455. Transformative Coaching

Show Notes

• Hrach, S. (2021). Minding bodies: How physical space, sensation, and movement affect learning. West Virginia University Press.
• Maynard, K. (2017). Reveries of Community: French Epic in the Age of Henri IV, 1572–1616. Northwestern University Press.
• Kendrick, J., & Maynard, K. S. (Eds.). (2019). Polemic and literature surrounding the French Wars of Religion (Vol. 68). Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG.
• Rice, K. G., Hrach, S., Linder, K. E., & Maynard, K. S. (Eds.). (2025). Transformative Coaching for Faculty and Staff in Higher Education: Powerful Tools to Address Institutional Challenges. Taylor & Francis.
• Little, D., & Palmer, M. S. (2011). Coaching-Based Framework for Individual Consultations. To Improve the Academy, 29(1), 102-115.
• Cannon-Bowers, J. A., Bowers, C. A., Carlson, C. E., Doherty, S. L., Evans, J., & Hall, J. (2023). Workplace coaching: A meta-analysis and recommendations for advancing the science of coaching. Frontiers in Psychology, 14.
• Jones, R. J., Woods, S. A., & Guillaume, Y. R. F. (2016). The effectiveness of workplace coaching: A meta-analysis of learning and performance outcomes from coaching. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 89(2), 249–277.
• Reynolds, M. (2026). Coach the person, not the problem: A guide to using reflective inquiry. Berrett-Koehler Publishers.
• Pope-Ruark, R. (2022). Unraveling faculty burnout: Pathways to reckoning and renewal. JHU Press.
• International Coaching Federation
• ICF coach finding tool

Transcript

John: Higher ed has become an increasingly complex and challenging environment to work in. In this episode, we explore the role trained coaches can play in supporting agency, resilience, and career growth for college employees.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

John: Our guests today are Susan Hrach and Kitty Maynard. Susan is the author of Minding Bodies: How Physical Space, Sensation, and Movement Affect Learning. She’s served as a Fulbright Canada Distinguished Research Chair, and recently appeared on the TEDx stage in Columbus, Georgia. Kitty is the Director of the Teaching and Scholarship Hub at the University of Richmond. Her higher ed career began as a Professor of French Studies, and she has taken on leadership roles in faculty development at Washington College and Virginia Commonwealth University before moving to the University of Richmond. She is the author of Reveries of Community: Epic in the Age of Henri IV and co-editor of Polemic and Literature Surrounding the French Wars of Religion. Susan and Kitty have both received training from, and are members of, the International Coaching Federation. They are also two of the editors of Transformative Coaching for Faculty and Staff in Higher Education. Welcome back, Susan, and welcome, Kitty.

Kitty: Thank you, thank you so much.

Susan: Thank you,

John: Rebecca cannot be here today. So, once again, our Dean of the College of Liberal Arts, Sciences, and Engineering here at SUNY Oswego will be filling in, and that’s Kristin Croyle.

Kristin: Thank you. I’m delighted to be here. So, today’s teas are, John, what are you drinking today?

John: I am drinking a spring cherry green tea.

Kristin: Oh ho ho. and for our guests, what are you drinking today?

Kitty: Well, I’m drinking a tea that is called Richmond Blend. I’m here in Richmond, Virginia, and the tea is from Boscovs, which is a sort of an iconic coffee and tea purveyor here in Richmond, Virginia, and it’s sort of a spicy cinnamony clovey tea. It’s probably better for Christmas time, even though we’re in July, but I definitely wanted to play along, because I’ve noticed, anyway, because I listened to your podcast quite a bit, that a lot of your guests have not been following and really respecting the conceit of the show, [LAUGHTER] so I wanted to make sure to do that today with my tea.

Susan: Oh no, and I’m a violator [LAUGHTER] because it’s going to be a swelter today here in Columbus, Georgia, and so I am having a Limoncello LaCroix, or La Croix, [LAUGHTER] as fancier people might want to pronounce it now. [LAUGHTER]

Kristin: Now, if this was afternoon here… we’re recording in the morning… I would be drinking a cold Earl Grey, but morning… just water today.

John: And going back to your earlier comment, one of our serial offenders has been Derek Bruff, who brings his tea for teaching mug, which he refers to as his coffee mug. [LAUGHTER]

Susan: Oh no. [LAUGHTER]

Kitty: It’s heresy. [LAUGHTER]

John: It’s always great to have him on, though, when we do get a chance to talk to him. [LAUGHTER] So, we’ve invited here today to discuss transformative coaching for faculty and staff in higher ed. Could you tell us a little bit about how this book project came about.

