A Preference for Partnership over Mastery

For a long time now, I have been working as a coach.  As always when naming this I notice a bodily sensation of discomfort signalling that I am not entirely happy with this role descriptor.  Is it too vague and ambiguous? Perhaps.  Do I work in sport?  No!  Am I a vehicle transporting large numbers of people from A to B? Definitely not!  So, what sort of coach am I?  Well, I am an **** coach, where you can insert development, leadership, innovation, life, relationship instead of ‘****’.  When I do that and say it out loud I have a different but equally significant sensation of discomfort as I feel the role is now too tightly described.  In fact, it’s constraining.  I am more comfortable with a title like ‘thinking and feeling provocateur’ or ‘partner in curiosity’ or ‘forensic payer of attention’ yet feel ill at ease in using them in a business setting!  Recently, in conversation with a friend, I came out with the descriptor 'curiosity wrangler' to describe what I do. We liked it, so it now features amongst my various LinkedIn descriptors.

Another term that I have a chequered relationship with is ‘Master’.  Going back many years I was in the university sector at the time when Masters qualifications were becoming more common place (meaning those that started at the undergraduate entry, concluded with a Masters qualification without passing through a Bachelors en route).  While honouring and celebrating the skill and effort it took (and still takes) to obtain a Masters qualification, I was also uncomfortable with the title.  Undoubtedly it reflected the effort and standard achieved of its recipients, yet it also appeared to create a hierarchy, as for me it is difficult to think of ‘master’ without wondering about the servants over whom they held sway.  It was a term I also found unsettling for being, at least historically, gender specific.  Unusually for me I realised that this was a not something that I could realistically change.  For many years I lived with my minor discomfort as the delight of working with talented students during their Masters studies, and then celebrating their successful completion was such a positive experience, it pushed my niggling dissatisfaction to the edges of my mind.

Now I am a coach and despite not entirely liking the term I stick with it!  From my newer vantage point of being a coach I look at what is happening in academia.  It’s great to see coaching is gaining an increasing presence in academic environs with both taught and research experiences now relatively commonplace in universities.  Despite the increased rigour these learning and research opportunities bring to coaching practice, the coaching industry is still not formally regulated in the same way that therapy is, for example.   There is no gold standard of chartered status in coaching as there is in so many other industries.  Chartered Status of course means that the holder must achieve a certain standard before they can legally call themselves, a lawyer, a therapist or a chemist (amongst many others).  There are several national and international professional bodies for coaches who do their best to set high standards of coaching and coach training, yet it is still possible for anyone to set up as a coach and charge fees for their services. 

A side note at this point to anyone looking for a coach is to encourage you to ask your prospective coach about their professional accreditation (and what they actually did to obtain it) and the life experience they bring to their coaching.  From an ethical perspective I am bound to encourage that you take on a properly accredited coach, but I do acknowledge that there are many fabulous (particularly young) coaches out there who cannot afford the cost of coach training or professional membership.  Therein is the tight rope walked by coaching’s professional bodies.  In setting standards they create a market place for training providers.  As with any market that means there will be costs levied by providers for the services they provide to customers.  Often these costs are prohibitive to groups already underrepresented in coaching (as customers or providers).  It would be wrong to see this as an unforeseen consequence, or to imply its effects are being ignored.  A lot of attention is paid to how to deal with creating a more inclusive coaching offer, yet there is still a long way to go to meet the challenge.

A not entirely gratuitous picture of some beautiful nerines, as partnership with nature is also surely more positive than mastery of it?

It’s a tough one, but not the point that I was intending to focus on here, despite my own mission being to increase diversity in the community of coaches and coachees through my own actions and in partnership with others.  My point is in relation to my own accreditation journey with my chosen coaching professional body, the International Coaching Federation (ICF).  I joined the ICF when I established my own independent coaching practice, Alpamayo Coaching Ltd.  I selected them as they had an international presence, and because I felt they had the most demanding requirements for accreditation, particularly in terms of the amount of actual coaching required to be eligible.

