Transformative Coaching

Hi, Professors! This is Karen Gonzalez Rice, art historian, professor and life coach for academics.  You are listening to “The Good Enough Professor,” the show that reimagines academic life for overwhelmed professors.  Let's create a more supportive, more humane academia, one small, intentional choice at a time. Listen on for how we can do this together.

Karen:  Today, I am so happy to share the publication of a book that I co edited, which came out with Routledge at the end of September. It's called transformative coaching for faculty and staff in higher education, powerful tools to address institutional challenges. Today, you'll be talking about the book and the behind-the-scenes process with my fabulous three co-editors.

·        Susan Hrach is director of the Faculty Center for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning and Professor of English at Columbus State University.

·        Katie Linder is Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Innovation and Strategy at the University of Colorado, Denver.

·        And Katie Maynard is director of the teaching and scholarship hub at the University of Richmond.

Welcome Susan, Katie, and Kitty!

Katie:  So happy to be here.

Kitty:  Thanks for having us.

Susan:  Thanks, Karen.

Karen:  All four of us are higher ed coaches working in higher education, and we each wear a couple of different hats within higher ed, and we practice coaching differently. I'm wondering if you can share your roles in higher ed and how you use coaching in your roles, and tell us something about your coaching as well.

Katie:  I'm happy to start us off. This is Katie.  I have a higher ed leadership role, and I use coaching kind of informally with my teams and kind of working with different units on my campus. But I also have a private coaching practice that I've had for almost 10 years, maybe like nine years, and I work with faculty and administrators and staff, and 1:1 coaching with people outside of work. And then I also happen to run a coach training program for people who are in higher education as well, who want to become coaches, and I've been doing that since 2020. 

I do love to embed somatic practices into my coaching. I'm also a certified yoga teacher, a meditation teacher, and so sometimes that's something that gets blended into my coaching as well. And I love doing things like project management, so I coach a lot around planning and projects and helping people to feel maybe in more control of their work and lives and really, really enjoy that.

I'll pass it over to Kitty.

Kitty:  Yeah, thanks, Katie. So in my role here at the University of Richmond, I'm in a center which does all of those things that a traditional teaching center would do, but part of my dossier also includes supporting faculty writers and providing resources for faculty throughout their career cycle. So as a former faculty member, I'm particularly interested in supporting faculty in later career stages. So I work a lot with faculty talking about finding a path, staying engaged as a faculty member throughout a long career, crafting a legacy.

But I also have taken coaching training with Katie. I'm finishing up my ACC level credential, like now I have five more hours left to coach, and then I have to take an exam, and then I will be done!  So I'm really excited, and I'm grateful for Katie for helping guide me through that process. It's been really instructive. I would say, in terms of using coaching skills, like Katie, I find that they're incredibly useful in all sorts of contexts, even outside of those more formal coaching sessions.

And I'll turn it over to Susan.

Susan:  Thanks, Kitty. So I think of myself as primarily a teacher, but also a teacher of teachers and a coach. And I serve as an internal coach for our leadership institute at my organization, but also with some external clients, both through our leadership institute and also on my own, and I'm also a speaker and facilitator for embodied learning kinds of workshops.

And I would say that I use my coaching approach because it's such an empowering kind of strategy for whoever you're working with, whether it's in the classroom, and you're trying to ask good questions of your students in order to have them come to the material in their own ways, or empowering people who are attending a workshop or as part of an interactive talk.  They need to have agency over the ways that they want to show up in the world, and so I find coaching super applicable to many situations.

I would say that my approach to coaching is also, like Katie's, an embodied, somatic kind of approach in that I'm particularly eager to conduct walking coaching sessions. I've really enjoyed doing that with a number of people. I like to be able to use the environment and being outdoors to elicit a sense of spatial awareness and sensory cues, and kind of a felt sense of their internal wisdom as we're walking.

Karen:  Everything that you all have shared resonates so deeply with me. This is Karen, and I'm just so grateful to have worked with all three of you. I wear a lot of different hats at my institution:  faculty member, I've been department chair. I'm embedded in the Center for Teaching and Learning and the dean's office to provide 1:1 coaching as well as different kinds of coaching-based programming. And I use coaching in all of these roles. Coaching has helped me support my students and my department and faculty and staff as a coach.