Susan: So, this is a book that was born at the Pod Network Conference in 2023 in Pittsburgh, and Karen Gonzalez Rice and I decided to pitch a birds of a feather session, which POD attendees may know more about. They’re very informal conversations. They usually take place first thing in the morning on one of the conference days, and they’re opportunities for people to informally discuss something that’s of sort of emerging interest. And so we pitched a birds of feather session on coaching. Kitty was in the group of attendees that day, and she was already working with Katie Linder and her coaching program for academics, and so within a couple of months after that November conference, the four of us had kind of connected and expressed interest in doing an edited collection and put together a call for proposals, and we were off to the races.

Kristin: Excellent. And who’s the intended audience for the book?

Kitty: Well, it’s really interesting, because we started out thinking that this book was going to be mainly for other coaches working in higher ed, or possibly people who we call coaching curious, just those who are wondering what coaching is about, and maybe if they want to become a coach. But it was really interesting as we started to talk to potential collaborators and contributors, our vision of what this book could be really expanded, and we realized that coaching has applications that really go beyond what we had initially proposed, so while the most obvious audience would be those who support faculty and staff in higher ed, that’s to say, people like educational developers, or maybe even folks who work in HR, several pieces relate directly to, for example, faculty roles like chairing a department, or even teaching, and so we ended up adding some other chapters to have a more capacious vision of what coaching could do in higher ed, so we have chapters from mid-level administrators, we have some other chapters for people working in different parts of higher ed, like instructional design, and I guess I would say our real wish for an audience, our sort of shadow audience, is upper-level administrators who hold the purse strings and can really hopefully have an opportunity to see how coaching might benefit their institutions and those working in them, and how it might be deployed throughout the university, but I think our overall takeaway here is that coaching is a really nimble way to support individuals at a complex moment in higher ed and the world.

Kristin: Excellent.

John: How did you select the authors of the chapters of this book?

Susan: We circulated our call for proposals widely among all of the coaching networks that the four of us were already a part of, and encouraged them to share freely. One reality that we recognized in seeing the need for this book was that there aren’t that many… there really aren’t any… formal organizations for those who work in coaching in higher ed, and so it had to be sort of a grassroots solicitation, and we got a really generous, lovely set of submissions that then we got together, talked about where there might be some topics that we wanted to see, but no one had submitted on, recruited a few more people who we knew had expertise in those areas, and overall we’re just super excited to have almost 30 contributors, or maybe a little more than 30 contributors to the book.

Kristin: Yeah, I was struck in looking through the book at both the unified voice, but also the really personal voices in it, and having that many contributors gives you an opportunity to have a lot of different voices in a kind of personal way. The book is divided into six sections. You were talking previously about all the different aspects that you wanted to bring in. Can you give us an overview of what kind of thing is addressed in each section?

Kitty: Sure, I’d be happy to. We start with a section on the foundations of coaching, which is really an introduction to what coaching actually is and is not. Susan just referred to the fact that sometimes coaching isn’t even really well defined, and can even have a questionable reputation, depending on who you’re talking to. So, this book, in the intro, we really established the norms of the International Coaching Federation, which is where most of us have been trained, or we’ve been trained in with organizations that are adjacent and use some of those same principles, and that is defining coaching as a collaborative process between a client and a coach to support the client in reaching goals. And then the second part is about growing coaching skills, and it really explores how to develop some of the essential skills and competencies that we associate with coaching, and how those can support folks in higher ed. So we talk about cultural awareness, we talk about knowledge of the profession, and we also talk about ways we can support the entire spectrum of neurodiversity with our clients. The next section is about applying coaching skills to specific scenarios, and so we really explore how coaching can be used in teaching, research, and leadership positions, and a subsequent section talks more about coaching for specific audiences, so we look at coaching for folks who are in roles like senior administration or student affairs, instructional technology, and also people who may just be having certain experiences in higher ed, for example, those experiencing burnout. And then we have a section on coaching the career cycle, where we focus on how coaches can help develop or help others develop vitality in the different stages of their careers. So that one’s a little more faculty focused, although not exclusively so, and then our last section is about group, team, and peer coaching materials, and that section we think about how we can scale coaching to reach more people than just a typical one-on-one individual interaction, so we think about how coaching can play a role in organizational transformation, or how we can use coaching to develop community.

