Rethinking Coaching – Critical Theory and the Economic Crisis

Citation

Sayers, P. (2011), "Rethinking Coaching – Critical Theory and the Economic Crisis", Industrial and Commercial Training, Vol. 43 No. 3, pp. 186-188. https://doi.org/10.1108/00197851111123668

How might radical coaching have addressed the behaviour of bankers that led to the credit crisis? What is there for coaching, as a profession, to learn from the behaviour of bankers? How might those who coach managers in large organisations rethink the way they do things to ensure that issues of corporate social responsibility are properly addressed? If these are the sort of questions you would like a sound intellectual perspective on, then Rethinking Coaching by Du Toit and Sim will be of interest to you. The book advocates a sceptical approach to be taken by coaches, where the concept of scepticism is anchored in works of philosophy stretching back to the ancient Greeks. The book has three strands:

1. 1.

   An analysis of the quality of thinking and perspective that was lacking in the banking industry, and in neoliberal economics as a whole, and which led to the credit crisis.

2. 2.

   An explanation of the philosophy of scepticism and its relationship to structuralism, postmodernism and feminism.

3. 3.

   What coaches might do to encourage scepticism within organisations, to combat the pervasive effects of groupthink, to demonstrate corporate social responsibility through whistleblowing if necessary.

Unlike many books on coaching which are written by practitioners and which offer primarily techniques for coaches to use, this book is a closely argued intellectual essay – a book on thinking for coaches, rather than a book about coaching practice.

The book is divided into four parts. Part 1 is the introduction which lays out the authors' argument, that a more radical form of coaching within organisations will encourage a stronger sense of corporate social responsibility, and that the basis to this more radical form of coaching can be found in critical theories of society that have emerged from philosophers and cultural theorists. Part 2 has chapters entitled “Coaching as Theory and Practice”, “Who Benefits from Coaching?” and “The Limitations of Coaching”. The first of these offers an overview of coaching theory, and the third a discussion of the extent to which current practice encourages the coach to question or accept the values and culture of the coachee's organisation. The second chapter in this part contains a number of case studies, showing examples of where, in the authors' experience, a coaching culture is well established. Most of the examples are from the public sector, and the two private sector case studies are from phone companies. There is nothing here from the financial sector. Given the kind of organisations where coaching is well established, it may have been less necessary for coaches to question the values or culture of the organisation. That won't be the case if coaching is to play a role in financial organisations characterised by a bonus culture that rewards a form of risk‐taking that many judge to be unethical.

Part 3 has chapters on “The Rise of Critical Theory” and “Scepticism in Public Life”. The first takes us through a history of relevant philosophical thought with excursions into Marxism and post‐Marxism, feminism and postcolonialism and finally to postmodernism, which seems to be the dominant theoretical framework for the ideas and language of this book. As the authors put it, “Postmodern thought has been critical of authority since its beginnings, and it has led the way in challenging the assumptions lying behind institutional power.” The second chapter explains scepticism, how Descartes's “I think, therefore I am” is one of the best known results of sceptical thought, and how scepticism develops into super‐scepticism in the work of Jacques Derrida. It then moves on to how scepticism can be used as a tactic when applied to public life and ends with a section specifically on sceptical coaching. Any reader taking a sceptical stance to Rethinking Coaching will now have plenty to chew on, and hopefully be convinced that scepticism is the best approach.

Part 4 is entitled “Theory into Coaching”. It starts with a chapter on “The Market Paradigm: What Went Wrong?” which picks up a theme started in part 1. There is something significantly wrong with neo‐liberalism and its belief in the ability of markets to right themselves without external, e.g. government intervention. The problem, in psychological terms, is groupthink – the way people fail to question the underpinning ideology of their professions and unthinkingly buy into the values and culture of their organisations. The next chapter “A New Dawn: Applying Critical Theory to Coaching” takes the reader back through the philosophical arguments from part 3 but now presented as an aid to breaking free from groupthink. Coaching is a very good way of helping people to articulate a questioning approach to their organisation. Furthermore, it is suggested in this chapter, we need to “break out of the cycle of fetishization”, at which point the language of the postmodernist culture theorist probably communicates a whole set of unintended images to the average coach. Subsequent chapters take us through “Coaching and the Whistleblowing Dilemma” and a final “Conclusion: Radical Coaching and Business as Usual”. The whistleblowing dilemma is presented in a well‐balanced argument pointing out the loyalty expected of most employees that has to be contrasted with the responsibilities individuals have to society as a whole when they discover questionable practices. Coaching can help people with these dilemmas. For organisations that espouse the principles of corporate social responsibility, whistleblowing should be less of a problem.

The good thing about this book is that it provides coaches with a very good theoretical framework to re‐evaluate their practice, and to become a bit more challenging of the organisations they coach in. The argument is well presented, but there are gaps. There is a clear message to coaches to be more sceptical and questioning of the organisations whose staff they coach, but what the authors might want to do about introducing coaching into the financial sector is less clear. The potential benefits of coaching for bankers are clearly presented but there are no examples of where this may already be in place. There is no mention in chapter 3 of coaching practice within the financial sector, but that doesn't mean that none exists. A discussion on how coaches might market themselves to the banks could have been helpful. Going in armed with postmodernism might not be sufficient. For a reader not familiar with the concepts of postmodernism, some of the chapters are a bit hard going. The arguments presented could be equally well expressed in simpler terms.