How could coaching be useful for arts leadership?

I’ve recently completed an excellent course to learn more about ‘relational dynamics coaching’. The course covered three main areas: coaching skills, leadership awareness and understanding of self and others (aka emotional intelligence). I’d recommend the course to anyone looking to develop either their coaching skillset, or coaching mindset (approach) – whether you’re interested in becoming a coach yourself or if like me you’re simply interested in developing your style. I say ‘style’ because whilst it’s designed with leadership development in mind (and our trainer also runs a leadership coaching course for Cultural Leadership Programme), it is already proving useful in all other areas of my life: professional, social, parenting.

So what is coaching? Coaching is about self-directed learning. Rather than advising or solving problems for others, a coach facilitates learning and development, Because the coachee finds their own insights and ways forward, these are owned and more likely to be successful than externally imposed ideas. A coach believes the client has the answers and resources within themselves – and through skilful questioning, framing and challenging – provides a positive, supportive and encouraging space in which to find them. Coaching is also about building capacity and avoiding creating dependent relationships – so a coachee feels responsible for their own development and progress. Coaching comes in many flavours – the course I followed was called ‘relational dynamics’ because of its focus on emotional intelligence as a key resource, often through realising different perspectives and insights into a situation.[1]

Or put simply, in the words of one of the other ladies on my course:

‘coaching is a bit like putting on an old coat you’ve not worn for a while and finding a fiver in your pocket: it was there all along, but it’s nice to find it and gives you a little spring in your step for the rest of the day.’

My interest in coaching stems from a desire to be better able to facilitate other people’s contributions when I’m working as a line manager or consultant. I’d noticed that on occasions whilst I wanted to empower and involve others, it wasn’t always working as well as I’d like and people had suggested coaching might offer me some new techniques. In my experience, you can only get so far on your own efforts but working with others slows you down, and I’m always in a rush! The words of a wise former colleague stuck in my mind: ‘If you want to go fast go alone, if you want to go further go together’. I like fast, but further sounded good too – and I hoped coaching would help me get further, with others.

The other reason I wanted to find out more about coaching was that many of the principles of coaching chimed with the kind of values I hold dear in relation to how I’d like to work with audiences in the arts. Therefore I was interested to discover what coaching might offer in terms of ideas for how to approach engaging audiences with art.

Far too many people believe the arts are not for them. Some of us in the arts (and I used to be guilty of this when I started work as a curator 15 years ago) see their role as ‘taste-makers’: determining on behalf of the rest of us what art is worthy of our attention. These days I value expertise and I’m glad someone else has done all the research and found the most interesting artists so I don’t have to traipse round every studio and biennale across the world, but I see a difference between expertise and control. Just as my doctor (with her professional knowledge) can advise me about my options for treatment of my dodgy back – I expect her to offer me a range of choices, and if I prefer to opt to ibuprofen over acupuncture then she respects my choices.

Personally I believe that we all have different tastes and respond differently to even the same artworks is a great strength of the arts – because these interactions are often personal and subjective they offer us fresh insights into ourselves and other people. If we see our role as arts professionals as facilitating opportunities to discover and enjoy cultural experiences – then I think we will be able to reach and engage with more people than if we prescribe culture for them. That means we need to shift our mindset from one of provision of culture by an elite to a passive audience, to think in terms of expert facilitation and offering of high quality content in a way that respects an audience’s own values, tastes and needs, as well as builds their capacity to understand and enjoy more.  I think many of the principles of coaching (e.g. self-directed learning, building capacity in the coachee for their own progress, being non-judgmental) could be helpful in thinking about how we create these conditions I’ve just described in terms of the arts sector and our relationships with audiences.

For example, if we enable a viewer to articulate and understand what it is about a particular artwork that they enjoy, or through exploring the impact of an artwork on them begin to understand the artist’s intentions more deeply, then we are giving them the skills and tools to enjoy and understand more.

So, in my view, coaching is very useful as both a mindset and skillset for the kinds of things I’m interested in achieving in the arts – and this course has been fantastic in helping put in place enough awareness, tools and excitement to enable me to keep on learning and improving.

Perhaps one of the simplest, but most effective tools we learnt was around use of ‘clean’ and positive language. I was staggered by the power that expressing what we wanted to do in positive terms and being clear about the benefits could create within a conversation. I’m not the kind of person who feels comfortable talking about energy outside of a physics laboratory, but even a cynic like me could see the impact that simply phrasing things in the positive could have on motivation and energy levels.

A quote the trainers used really captured this insight about the power of language for me:

‘we do not describe the world we see but we see the world we describe’ (Jaworski).

The other revelation from this course was the lovely group of ladies who were fellow-learners on the course – from whom I’ve learnt as much as I did from our excellent trainers Deb Barnard and Rivca Rubin.  At the end of our 8 days, and having all passed our exam, we discussed what next – someone put it nicely by saying it reminded her of when she’d just passed her driving test and the instructor said: ‘Right now you’ve passed you really start learning’. And I really, really look forward to practising and learning more.

In fact I’ve decided to work towards a formal coaching qualification so I’m looking for people to practice with so if you fancy a bit of free coaching to try it out then drop me an email.

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[1] Paraphrased from my Relational Dynamics course manual ‘Foundations of coaching: the key principles’ by Deb Barnard.