Kristin: I appreciated your use of the term coaching curious, because I think having that variety of topics really gives people a chance to see the range with which coaching can be used in higher ed.

John: What led you to see coaching as a useful framework for faculty and staff development in higher ed?

Susan: Well, I had begun my academic career working in writing centers, and in that field the writer is always given the agency and autonomy to be in charge of their own work, and you work with the peer tutors, or the peer consultants, as they’re called sometimes, to respect the control of the output to the student, and so when I first learned about coaching, I immediately recognized a similar kind of ethos, which is different than mentoring and different than consulting, and different from therapy in an important way that maybe we can address later, but mostly in that a mentor or a consultant is someone who has the knowledge that they’re planning to impart to the person being mentored, whereas coaching respects the client or the coachee as the expert in their own situation, and the person who the answers really need to be drawn out from. And so I also connected with it as an educational developer, and thinking about active learning, because telling people what to do just doesn’t work, [LAUGHTER] as wise as it may be, and telling them about the knowledge or skills you want them to develop is just not as effective as allowing them to come to those realizations for themselves, and so I saw the value in it. I was already committed to its usefulness in learning, and coaching, in the end, is a lot about the learning process of the client.

Kristin: And John didn’t mention, but I’ll say, I’m a clinical psychologist, that’s my background, so I’ll just double down on what you said there. [LAUGHTER]

Susan: Yes, thank you.

Kitty: And I would also say that coaching for educational developers, coaching is kind of in the air anyway. There’s a really canonical article from 2011 by Michael Palmer and Deandra Little, which is called “A coaching-based framework for individual consultations,” and a lot of us use that, and I used it for years to help me be a better consultant when folks come in for specific pedagogical reasons, or even just to talk about career questions, and so I was already using some of those principles, and so it was a really exciting opportunity to develop those coaching skills and really take them further.

Kristin: Beyond some of the iconic articles in the field, your book cites several studies concerning the impact of coaching in workplace settings. Tell us a little about the research foundation here.

Kitty: Absolutely, so we have a very short literature review in the book that will point you to some helpful resources that talk about what coaching is and how it works. In particular, there are two meta analyses, one that came out in 2016 and one that came out in 2023 that have both looked at the literature to demonstrate how coaching is an effective workplace intervention, and more specifically, what that could mean is that coaching has been linked in the research to things like greater optimism, work-life satisfaction, engagement in work, productivity for workers, and it’s also been studied in terms of how it can improve management skills for those who are in supervisory roles. So, there’s a recognition there that more research is needed, that it’s really an evolving field and has become more and more common in the workplace over the past 20 years, but there’s also a lot that’s very promising there, and I would just say that what it really does for me is confirm the positive results that we tend to see firsthand as coaches in our sessions, or even those of us who’ve been coached ourselves, so it sort of confirms that anecdotal evidence that we already had, that it’s a very powerful practice.

Kristin: Thank you.

John: Your book title uses the word “transformative.” What makes coaching transformative rather than simply supportive or developmental?

Susan: Yeah, we address in the introduction just briefly the fact that the word transformative is more than just an adjective for a number of theories of leadership, and we want to signal with that word that we are taking a particularly open approach to multiple different ways of thinking about transformation, but I can say about the way that coaching, in particular, signals transformation to me comes from one of the leaders in the field, Marcia Reynolds. She wrote a book, I think, called Coach the Person, Not the Problem, [LAUGHTER] in that one of the most important questions and transformational questions in coaching sessions can be what makes this important, and so you’re drawing out from the client not just a solution to their immediate problem, but something deeper, something that would signal a shift that is a new perspective for them, a new insight that might change their behaviors or even beliefs, and so in that respect it’s more than a surface- level change.

Kristin: I know that none of us are unaware that higher ed is going through a lot of change right now, and that we have many faculty and staff colleagues who are experiencing burnout, who are feeling particularly uncertain, who may have difficulty seeing what their future is in higher ed and aligning their own values to some of the changes in their regions of the country. Tell us a little bit about how coaching can be useful in a setting like this.

