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Big Beacon Radio Ep. 8: Leadership Coaching in Higher Ed

September 25, 2015/in Media/by Emma Schoenfelner

Ep. 8 – The Leadership Coaching Revolution in Higher Education

The use of leadership coaches has exploded in corporations and other organizations. Eric Schmidt and Bill Gates say “everyone needs a coach,” and increasingly in the C-suite, almost everyone has one. And the reasons for this growth are becoming clearer. When individuals are coached, they become more effective with improvements in task & relationship orientation; and coaching is a good investment returning $5-$7 for every $1 spent. In this episode, Big Beacon Radio host (and coach) Dave Goldberg explores the growing usage of coaches in education with three other coaches. Dave is joined by Bev Jones, Kelly Lewis, and Daryl Nardick for a lively discussion to explore what coaching is (and isn’t), when it can be helpful for faculty and higher ed leaders, and the ways in which the ideas and practices of coaching can help transform higher education. Join Bev, Kelly, Daryl, and Dave for this important conversation on the future of coaching in the transformation of higher education.

Listen on VoiceAmerica or download on iTunes podcasts.

Learn more about Big Beacon Radio, here.

5 Steps for Transforming Education

March 29, 2015/in Change, Education/by Emma Schoenfelner

Universities, created as an assembly of experts in 1088, are as outdated as buggy whips. The cost and rewards of a college education are increasingly under attack. To sustain great universities requires cultural transformation consisting of 5 Steps:

4 Reasons Universities Don’t Invest in Organizational Development & Why They Now Should

July 22, 2013/in Coaching, Education, Leadership, Of interest/by David E. Goldberg

An Engineer in OD/HR Wonderland

When I took training as a leadership coach at Georgetown University, many of my colleagues in cohort 30 were in human resources (HR) or organizational development (OD). As I had just resigned my tenure as an engineering professor at the University of Illinois, learning amidst these people was disorienting on at least two fronts. First, engineering is more technology and thing oriented and HR/OD is more people and organization oriented, and routine discussion of social, emotional, and personal matters in a classroom setting seemed a bit weird. Second, my colleagues all belonged to organizations that believed in the importance of investment, staff, and concerted effort to improve their organizations & I had belonged to an organization that invested almost nothing in its improvement as an organization. I had expected the first of these going in, but the starkness of the significant investment that many if not most organizations make in themselves as organizations was bracing when compared to the almost non-existent expenditure of universities in this area.

And as I have continued to reflect on this contrast, I remain more than a bit puzzled. Organizations in the private sector understandably grasp the importance of organizational excellence and think of it as an investment that delivers a reasonable return, and expenditures are calibrated accordingly on such things as leadership development, teamwork training and facilitation, executive coaching, and so forth. Many of my Georgetown colleagues were attached to or consultants to organizations in the Federal government, and even there, substantial sums were expended to improve organizational effectiveness in the alphabet soup of Washington, DC. Why was it that my university–for that matter, almost all universities–spend so little on developing their organizations qua organizations?

4 Reasons Universities Don’t Invest in OD

As I thought about this point, I was puzzled, but in thinking about it, there are a number of reasons why universities have not invested in organizational development to this point:

University life has been stable for a long time. Universities go back to the University of Bologna founded in 1088. Although universities have changed over the years, they have been quite stable, and traditional governance and structure have appeared to serve the institutions for a quite a long time.

The university has been viewed as an assembly of experts. Over that period of time, the university has been viewed largely as a loose assembly of quasi-independent experts. Yes, departmental specialization was a relatively recent invention of the 19th century, and specialization intensified around the time of World War 2, but professors have been hired for their academic excellence and expertise for nearly 10 centuries. The primary tool of “development” of the university is sabbatical, and each of the experts is supposed to renew him or herself professional several times over the course of their academic career, but no team or institutional development takes place among faculty, by and large.

Faculty members would resist OD methods if they were introduced. Elsewhere (here), I have written about how universities may actually retard faculty development, and if this is so, fairly early stage faculty would tend to resist OD methods if they were introduced. In engineering, for example, hard-core “rigorous” engineering professors would reject methods coming from less technical fields as being too soft or “not rigorous” regardless how much they were needed or useful. It is reasonable to imagine that other disciplinary experts would reject out-of-discipline expertise out of hand (except for HR/OD faculty members perhaps).

Universities are not led and managed, they are administered and governed. And the language that we use surrounding the university is interesting. Professors and the university require governance and administration, not management and leadership. In coaching, we distinguish between administration, management, and leadership as a distinction between past, present, and future. Those selected to take a place in the university hierarchy are called “administrators” and their job is to bring forth a somewhat smoother version of the past going forward. Faculty members expect to be involved in “governing” the university through committee work and quasi-democratic process. To accept OD methods in the university is tacit admission that the university needs leadership and management and to risk diminishing faculty voice in governance.

