Simon Western – Vogel Wakefield

Coaching is political

Coaching has been practised to support leadership for a few decades now. But the mismatch between leaders’ impact and the challenges we face as a society has never seemed greater.

Look, for example, at the paralysis over how to manage climate change. Politicians and executives seem clueless, or unwilling to engage in strategies that can help bring about the radical changes required to mitigate predicted disaster scenarios. The question here is how the coaching profession can engage with the climate emergency – only one of the complex political issues that shape the context in which we encounter our clients. The mismatch between the scale of these tasks and the quality of leadership with which the world can tackle them is a call for coaches to critically review our impact and responsibilities. Continue reading “Coaching is political” →

Our influences

The cultural influences that shape how we lead (and follow)

By Martin Vogel

messiah therapist — Messiah and therapist.

Leadership is often viewed as a static or neutral concept – perhaps rooted in the traits of a particularly capable individual, or determined by the situation in which leadership is required. In fact, how we lead is profoundly influenced by our culture and it changes over time. The best evidence for this that I know comes in Simon Western’s Leadership: A Critical Text – a survey of the concept and practice leadership from the early 20th Century on.

Simon identifies four discourses of leadership that have been influential over the period: controller, therapist, messiah and eco-leader.

Continue reading “The cultural influences that shape how we lead (and follow)” →

Leadership

Who will lead us from this chaos?

By Martin Vogel

YourCountryNeedsYou

My blog post last week, on the social fracturing that led to Brexit, has resonated with many readers. On every day since it was published, the piece has attracted more traffic to the site than we would normally see in a week. It speaks, I think, not just to the anxiety about what the vote has revealed about our nation but also to another anxiety about the contribution to that state of affairs made by the organisations of which we are part.

Continue reading “Who will lead us from this chaos?” →

Coaching

Coaching: a vocation for our times

By Martin Vogel

Coaches follow in the tradition of shamans.

Book review: Coaching and Mentoring: A Critical Text, by Simon Western

Simon Western seeks to challenge and expand our view about what constitutes coaching but, in so doing, he also challenges and expands received wisdom on what it means to be a leader in today’s complex and fast-moving organisations.

Coaching is a young practice, scarcely a profession. On the one hand, it has an inferiority complex in relation to other helping professions, particularly psychotherapy from which it takes much of its sense of good practice. On the other, it is rapidly being colonised by big management consultancies and business schools who recognise coaching’s threat to their turf. Talk of codifying what coaching should be through accreditation and even regulation is a sure sign of vested interests attempting to appropriate ground for themselves.

Western’s book, Coaching and Mentoring: A Critical Text, investigates coaching as it is practised rather than how it is conceptualised in the literature. The strength of this approach is that it resists the tendency to reduce and constrain how coaching is defined. Instead, Western celebrates its diversity – from new age influenced life coaching through to corporate coaching interventions with their solutions-focussed processes and returns on investment.

Continue reading “Coaching: a vocation for our times” →