Kitty: So I think to go back to our conversation about that word transformational, I would say that coaching is really particularly useful for people navigating transitions and change, and frankly, that’s when most people start to seek out coaching support is when they’re going through something where they’re really not sure what to do, [LAUGHTER] they’re really not sure where to go next, and so anytime there is a lot of uncertainty and change in someone’s life, coaching can be a really helpful response. It kind of gives people back that sense of agency in some way or another. In terms of burnout, in particular, we have a really great chapter in our book by Rebecca Pope-Ruark, who wrote the book Unraveling Faculty Burnout, where she really explores this in terms of faculty, and in that chapter she offers some tools for coaches to help people rediscover purpose, compassion, connection, and balance, and those are the four things that she notes that are pillars of burnout resistance, the things that help us find ourselves when we’re facing those challenging moments in our careers. And I would say more globally, as we’ve started to think about coaching as an ecosystem that could exist within higher ed, I see it as a hopeful space where we can actually build more humane and inclusive higher education workplaces that really respect the individual needs of the people who work here.

Kristin: Thank you.

John: Teaching centers and faculty developers often serve a role where they answer questions for people, they provide models of effective teaching practices. They do workshops and so forth, but the coaching approach is a bit different than that type of interaction. Can you talk a little bit about how a coaching approach might change the nature of interactions with teaching centers and what a typical coaching session might look like?

Susan: So, the most conventional kind of coaching is one on one, and so it’s not a workshop typically, not that a workshop can’t employ coaching strategies, but as we were discussing earlier, it’s about drawing out the expertise of the person that they already possess, so a coach would ask: “Where are you now? What would be different if you achieve this change that you want to make? What are your options for getting there? What obstacles can you anticipate, and how will you respond? What’s the first step?” And so those are each pieces of a coaching framework that the client has to answer for themselves, and so if you think about it in terms of a client who might be also interested in changing their teaching strategies, let’s say it’s slower but might be ultimately more successful route to making that change. You’d have to acknowledge that it’s going to take significant time and resources to adopt new teaching strategies and refine them, or to envision a different career path, or a purposeful retirement. And coaching is allowing you to get clear on why making that change is important enough to invest that time and energy. And so if you don’t know what strategies you might want to employ, then the coaching conversation might include, “Let’s talk about what your resources are. Who do you know? Where could you go? What actions can you take in order to find those things.” So again, you’re not providing the answers, you’re sort of helping the person think about where they want to pursue those.

Kristin: And I know many faculty are well versed with what an individual teaching consultation might feel like, but how would that differ from how a typical coaching session might feel or look like?

Susan: It’s different in that, and this is very important for clients to understand, it’s usually part of the initial meeting in which we take time to talk to them about their expectations and how coaching is different from mentoring or consulting, which is that the coach is not going to hand you the answers. [LAUGHTER] If that’s your expectation, then this is not, maybe the interaction, or the…

Kristin: Oh, but that would be so much easier., wouldn’t it? [LAUGHTER]

Susan: It would…

Kristin: You’d just have the magic answers on hand.

Susan: It would and yet, it wouldn’t be as successful in leading to a lasting change, or growth, or learning, which is hard and takes effort on the part of the person who’s seeking out that growth.

Kitty: And I would just add to what Susan said by saying there are times when coaching isn’t the solution. Sometimes, in a pedagogical consultation, your expertise does come into play, that people really do want to know, like, what should I do in my classroom, what kind of warm-up activities should I do in my classroom, and do you have any ideas for me that I could use? And that’s not a coaching conversation, that’s a consulting conversation, and that’s okay. It doesn’t all have to be about coaching, but I think that coaching skills are valuable, and I think to get back to Susan’s point about her writing center work, the idea that you are seeing the person who’s coming to you for a consultation or a coaching session, you’re seeing them as someone who has more answers than maybe they even realize, and helping draw that out for them with powerful questions, and sometimes coaching tools and deep listening, that is valuable in a consultation too, even if it is a moment when you maybe are going to give somebody a more direct answer, or you’re going to be like, “Here’s a book you could take a look at, and it has all sorts of great ideas in it.” So, they both can be very helpful in this work.

Susan: That’s right.

Kristin: Yeah, I like the writing center analogy, because the best writing teachers are helping people find their voice and express their own voice, they’re not telling them what to write.

John: So, part of coaching involves having the clients identify their own goals, but one of the problems that we all have sometimes is having the motivation to achieve those goals. How can coaches help their clients remain motivated to achieve their goals?