This helps us understand why organizational development is not being used in universities, and interestingly, the list also helps us understand why OD is needed, badly and now.

The Times They Are a Changin’

Although universities have not used organizational development methods because of their stability, their nature as an assembly of experts, resistance from faculty members in early stages of adult development, and because of their leadership structure and culture, universities now face exogenous forces that flips the logic of previous times. This blog has written about each of the matters, and so we simply summarize the counterpoint to each of the 4 points of the previous section:

MOOCs & the democratization of research are destabilizing a 10-century consensus of the nature of the university.
The notion of expertise is under attack in the classroom and the laboratory. Returns to expertise are diminishing rapidly.
Faculty members need exactly the kinds of deep development and coaching that OD methods can bring to the organization and to individuals within it.
If the notion of a residential university is to survive, it needs more leadership and management, less administration, and reforms to permit innovation and maintain faculty governance, both.

As such, I predict that organizational development methods and coaching will increase in usage as these forces are faced. Bringing OD to the university without provoking a faculty reaction requires sensitivity to the culture of the university, an understanding of the importance of faculty governance, and a respect for the traditions of the faculty and the university. ThreeJoy Associates brings those things to its work. Write me at deg@threejoy.com to understand ways in which these methods may be helpful in promoting innovation and effective change in your organization.

5 Times in a Career When Academics Should Hire a Coach

May 1, 2013/in Coaching, Education/by David E. Goldberg

The use of executive or leadership coaches has become an accepted and widespread practice in private corporations, non-profits, and government, and the reasons are becoming clearer (here). When individuals are coached, they become more effective at work and at home with notable improvements in both their task & relationship orientation; organizations become more productive with coaching returning $5-$7 for every $1 spent.

By counter distinction, the use of coaches in academic life–for that matter, the use of any kind of systematic organizational development (OD)–is virtually unknown inside the university. With the many pressures for change that universities are now facing, both economically and technologically, there are good reasons to believe that this is about to change. While universities and colleges come to grips with changes enveloping them, individual staff, professors, and administrators may want to consider the why and when of hiring a personal coach to help advance their careers and their lives.

Coaching, It’s Not What You Think

Those unfamiliar with coaching sometimes think that coaching is a form of consulting, mentoring, or advice giving, but at it’s best, coaching is a form of one-on-one inquiry and reflection in which the client is aided by the coaches listening and asking questions in ways that help the client find and overcome obstacles and then identify and realize possibilities.

The coach works to support only the client’s agenda, starting wherever he or she is; the coach comes to the engagement without judgment or any ideal sense of what the client should or should not be doing. In this way, the client can safely explore his or her own authentic path, style, and career in a safe, supportive environment.

Compared to other kinds of OD interventions such as training and group facilitation, coaching is especially well suited to the highly competitive and individualistic nature of the academy. The confidentiality of the coaching relationship creates a safe haven for sharing hopes and concerns, successes and breakdowns, and possibilities and aspirations.

5 Times Coaching May Be Helpful in an Academic Career

There are at least five times in an academic career, when hiring a coach might be beneficial to an academic:

You’re thinking about becoming an academic. Getting a PhD or other terminal graduate degree is a major commitment, and academic life is not for everyone. Consulting a career coach at the onset of the academic journey can both avoid a potentially costly and emotionally devastating decision and set sail with clear, aligned, and realistic expectations, intentions, and aspirations.

You’ve taken your first academic job. Congratulations, you’re a newly minted assistant prof and you’re eager to get started on your teaching and research, but the road to tenure is filled with many difficulty decisions. Moreover, your dean, department head, and colleagues will offer you much well intentioned advice, but how do you maximize your chances of succeeding and still stay true to your original aspirations and intentions? Consulting a coach at this stage in your career gives you a safe means of exploring your challenges and opportunities with someone who has only your interest at heart.

You’ve been promoted or received tenure (or denied promotion or tenure). The career ladder as a professor only has three rungs, and each promotion can be a major life transition. The transition from assistant to associate prof is usually accompanied by tenure, and the moment of getting to tenure can be disorienting. Should you continue on the same trajectory? Is it time to think about an adminstrative role? What’s next? These are some of the questions that beg answers upon receiving tenure, and a coach can be helpful to asking those pertinent to your circumstances and to finding your own answers. Denial of tenure is a difficult transition, and universities and colleagues provide little or no support. A coach can help you put the event in proper perspective and find a path aligned with where you now are. Denial of promotion to full professor is another difficult case, and a coach can be especially helpful in finding perspective and next steps.

You’ve taken a new administrative post. Transitioning into administration can be quite a shock to the system, and even transitioning up the ranks from head or chair, to dean, to provost, and president can be challenging as each new post is quite different from the one vacated. Administrative postings and promotions are opportune times to hire a coach to help with the challenges of the new position and to prepare for subsequent advancement by building skill and developing in ways that align with the new post and the next.

