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Coaching
by Rebeca Pope-Ruark
Welcome to Week 3 of Building Your Network! Over the last two weeks, you’ve thought about the need for a professional network and different types of people who can make up your network as well as thought about the role of mentoring in your professional development. This week, we are looking at the second of three types of people you could have in your network – a coach.
When you think about a coach, what image comes to mind? Perhaps your Little League baseball coach or the coach of a professional sports team you follow. Maybe you think about a life coach or a wellness coach who helped a friend on a specific leg of their personal journey. There are lots of different types of coaches out there, so what type of coach might be most valuable in your professional network?
In this week’s podcast episode, Maria interviews me, an International Coaching Federation-certified coach for academics and administrators in higher education. I work with academic and research faculty on a variety of topics related to their professional growth and development – from planning strategically for the next five years of their careers, to talking through how to resolve a conflict, to managing time and priorities better, to treating burnout, coaches like me are sounding boards and thinking partners for busy higher ed professionals.
What is Coaching?
In this context, coaching is the process of working through opportunities and challenges with a “thinking partner,” the coach, whose role is to ask good questions that allow you to think through your situation, goals, and strategies for moving forward.
Coaching is different from mentoring, a relationship in which the more experienced person offers advice and expertise to the more junior person. Instead, the coach is an expert in a process designed to help the coachee build greater self-awareness, confidence, and resilience by exploring topics important to them.
Coaching is also not therapy, though they can often work in concert with each other. While therapy focuses on improving mental health and often involves exploring the past and its impact on a person, coaching focuses on the present and ways to achieve specific goals.
Coaches use powerful questions and creative tools to help clients think deeply and come to their own conclusions about ways to act or decisions to make in their life and work. Coaching sessions are directed by the client not the coach, so working with a coach means bringing topics to the table that you want to work on directly. As a coach for people in higher education, I often work with people on topics like how to identify values and goals to guide your work, how to effectively work with collaborators or students, how to plan for strategic career growth, whether or not to move into leadership roles, and how to cultivate self-care and well-being as a busy professional with a life outside of work.
Here’s an example of one tool I use with clients who want to change their behaviors in some area of their work-life, called the starfish. This tool asks the client to think about the area where they’d like to make change and to think about five things, the arms of the starfish: what they would like to start doing, stop doing, keep doing, do more of, and do less off. I will typically give the client 3-4 minutes to fill out the visual and then we discuss what they came up with. I follow up by asking the client what they would like to commit to changing based on their results between now and our next session. This is just one simple tool a coach might use to work with you.
Why Include a Coach in Your Network?
Coaching offers clients a dedicated space to think about themselves, their needs, and their goals in ways that many faculty and faculty leaders don’t take time to do on their own. Coaches hold space for the client so they can dig into the thinking, feeling, and doing parts of themselves to explore how to achieve the goals they have. Maybe you feel like you have lost sight of your goals or need to articulate new goals after a promotion. Or maybe you are in a tricky leadership situation and need someone to not just vent to but to help you strategize about how to be successful. Or perhaps you just need an outside perspective to help you make sense of work or learn new ways to manage your time and priorities. These are all areas where a coach might be helpful.
When do you know if you should reach out to a coach or to a mentor (or to a therapist)? Here’s a worksheet to help you think through your decision. <link to printable>
How Do You Choose a Coach?
Because coaching is currently an unregulated but growing industry, many people out there call themselves coaches. Good coaches have training in coaching theory and skills or in a related field like psychology, counseling, or social work. While not all coaches have a certification, a certificate from the International Coaching Federation is one marker of a well-trained coach who is guided by an ethical code of conduct in their work.
Look for people in your social and professional networks who coach or who work with a coach to get recommendations. Coaches often specialize in certain populations. For example, I work with academics who are experiencing burnout in my private practice and have colleagues who work exclusively with graduate students, new or mid-career faculty, faculty leaders, or faculty and staff transitioning out of higher ed. Look for someone who has a specialization in your situation or context.
Good coaches also want you to find the best coach match for your needs. Take the time to talk to a few coaches before signing on with one. Ask them about their approach to coaching, their training, and the ways you would partner in the relationship. You want someone who has similar values, and if they understand higher ed, all the better, since we have some unique ways of thinking and acting that folks outside higher ed might not appreciate.
Here are some links to learn more about coaching and even ways to become a coach yourself:
- Coaching vs. Mentoring: What’s the Difference? – A post of the Radical Candor blog about some of the differences between coaching and mentoring relationships
- Faculty Success Coaching Program at Georgia Tech – My coaching program for internal institutional clients
- Higher Ed Coaches – Dr. Katie Linder’s coach training program for higher education professionals, mentioned in the podcast
- “What I Gained from a Year of Professional Coaching” – A Chronicle of Higher Education article on one faculty leader’s experience with coaching
We hope this content was useful to you, and please know that we want to support you. You can leave us a comment (if you have an NC State ID), or we will be following this conversation on Bluesky, X and LinkedIn at #SparkBYN and you can join us there. Looking forward to hearing from you!
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