Kitty: Well, this is a foundational piece of what coaching does, and I think the first thing is that it helps people identify their values as well as their true priorities, which sometimes can get lost in all the doing that consumes so much of our time, so it taps into intrinsic motivation, which means that if we are able to set goals that matter to us, that helps us make meaningful progress on those goals. I think sometimes we have goals in mind and they’re actually not our goals, their someone else’s goals. [LAUGHTER] I mean, sometimes that has to be the way it is in our jobs and in our lives, but a lot of times there are ways that we can find to tweak the goals, so that we are actually more naturally motivated to accomplish them. But coaching is also really helpful with project management. It’s helpful in how to plan to find mentors and to find the help that you need to accomplish a goal, and what kind of resources are needed, and then it also can provide accountability structure, which is another thing I think, in particular for academics who do a lot of independent work, where deadlines are a little bit more fluid, or sometimes incredibly fluid, depending on where you are. It helps kind of stay on track. Also, sometimes, for example, in coaching, I actually will write follow-up emails to people, so that’s part of my support is checking in to say, “Hey, last week you said you were going to do this, how’s it going for you, how is that going? And sometimes that’s enough to help people kind of loop into the goals that they want to achieve.

Kristin: And I know that faculty who have worked in a more traditional faculty role versus ones who are working in an administrative role, where there’s more of a team environment, will sometimes find that different structure also to be helpful. So, yeah, it’s finding ways to build your own structures in, yes?

Kitty: Absolutely. And that’s one of the other types of conversations we would have with a client, is: “What’s going to help you keep on track. What do you need to keep on track?” and “How are you going to build that into your life?”

Kristin: What role can coaching play in helping faculty and staff make more sustainable decisions about their time, their energy, their professional identity? How they can make decisions that will pay off for them in their own satisfaction for years to come.

Susan: Yeah, thank you for that question. I think it’s been really interesting to me over the past few years of working with colleagues how much it matters to have someone give you their undivided attention and presence for a number of hours as your coaching series evolves. Even when I was feeling very sensitive about my own development coming out of training as a coach, I would be very conscious of where I had not asked the best question or had fallen through the cracks of where the conversation might have gone and yet there was no question by the end of the conversation that the person was just so pleased to have had the chance to talk and have someone really listen to them carefully, and how desperately people needed that, [LAUGHTER] and so I would say that the sustainable decision making is partly an outcome of having made the choice to invest time and energy in a coaching relationship, like you’ve already taken the first most important step, which is to say, I am going to carve out some time, which, as we know, time is maybe the most precious resource that most academics have, we’re not in it for the money, but we sure do spend time. So, if you’ve decided I’m going to intentionally dedicate an hour on several occasions to talk through an important issue for me, then you’ve already kind of signalled to yourself that this is something you’re prepared to sustain and be committed to, and as Kitty was saying earlier, the accountability that coaching provides is one of the really important things that we practice in between each session, and that ultimately by the time we reach the point where we’re ready to at least temporarily bring that series to a close, t he person needs to have identified what their own accountability practice is going to involve, and so there’s a sustainability priority that’s kind of built into the coaching conversation.

Kristin: I can imagine that some people who have not experienced coaching may listen to this and may think, but I have a very supportive colleague or partner or friend that I have these kinds of conversations with. What do you see as different in the coaching relationship than a great supportive personal relationship?

Susan: That’s a great question, and it’s a question that I asked myself when I was starting the training, because I thought, “Well, you know, I have decent conversational skills. How hard can this be?” And then I realized that it’s actually incredibly hard, because coaching conversations do not follow normal social turn taking. You, the coach, are not an equal, like, interlocutor in that relationship. The client should be doing way more talking and way more thinking, and you are posing powerful questions for them. And so it is not a normal conversation, [LAUGHTER] and it’s hard to develop the skill to sort of be quiet and make space for their thinking to emerge. Sometimes there’s long silences while you’re allowing people to process their thinking, and that’s not the typical friend or colleague kind of conversation.

Kitty: And coaching sessions are actually very highly structured. We follow a pretty standard structure of every coaching conversation, so in that sense, as well, it’s different than having a good supportive friend or colleague, although we all need that too. So I certainly don’t want to say that those conversations are not incredibly valuable, but I would say in my own experience, when I’m having a conversation with a colleague or friend, a lot of that is about getting advice, specific advice from people, which is also incredibly helpful, but coaches aren’t going to give you that advice, they’re going to draw out your own advice for yourself. One of my favorite coaching questions is something that Katie Linder taught us, which is a lot of times clients come to you and they actually expect to be getting advice from you, and so that’s something that we sort of have to prime with our clients, is that we’re not going to be giving you specific advice, because that’s something we’re going to trust you to find yourself, but when somebody does come to you and they really want advice, Katie’s question is, “What would you like me to give you permission to do?” because it turns it back on them again to say, “Hey, what do you really want to do, what are you looking for me to say to you that you want to do yourself?” which I think is a very clever question, and it’s really fun to ask it, [LAUGHTER] it’s really fun to see what kind of answers you get.