You’re preparing to leave the university. Perhaps you’ve decided that it’s time to move on, start a company, become a consultant, take a position in the private sector, or retire. These transitions are to get the good questions and listening of a coach to help draw out the best in what comes next.

These five times are good ones to think about finding and using the services of a coach. The next section puts forward a number of open-ended questions to help in your quest for your coach.

Finding Your Coach

So perhaps you’re at an academic transition when a coach might be useful to you. How do you find one aligned with your needs? Here are some questions to consider in hiring a coach:

What training and qualifications does the person bring to their coaching?
To what extent does the person have academic experience and understand academic culture?
To what extent is the potential coach curious about you, your obstacles, your opportunities & to what extent do they seem to have a method or an answer?
To what extend do you feel comfortable with the potential coach, and to what extent is it easy or hard to share private information with him or her?
To what extent does the coach ask questions that engage your reflection and are both hard and interesting to answer?
To what extent does the coach seem to listen to you and “get you” through that listening?
Given that universities do not yet pay for coaching, to what extent does the coach accommodate those who are paying out of their own pockets?

A good source of information about coaching and coaches is International Coach Federation, and these days there is much other information online. If you’d like to learn more about coaching with ThreeJoy, write to Dave Goldberg at deg@threejoy.com.

2+1 Tips for New Deans and Department Heads

July 12, 2012/in Coaching, Leadership/by David E. Goldberg

‘Tis the season of high profile “steps down” as well as interim and late appointments. A google search of “dean steps down” (search results here) reveals a number of smooth and not so smooth cases, but the news in these postings for new appointees is that academic leadership can be rewarding or fraught with career danger, depending upon how the new position is approached.

One of the difficulties in assuming academic leadership (or assuming higher academic leadership) is that so little effort is expended by academic institutions in the development of their leaders. It is widely known that the private sector invests enormous amounts in leadership development–General Electric is a good example–but the seriousness of, for example, the US Federal government in developing leaders is less well known.

This was driven home to me in emotionally salient style, when I took training as a leadership coach at Georgetown University (here), When I enrolled in class, I was struck by three things. First, I was surprised to see coach trainees from so many representatives of the Federal alphabet soup of agencies (FBI, CIA, NIST, State Department, and on and on), Second, I was surprised to learn how many of these agencies regularly engaged OD consultants and executive coaches to help develop their organizations and their leaders. Third, I was one of only two members of the 35-person cohort who worked for a major university, and both of us had already made the decision to leave the university.

If you look around major universities and colleges, they all have human resource departments, but those departments are more tactical and bureaucratic than strategic and developmental, and you have to look really hard to find anything even remotely constituting organizational development (OD) or leadership development in the academic world. One happy exception to this rule is Michigan State University’s FOD or Faculty and Organizational Development unit (here), but the rising academic leader at most organization has poor or no choices when it comes to furthering his or her own growth as a leader within the extant organizational structure.

This lack of intentionality on the part of universities in developing their leaders is a double whammy for the leaders themselves. The new or rising academic leader is usually chosen for his or her disciplinary expertise, an expertise that is often developed by singleminded concentration on research and scholarship, something that doesn’t usually leave much time for studying up on the latest in administration, management, and administration. This lack of intention by the organization and lack of preparation by the candidate, is especially difficult, because universities are notoriously difficult organizations to lead, and much of what is written in the private sector about leadership does not apply directly.

So what’s a new or rising academic leader to do? Here, I offer 2 reading suggestions and one tip for the new or rising academic leader:

Read The First 90 Days. Read Michael Watkins book on job transitions, The First 90 Days (here). This book has both nice strategic models and tactical advice about how to navigate the change. One of the most important pieces of advice is to promote yourself, that is to not think of yourself as having the same role as before, and to reflect carefully about what that means.

Read What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. Read master executive coach, Marshall Goldsmith’s take (link here ) on the key ways in which you need to think differently about the skill set you require moving forward.

Hire an executive coach. You’ve taken the job, you don’t have time to go for an MBA or other leadership training, and you’ve got a department or college to run, so now what do you do? One of the fastest and most effective ways to develop your leadership skill is get a coach. Coaching is hot, but it is not mentoring, or consulting, or advice giving (see a related 3joy post here). Instead coaching provides you with a skilled practitioner to notice, listen, and question (NLQ) and help you find your own leadership style in your own context with a minimum of disruption and maximum of help. Coaches can work with you & your situation, they can believe in your resourcefulness, creativity, and integrity, provide just-in-time & relevant resources for reflection and action, ask you the tough questions that the situation demands, and listen to your reflections to help forward your progress.

To get more helpful resources for the new or rising academic leader, to find out more about leadership coaching in an academic context, or to schedule a complimentary introductory coaching session, write to Dave Goldberg at deg@threejoy.com.

Tag Archive for: organizational development