-examples where coaching embeds successfully across an organisation, this is not yet the norm and yet it has so much to offer - particularly at the moment in our era of great uncertainty and upheaval during the CoVID crisis.

One of the issues, which it may be argued is current across all coaching fields, is the lack of conceptualisation that yields useful indentifiable characteristics of coaching that go beyond just its purpose. Ask yourself the question 'what is coaching?' and try to answer this in terms other than its function or the more generally accepted indentifiers like 'non-directive', 'non-judgemental', 'collaborative', 'dialogic' etc.
Perhaps one of the issues is that a clear identity or definition of coaching just isn't possible. Coaching is often associated with other fields and disciplines such as coaching psychology, mentoring, teaching and adult learning and is often prefixed with additional 'rules' that attempt to describe it more definitively as a process such as instructional-coaching, peer-coaching, neuro-linguistic-coaching, cognitive coaching etc. To an external observer this might appear to avoid the nature of what the 'coaching' is - or moreover make assumptions that we all know what it is, or that it is transferable as an 'it' into any situation. So, I am really interested in the 'it' but wonder if rather than there being any possibility of defining and describing it as a separate entity.

I think COACHING EMANATES FROM THE RELATIONALITY (see Cronin and Armour (2017)) of the situation in which it is enacted. This includes:
- Internal coach-coachee relationships
- Relationships between the organisation and external bodies (e.g. in schools a national external inspection system)
- The structure versus agency debate (e.g. in Priestley, Biesta and Robinson, 2015)
- Participant lifeworlds and perezhivanie (e.g. in Roth and Jornet, 2016)
- Adult learning (e.g. from Knowles, 1970)

So I offer an alternative perspective that coaching can therefore never be a 'thing' that is applied to a situation, but rather it is something which emanates from the inter-relationality. It is therefore always unpredictable. The more we as coaches are able to learn about the human condition, the more we are able to understand the complexities of dialogic interaction and that it really is that - a two way exchange of meaning, not a conveyor belt to achieve organisational goals.
If coaching in education does have an identity crisis I personally think it really matters - but this should drive us on to learn more about what 'it' is.

⇨ How do you continually learn about what coaching is?

Cronin, C. and Armour, K. (2017), '"Being" in the Coaching World: New Insights in Youth Performance Coaching from an Interpretative Phenomenological Approach', Liverpool John Moores Research Online.
Knowles, M. (1970), 'Andragogy: An Emerging Technology for Adult Learning', in The Modern Practice of Adult Education: From Pedagogy to Andragogy. Cambridge: Cambridge Book Company
Priestley, M., Biesta, G. and Robinson, S. (2015), 'Teacher Agency: What is it and Why does it Matter?'
Roth, W. M. and Jornet, A. (2016. 'Perezhivanie in the Light of the Later Vygotsky's Spinozist Turn', Mind, Culture, and Activity. Routledge, 23(4).