Kristin: And I’ll add, too, that having a separate relationship, a coaching relationship, you don’t have to worry if I say this thing, how is my friend going to judge me, or if I say I want to do this, am I ready to talk about this piece with my partner? There’s other complexities in our long-term personal relationships that in a coaching relationship you don’t have to worry about how are they going to change how they see me or what is the impact of this going to be, where there’s a reciprocal kind of emotional care where you’re trying to take care of the other person. Coaching gives people an opportunity to not have to care about [LAUGHTER] not in the same way, to not to take care of the other person, that that’s the time for them to think about how to care for themselves.

Kitty: That’s an incredible point. I think it’s really, really important, and gets us back to some of the principles of coaching, where we are confidential. It’s really our relationship with our clients, it is 100% between us, it never leaves that conversation unless it’s some professional obligation, because someone is expressing harm or something like that, but otherwise it is absolutely confidential, and so people can try on things that they might not feel comfortable trying on with a colleague or a partner.

John: It sounds a lot like psychological counseling in many ways, doesn’t it?

Kristin: In just certainly non-directive approaches, there are similarities, and many of the roots come from the same roots.

John: One of the things you address in the book is how coaching needs will be different for different people at different stages of the career and in different roles. How might coaching needs differ for early career faculty, mid-career faculty, senior faculty, chairs, and staff leaders?

Kitty: I would say in many ways the coaching approach doesn’t change much with all of these audiences, because our practices are similar. We are going to ask powerful questions, we’re going to be listening deeply in a way that empowers the individuals we work with, but coaches often develop expertise in a particular area, depending on where they’re working and the spaces they’re working in, and when that happens, coaches tend to see similar issues come up, so they become more skilled at asking the right question at the right time, or understanding a particular tool is going to be really useful for somebody in a particular career phase. So to your question, John, it’s not unusual, for example, when I encounter people in their early career to be struggling with finding mentors or to be trying to figure out what kind of workflows are going to actually be effective for them as they’re juggling all of the new things that they may have not had to juggle in graduate school. On the other hand, someone who’s a little bit more advanced in their career might be thinking about legacy or thinking about retirement. Someone in mid-career might be just getting tenure and trying to figure out what’s next for them after they’ve jumped all these hurdles and they finally come to the end of the hurdles and are looking ahead and saying, “Well, what do I do now?” So, really, I think a general coaching approach can help with any of those concerns, but a coach with a background in those areas is likely to have the tools to address a particular need. And so, one of the nice things about our volume is it has some great chapters to help both coaches and those who are kind of going through those different career phases.

Kristin: How can coaches help faculty and staff navigate conflicts between their own goals, values, and commitments and institutional pressures, particularly in settings where coaching may be available within the institution.

Susan: This is a really important question, and it’s one that touches on some things we’ve already mentioned having to do with ethical commitments. The International Coaching Federation, in fact, requires an ethics training as part of the credentialing process and re-credentialing process, and so for internal coaches this is particularly important, and as Kitty mentioned, the confidentiality piece is primary, but the other thing that kind of surprised me when I first started the training and remains really important to my sense of the value of doing this in higher ed is that the coach’s primary responsibility is with the client, not the institution. And so, I was really kind of shocked when I asked the question in my training: “Well, what if the person wants to quit? Then what do you do?” And the response was, “Well, then you need to explore that with them.” This is not a place where your job is to make sure that they stay with the institution, no matter what. You’re helping them think through a very difficult professional crossroads, and so if maintaining their affiliation with the institution is really a valuable and meaningful priority for that client, then okay, we know that that’s one of our anchors. We’re going to have to figure out how to manage this conflict in other ways, but if the conflict turns out to be more significant than staying in that job or role, then the job of the coaching partnership is to think about how to manage this transition. What would be a better fit? What does that look like, how are you thinking about that, and so there’s a great chapter in the book, in particular by Chinasa Elue, that is about coaching. Well, let’s see, what does she call it?

Kitty: Walking the tightrope…

Susan: Walking the tightrope: Coaching faculty clients who decide to leave the university.

