Leveling Up through Coaching
What exactly is coaching and how might it facilitate developing university research leaders? As part of our Brown Bag series, ATG recently hosted a panel of trained coaches who apply their coaching expertise to empower university researchers to identify and move toward their goals.
The training researchers undergo to become excellent scientists and scholars rarely includes training in leadership. Our panel of coaches have found that coaching can provide a process for university researchers to gain the skills and confidence needed to work as an effective research leader. This can be as a new researcher or an established investigator moving into larger collaborative challenges.
The International Coaching Federation defines coaching as “partnering with individuals in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential. The process of coaching often unlocks previously untapped sources of imagination, productivity and leadership.” Don Takehara, who coaches Engineering researchers at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, explained what coaching allows him to accomplish in his research development role: “What we really want is to have individuals who are passionate and energized in research whether as an individual or as part of a group. Coaching can help make that happen.”
All three of our panelists, Peg AtKisson, Jet LeBlanc, and Don Takehara, were trained in the co-active coaching method through the Co-Active Training Institute and Don went through the extensive process of becoming certified as a co-active coach. What is different about this kind of coaching is the person being coached is leading the coaching. This is not about coaching clients toward performance goals, as Jet was required to do when she coached employees at a large software company. She described what she gets to do now as an executive coach for senior faculty in this way: “In my role now, coaching is about helping brilliant people get whatever is in their way out of their way.”
All three of our coaches described co-active coaching as a partnership between the coach and the client with the coach providing a thought-provoking and creative way to level up.
If you like to hear directly from our panelists about their experiences, you can view the recorded portion our Brown Bag talk.
Further, many members of our ATG consultant team are trained as co-active coaches and offer both executive coaching and curriculum-based coaching one-on-one and in a group. Learn more about ATG’s talented team. If you’d like more information about ATG’s coaching opportunities, we would be delighted to hear from you.