I did the necessary theory training and gained a portfolio of more than 100 hours of practical coaching and was rewarded by accreditation as an Associate Certified Coach (ACC) by the ICF.  A year or so later I was pleased to reach 500 coaching hours and to have completed a comprehensive CPD portfolio as well as the requisite hours of coach supervision and mentoring to submit for the next level of accreditation.  I did exactly that and was awarded Professional Certified Coach (PCC) status with the ICF.  I am not particularly good at noting my achievements (I need a coach to help me with that!) yet I remember being proud of reaching PCC and knew, despite my primary motivation being my coaching partnerships, the journey towards PCC accreditation had been motivational for me.

Since then, I have worked with over 450 clients and I am now approaching 2500 coaching hours and a coaching CPD portfolio (received and delivered) of over 1000 hours.  I have what is required to apply for the highest level of accreditation with the ICF, yet I find I’m not inclined to do so.  Why not?  At least in part it’s because the title of the next level is Master Certified Coach (MCC).  In this different part of my career my antipathy towards the word Master is something I can’t ignore.  My purpose behind writing this is to try and unpick my thinking and feeling by writing about it.  I am interested to see what finds its way onto the page and how I might feel once I have done with my writing.

To start with I want to be clear I have huge respect for those who choose to pursue Master Certification as a coach.  I know many people who have, and I have enjoyed learning with and from them.  I also want to be clear that I am not in any way offering advice to others in sharing what are my own views.  Some might say that they are self-limiting, that I am at risk of standing in my own way.  They might be right, and I am certainly open to influence towards a better way!  However, right now there are two things that particularly bother me about the title Master in relation to coaching, and the implied mastery that goes with it.  These are the ring of destination it is has about it, and the sense of differentiation.

I love the learning that comes with coaching.  It’s one of the parts of being a coach which offers such a rich experience.  There are limitless CPD opportunities supporting building of competence and increasing knowledge yet the most important learning for me comes from every coaching conversation I have.  I become a different coach after each conversation as the experience of it absorbs into my own way of being, which then plays into all my future coaching sessions by altering the nature of my attention and the experience arising from it.  I may not be aware of the micro-changes I experience after each session, yet I am aware of my coach evolution over time.  It is comforting to think of this iterative development occurring in perpetuity, or at least until I decide to stop coaching.  What I sense in the term Master, and mastery, is a journey’s end which I find intellectually and emotionally limiting.  It has the feel of a destination, and I don’t like that at all, preferring the thought of a learning continuum stretching away into my future, one made up of the stepping stones representing each coaching conversation.

Then there is the issue of differentiation.  What I mean is I can’t help hearing the word ‘servant’ when ‘master’ comes up in conversation.  ‘Who or what is servile to my mastery?’ is a question that raises its ugly head and causes discomfort because my coaching philosophy is one of partnership and equality.  These characteristics come into being as trust is built and then nourished throughout the partnership.  Anything that erodes this, or puts it at risk, is an issue for me.  That is not to say a coaching partnership will be free of any sort of power dynamic.  It will be present, and leadership and followership may be roles that coachee and coach occupy by choice.  I am reminded here, probably influenced, by the words of Dee Hock who said that ‘leadership presumes follower; follower presumes choice’ and for me one thing absent in a master/ servant dynamic is choice.

There are other factors at play in my complex response to ‘Master’ in relation to coaching proficiency, but I will leave them for another time.  What I am left with is a thought about what sort of language of certification would work for me and I realise there is a word that immediately comes to mind.  Partner.  I do find that aspirational, and something I already do, but which I can always get better at.  Yeah, Partner Certified Coach, I’d be happy with that!

What might be a possible future with me and Master Certified Coach certification?  One is that in writing these reflections I begin the process of changing my stance.  I am open to that possibility.  Right now though a more likely future I can envisage is one in which I submit an application for such recognition and then, assuming I achieved it, retire from coaching and change to something new as there will be no more learning to be done!  That particular possible future is a long time off though and one that is fogged by the truth captured in the phrase ‘we are ignorant of all endings’.  One of the many challenges of the human experience!