Kristin: And as a Dean, I will say that if someone talks with me, and there are faculty and staff who talk with me about their quandaries about whether they should stay or go, I actually see my role in a very similar way. I want them to be thriving. If they’re thriving here, it’s good for the institution, but if they’re not thriving, it’s not good for them, and it’s not good for the institution,

Susan: That’s right,

Kristin: But that’s a very different conversation, certainly, than it would be with a coach.

Susan: It is, and I have noticed that it’s particularly difficult and regrettable that the system of tenure makes many people feel that there is no possible way for them to walk away from this. They grabbed the gold ring, and so, boy, they better stay. And so it’s a life crisis. [LAUGHTER] And so coaching is a really wonderful tool to have to be able to work through that kind of crisis.

John: So, who should be trained in coaching skills? Clearly, from the main theme of the book, teaching center staff should be, but might this also be appropriate for chairs and deans and student affairs professionals and supervisors and peer mentors, and might it even be helpful for faculty, because our relationship with students is also a coaching relationship in many ways.

Kitty: Yeah, I would say absolutely to all of those things. I think coaching skills are really helpful for anyone, and in particular, anyone in a type of role where you’re being asked to mentor or support or guide others in some way. I think one of the biggest revelations for me during my coach training was the breadth of occasions where I found deep listening and powerful questions to come in handy, not just professionally, but even personally, in some moments. So, I think when I think of faculty members, John, as you noted, working with students, coaching skills can be so helpful, or if you’re doing advising with students in any way, but I’d also say with colleagues, I think one of the things that I have experienced myself as a former faculty member is we’re not always good at talking to each other, we’re not always good at listening to each other, we’re not always good at asking the right questions of each other, and so those skills can be applied in all sorts of contexts.

Kristin: What mistakes should campuses avoid when they first try to introduce coaching?

Susan: In the beginning of the book, we have a couple of chapters. These are Katie’s on how to seek out certified training programs, what questions to ask, what are all of the options you might consider, and for what reasons. But training is key. So I hope that our book is an important contribution to people who are at the coaching curious stage, but I wouldn’t want someone to read our book and then decide, okay, we’re ready, [LAUGHTER] let’s do it. There’s some very important standards that we want coaching professionals to be able to meet and uphold, and institutions can also look into outsourcing, just like with any other professional development. The imperative to develop your own internal coaches doesn’t have to be where you start, and in the corporate sector, executive coaching has been a thing for a long time, and I think upper-level administrative leaders get a little bit of that because they fall into that kind of executive identity, but what we’re really hoping to do is democratize this resource, and so where deans or provosts or others who have control of institutional budgets might be interested in whether coaching could be a useful way to help people who could benefit. I think there are other places to begin.

Kristin: Yeah, I think the influence of kind of corporate leadership coaching has been a positive in many ways, because people see it, they see the value, they think, “Well, if that’s something that is a given in those settings, and people will pay a lot of money for it in those settings, that it must have actual value.” So that people who are not responsive to the research foundation may be responsive to that argument. Instead, I think the first time I hired a coach for someone was 15 years ago, saying, “Look, you have great leadership capacity and skill, but it’s not something that you’re able to bring out. Let’s see if a coach can help bring that out.”

Susan: Oh, thank you for saying that, Kristin, and if I could just add something else about ways we would prefer not to see coaching implemented is as remediation. Your impulse was to see someone who has great leadership potential, because coaching is about where are you now and where do you want to go, and I would love to h ear more from you about how you see therapy and counseling as distinct from that kind of orientation, because my understanding, or the way that I explain it to my clients, is that if we get to a place where you seem unable to move past something that happened to you in the past or some conflict you had with someone in the past, and we just keep being drawn back to this issue that clearly needs to be resolved or healed in some way, then I’m going to make a referral to you to a professional counselor, a professional therapist. A coach should be trained to recognize when referrals are the appropriate action.

Kristin: Absolutely, absolutely, and of course it depends on the therapeutic approach. Some therapeutic approaches focus more on skill building as well, or someone may not have developed the skills that they need to really thrive in interpersonal relationships, for example, or they may have significant substance abuse backgrounds, or there may be all kinds of things going on, and a great therapist is tooled to be able to handle complexity and to be able to recognize how those complex pieces act together and help somebody move forward in their lives and their goals. I certainly would think that the ultimate goal is very similar. We’re all trying to help people in education as well identify the things that they see as really valuable in their lives and the capacities that they can see that they have to live a meaningful and joyful life, that is our goal across the board. I’m sure that is the goal of many of our faculty as well, with the students that they work with. We just take a somewhat different approach in doing so. I’m also thinking that listeners may have one other question. You may have gotten them really excited, so can I ask the question, if someone is looking for a good coach, what might you suggest in how they could find one.

