3 - Original Research (2011–2014): Looking at Adult Learning

Summary

During the early part of the 2010s I was involved in extensive research into the development of leadership in managers. I undertook much of this work with my colleagues Pam Heneberry and Sally Crompton (from the Professional Development Centre Limited), both ILM Level 7 qualified coaches, and we all took a very creative way of designing a series of development programmes (for both leadership development and coaching prowess) during which we collected data from the interactions and reflections of individuals who were undertaking the course. Coaching of delegates was a crucial part of the co-learning, which presented us with the initial challenges of creativity in coaching. This chapter will outline many of the key elements of adult learning we discovered or confirmed during this past decade of research and the factors that affect an individual's development. Several key themes emerged in the course of this work, which are crucial to successful executive coaching in British managerial (in this case private companies) settings. These themes included the care and feeling of emotions, the acknowledgement, protection and facilitation of adequate spaces for development and learning, the use of mediating objects (see Chapter 2) and regular and meaningful reflections.

One set of themes, we found, were often clustered around the internal lives of people: the ways in which humans can identify and highlight the assumptions we can all make about emotions, individuality and, also (and this has strong links to Action Learning), how to produce strong bridges to action. The bridges between these developmental themes seemed to lay in the person's emotional reaction to provide and discover artefacts, their own individual interpretations of the meanings of these objects and the underlying assumptions about, perhaps, naturally occurring artefacts and their significance, importance or legitimacy. In a similar way, coaching practice also needs improved approaches to an individual's development, while outlining both a contribution to and a development of coaching theory and practice. In attempting to provide more relevant coaching interventions, a theoretical understanding of the ways in which humans engage with each other is more important than a strict adherence to coaching models.

We have already learnt that adequate development in human beings (certainly in a Western context) cannot take place remotely from their work context or, for that matter, from their own lives outside the work setting (Weick, 1976; Cousin, 2006; McKergow, 2009; European Coaching and Mentoring Council 2020).