At the time of starting this Doctoral Programme in the Institute of Work Based Learning at Middlesex University in London I was 58 years old and
had reached a stage in my career with significant life and professional experience. I now “knew” what I was doing, reflecting Heron’s (1992) four ways of knowing, including lived experience, a strongly developed sensory and emotional awareness, diverse practical and interpersonal skills
underpinned by solid theoretical knowledge in my particular field.
“The affective mode embraces feeling with emotion....the imaginal mode comprises intuition and imagery....the conceptual mode
includes reflection and discrimination...the practical mode involves intention and action (ibid pp14-15)
I now wanted to generate further understanding to make sense of and further ground my experience as a professional practitioner at the same time create new knowledge and skills for myself and potentially for others. This led me to ask: What might I do to continue my own learning and development? How might I improve my practice? How might I share my “wisdom”? I therefore decided to embark on this Doctoral Research path. Ultimately, my learning and development aims to fulfill my own wish to be more effective with my clients, (primarily internal and external executive coaches), who in turn will provide the best possible service to their clients i.e. the coachees and the organizations who employ them. At the same time, in a recent conversation with my University Project Consultant I declared:
“For me, I am seeking the recognition and the academic rigour of doing this sort of project at this level, which has required more discipline than I would normally bring to my everyday work... I have learned through the rigour of setting up the project, of planning it, of paying real attention to the detail, of creating the core conditions for engagement, participation, supporting those that I’m working with
and accounting for my experience, have all contributed. And I have to account for it in a different way and to a level of experience and
expertise which I believe I am worthy of. And subsequently I want my voice to be heard.” (AH conversation with Project Consultant August 2013).
As I have my own experience of receiving and giving coaching supervision over more than ten years so I wanted to learn from a wider circle of
professional practitioners. I was genuinely curious to discover what value or learning others gained from engaging in supervision and establish what is helpful to them and why, and if not helpful, why not. Within this domain of inquiry, I was also fascinated to explore the power and value of the reflective process on my own and others’ learning and development.
During this early period of my enrolment at Middlesex, I was becoming increasingly frustrated and curious about why both new and experienced coaches did not engage in supervision, using such justifications as “It costs too much”, “I’m qualified/trained/experienced so why do I need to have supervision?” and “Why do we need it, that’s what they do in therapy and I’m not practising as a therapist?” or “I don’t know where to find a supervisor”. Thus I was keen to engage with experienced executive coaches and supervisors who do participate in supervision, to share their voices within the profession and inform those sceptics and “resisters” of its relevance and value. Furthermore, I felt that it was vital to generate
practitioner-based knowledge about how supervision helps or hinders executive coaches. It seemed significant to explore this domain with other practitioners, rather than relying solely on the voices of expert opinion in the literature (e.g. Hawkins & Smith 2006, Bluckert 2006, Hay 2007) and the subsequent mandate from the coaching associations who now insist on supervision as a prerequisite for accreditation of coaches (e.g. APECS 2007, Association for Coaching (2013a), EMCC (2009)).
I wanted to gain a deeper appreciation of what is learned and achieved through this process of supervision at both a content and relational level i.e. what happens and how, when coaches engage in this process called
“supervision” and thus establish why it is useful (it is a presupposition of mine that it is). It was important for me to explore its impact on learning and development as a positive and vital ingredient for executive coaches. I hoped to allay the scepticism by those whose stance is to refer to
supervision as the ‘borrowed clothes’ (e.g. Schwenk 2007 uses this term) from other helping professions and as such not relevant to their practice. I was also passionate about developing a project that would enable me to model my own practice and draw on my experience in this field. This commitment informed my choice of Research Methodology discussed in Chapter 3 and the development of my Project Activities discussed in Chapter 4 of this Project Report.
Given the early stage of development of coaching supervision in this country (and indeed worldwide), and its so far limited acceptance as an integral ingredient in on-going Continuing Professional Development (CPD) for executive coaches (Bachkirova 2011), I wished to generate further understanding and appreciation of the significance and value of the process and its importance to the individual executive coach’s practice and thus to the profession of coaching.
I enrolled at Middlesex University in 2008 to formalise and integrate my work and to investigate these questions through a work-based Doctoral Project.