Kitty: Well, I would say one thing to know about coaches is that most of them do a free half an hour consult with their coaching practice, so there’s nothing lost if you find someone who looks interesting to you, and you just want to have a conversation to see if you vibe with that person and their approach. In terms of finding a coach. I would look for someone who has an ICF credential personally, just because having gone through that training, I know that it’s quite rigorous and quite demanding, and the people there have been trained quite a bit with ethics, and they’re trained to recognize the difference between therapy and coaching, and know where their limits are. So, I would definitely look for that as well. And I might just ask around a little bit to see if anybody you know has had a great experience. I know that’s how I found my career coach that I had back in the day, that I had a really excellent experience with, which was one of the things that got me into coaching in the first place. So, Susan may have some better advice than I do on that one.

Susan: No, I think you answered that really nicely. There is, I believe, a coach finder tool on the ICF website that would be the whole breadth of coaches all over the globe, so that may be a deeper dive [LAUGHTER] than you’d want to do right at the beginning.

Kristin: And I’ll also double down on a short consult session is a great idea. Sometimes people just don’t jive, and it’s no reflection. The coach may be a fabulous coach, it doesn’t mean that the person requesting coaching is all screwed up because they didn’t jive with this coach. Sometimes there’s just not a connection, and it’s not a reflection on either person, but it’s worth that first conversation to say, “You know, this just didn’t seem to go. I’m going to just try again,” because having a good connection can provide a really good foundation.

Susan: That’s right. And coaches are typically very generous. I have also had other coaches make referrals to people who might be better suited, for example, when I was seeking out mentor coaches for my re-accreditation, and I appreciated that generosity.

Kristin: Tell us about your experience of writing the book.

Susan: I would really like to praise our contributors to this volume, not least of which for being the most organized, well-managed time writers that I think have ever existed in a co-edited collection of this size. It was such an interesting experience to work with people who all sort of work with other people about time management issues and writing, because they were on it. No one had to be repeatedly nudged into getting their submission in. It was a really smooth process, and it was such an enjoyable experience to work with Kitty and Katie and Karen, because four people is a nice group as a editing team. When one of us had a life got in the way of being able to keep our balls rolling, the other three people would always pick up the slack, and so I think we were able to make incredibly smooth progress on getting this book to the press.

John: We always end with a question, what’s next?

Susan: I am actually heading full force into this coaching world. As of this summer, I’ll be leaving my role as a director of Center for Teaching and Learning to focus on coaching for individuals and for organizations, in addition to the speaking engagements and workshop facilitating that I have been so honored to do with a number of universities, my focus on active and embodied learning and my coaching practice specifically offers an embodied approach, because I like to conduct outdoor audio only sessions, in which clients can be walking or enjoying some fresh air to develop new perspectives and spending time outside.

Kristin: Excellent.

Kitty: And for me, I’m sort of in the midst of a lot of reflection and planning for the academic year here at the University of Richmond. So, I’ve been particularly busy thinking about ways to support folks in our mid-career. We revamped our early career support programs with the Provost Office last year, and this year we’re starting to focus on mid-career folks, so really post-tenure, or for those not in a tenure-line position, more advanced teaching associates, and so I last year did a group coaching with the Associated Colleges of the South across all the schools of that consortium, and we’re going to do one here at UR next year. So, I’ve been working a lot on that and thinking about group coaching and how we can apply that more effectively in my institution.

Kristin: Sounds so interesting.

John: Thank you both. It’s great talking to you again, Susan, and it’s nice meeting you, Kitty. I really enjoyed reading through your book. It’s a really nice collection of resources.

Kitty: It’s been a pleasure.

Susan: Well, thank you. Been great to be featured on Tea for Teaching, because it’s a little outside of the normal topics, and so we’re so happy to spread the word.

Kitty: And I’ve been a fan of Tea for Teaching forever, so it’s so exciting to finally make it on the show. [LAUGHTER]

Kristin: Well, I would love to hear about the group coaching and how that goes, [LAUGHTER] but that’s just putting in a listener request. [LAUGHTER]

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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