Values-Based Coaching

A Guide for Social Workers and Other Human Service Professionals

When I began my journey as a coach, I had no idea what a roller coaster ride it would be. I only knew I loved to witness the joy of people transforming their lives. As a therapist, I enjoyed deep, long, intimate relationships and many profoundly moving moments; yet something was missing. The ethical guidelines of my profession often prevented me from saying everything I felt ought to be said. They also prevented me from giving needed hugs (which, I confess, I often did anyway) and from addressing my clients’ whole lives, including their businesses, their finances (except when they didn’t pay and the “transference” needed to be addressed), and their spirituality. But, most of all, I would hesitate to ask powerful questions or suggest that they might be responsible for their own happiness. Instead, I indulged their stories, many of which were, in fact, extremely painful, and I participated unwittingly in reinforcing their notions of themselves as victims. I had tools for helping clients get in touch with denied anger toward their families, but none to help them successfully move through to the other side of that anger. Of course, I too felt like a victim in my own life, despite years of my own personal, successful, life-altering psychotherapy. Therapy had helped me heal my childhood pain sufficiently to function successfully in my work, to marry, and to have children. However, it took much too long and still did not leave me feeling fully in the driver’s seat of my life. I enjoyed my work and did well at it, but . . . something was missing.

In 1981, I participated in a one-day workshop in adult development with Frederic Hudson, author of Adult Development, LifeMaps, and The Coaching Handbook and founder of the Hudson Institute. During the workshop, Frederic drew a simple wheel representing various areas of our lives—work, family, friendship, money, personal growth, and so forth. He asked us to rate our level of satisfaction in those areas. He then had us write our goals in each area for the next three months, six months, one year, two years, five years, and 10 years on index cards, and he instructed us not to look at them for at least a year. I actually forgot about the cards altogether until a number of years later, when they literally fell out of a book I was taking off the shelf. Amazingly, almost 75 percent of what I had written had come to pass! When I wrote them down, many of those goals seemed unimaginable, yet I achieved them. What I didn’t realize then was that my workshop with Frederic had been my first experience of coaching.

I had left my job of 15 years as chief social worker on a general hospital in-patient psychiatry unit in the Boston area and spent a transition year selling residential real estate. I felt burnt out after 17 years of in-patient psychiatry. When I started my private practice, it filled quickly. Other practitioners began to call me and ask me my “secret.” I told them I had none, but when asked to speak with the private practice committee of the Massachusetts Chapter of NASW, I sat down to think about it and realized I had integrated some valuable lessons from real estate. I realized I was not afraid of marketing or self-promotion—concepts that many therapists find distasteful. I also had integrated the possibility of selling as a service that could make a difference.

Around 1992, I began to think about new career options. Managed care was looming large in Massachusetts, and although I was doing well and enjoyed my practice, I had a strong wish to expand beyond the safe four walls of my office. I wanted to make a bigger difference than I could one-on-one, with families, or small groups. Many of my consultations with other therapists supported or inspired interesting and valuable directions and projects. I saw that I could make a difference with them. I was also curious about and drawn to the world of business. Some “coaching” I had offered a client resulted in a large windfall for him. Around that time, I discovered the growing profession of coaching and knew that coaching was what I wanted to do.

This book is a product of the transformation I have made from therapist to coach. Unlike many coach/therapists who have completely given up their therapy practices, I continue to practice both. My perspective is that coaching is both a set of new skills and a new career path. You can choose for yourself. Hopefully, the following pages will give you some direction. I provide the basic framework for understanding the developing field of personal and professional coaching, exercises to help you directly experience coaching and understand its potential in working with clients, and some tips on developing and marketing a coaching practice.

What I describe as “values-based coaching” is more than the expression of the basic value of collaborating and partnering with (as opposed to managing or controlling) others to help them achieve their goals. I am speaking of coaching that is informed by the core values of social work—serving underprivileged and underserved populations and taking on big problems with small dollars.

The primary mission of the social work profession is to enhance human well-being and to help meet the basic human needs of all people, with particular attention paid to the needs and empowerment of people who are vulnerable, oppressed, and living in poverty. A historic and defining feature of social work is the profession’s focus on individual well-being in a social context and the well-being of society. Fundamental to social work is attention to the environmental forces that create, contribute to, and address problems in living.

Social workers promote social justice and social change with and on behalf of clients. “Clients” is used inclusively to refer to individuals, families, groups, organizations, and communities. Social workers are sensitive to cultural and ethnic diversity and strive to end discrimination, oppression, poverty, and other forms of social injustice. These activities may take the forms of direct practice, community organization, supervision, consultation administration, advocacy, social and political action, policy development and implementation, education, or research and evaluation. Social workers seek to enhance the capacity of people to address their own needs. Social workers also seek to promote the responsiveness of organizations, communities, and other social institutions to individuals’ needs and social problems.

The mission of the social work profession is rooted in a set of core values. These core values, embraced by social workers throughout the profession’s history, are the foundation of social work’s unique purpose and perspective:

• service,
• social justice,
• dignity and worth of the person,
• importance of human relationships,
• integrity, and
• competence.

This constellation of core values reflects what is unique to the social work profession. Core values, and the principles that flow from them, must be balanced within the context and complexity of the human experience.

Coaching, which began as a somewhat elite service (much as psychoanalysis once was for well-heeled individuals and corporate entities), can and increasingly does have a place inside of social agencies, grants, and organizations being designed and brought into existence by creative coaches from both the social work profession and other backgrounds. Social entrepreneurship, a relatively new phenomenon, is also using coaching to increase effectiveness and build business skills in a new generation of social change agents—the nonprofit leaders who understand the importance of knowing how to obtain and grow an organization’s financial reserves to thrive and make a difference.

The International Coach Federation (2009) Code of Ethics does not place value on serving needy populations. What is stated is the following: “Coaching is partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential” (Part One, Section 1).

My goal is to share the basic principles of coaching, highlight the current trends in the field, present a number of case examples, and finally share with you some inspiring applications of coaching. Ultimately, my goal is to leave you touched, moved, and inspired by what coaching has to offer and open to creative ways to bring coaching into your work—be it in an agency or with special populations. Please read this book with the filter of what is important to you—in your work and in your own life and career.

I want to hear from you and learn about your ideas. Please write to me at book@ontrackcoaching.com, or go to my blog: http://www.ontrackcoaching.com/blog.