I'm really taken by the idea that people are naturally creative, resourceful and whole. So much is possible when we think of our work in the context of our larger identities and our lives beyond campus and when we make decisions and navigate the world with the wisdom that we already have. But I think that in academics and higher ed, we are not really encouraged to think that way. So I love to be able to bring in these broader contexts of who we are in my coaching, both at my institution and also in my private coaching practice, where I support folks in higher ed, mostly in higher ed, who are really looking for more fulfillment in what has become quite a challenging sector. You know, as we discuss in the book, higher ed has been enduring some really difficult times, so supporting people through that is feeling really good for me in this moment.

All right, so let's talk a little bit about the book. Katie, this is a question for you. As we were working on this book, as we were talking and planning and working with our wonderful contributors, I think we shared a sense of urgency in our current moment. And I'm wondering, why do you think this work is so important right now?

Katie:  This is a great question, Karen.  I do think that we've all heard people say that the last year or so has felt a little like the pandemic, like there's a lot going on that feels uncertain, and there's a lot of change and a lot of transition and a lot of instability for people in higher ed. I mean, we're really going through it right now in a lot of different ways and at a lot of different levels. And I've always found coaching, whether I'm being coached or whether I'm coaching others, to be a very grounding kind of anchoring practice that you can have all this stuff swirling around you.  You can still come to this place where you can try to work it out and try to figure out what are your next steps, have some reflection, connect back with your values, whatever those things are that you need to do to figure out what the next right action is for you. And I do think that, a lot of the people I'm currently coaching, they have a lot of big questions that they're trying to ask.  A lot of “should I stay or should I go” kinds of questions or, you know, my research has pivoted in a very significant way because of grants not being available in the way that they were before.  And certain people that I coach who worked in DEI spaces that no longer feel like they have a path, you know, in terms of what that looks like. So some really big career questions for people, but I also think, some very personal identity questions for people as well who are feeling like they're really challenged by the current federal administration.

I think that there are many things that allow coaching to be an answer to some pretty big problems. But I think the work is so important right now when you have this time of instability and people really need to feel like they're supported.  And that's so much what coaching is, is having a thought partner, having someone to come alongside you, to kind of witness what you're experiencing, and to offer some tools and facilitation of like, thinking about what are those right next steps, however small they may be.

I also think that, and I'm sure this is true for everyone here, when you take on a big project like this, you want it to have a lot of meaning, because you put in a lot of work to getting it out there. And I think that this has so much meaning to each of us right now.  Because I don't know that we talk about coaching in higher ed as much as we should, as a possible solution and a transformative practice to a lot of what we're dealing with. And so there was so much that spoke to me about this project, and I think that it's coming out right now, it's just perfectly timed to help a lot of people address different things that they're going through.

Karen:  It occurs to me that in this book, we're kind of able to talk both about the structural and the personal. There's personal things, things that we can do individually to make our experience more fulfilling—or more whatever it is that your goal is.  And moving through higher education, in this moment, I'm thinking about some of the chapters on student affairs or on instructional technology, and sort of a wider focus. I think part of what we're showing is that there's also a structural component to the kind of change that can happen with coaching, which feels exciting.

Kitty, this question's for you. So, Kitty, who do you envision reading this book and what do you want them to take away from it?

Kitty:  That is such an amazing question. It's interesting. I think our early conversations about this book were focused on either people who were already doing coaching in higher ed—so people like us who might feel like we are looking for more connection, or opportunities to gain resources and understanding of what other people are doing in these spaces—and also maybe some thinking about people who are wanting to be coaches, “coaching curious” is the word we use in the book, people who are wanting to discover what coaching can do.

But as we started to gather folks in different sectors across the entire university ecosystem, I think what we realized is that this particular approach, the coaching approach, actually has a really wide application. So we maybe started with particular people working in spaces like mine and teaching and learning centers, working with faculty development, working with people who are involved with students. But what we ended up finding out is that coaching is happening in all sorts of different places, and can actually be beneficial in places like student affairs, as was mentioned, or folks who are working in academic technology, people who are department chairs who are looking for tools to do that work better, folks who are mid-level administrators who are also looking to manage their team more effectively.  And I think what we were encountering was, we know that coaching exists a lot within HR departments, and so even in higher ed, you will find coaches in an HR sort of context. But actually coaching can really be expansive throughout higher ed.

So I think in terms of what we wanted people to take away from this book, I think there's a lesson here that folks can take away, which is coaching is something that can support individuals as well as institutions. And our secret audience, actually, in some ways, are the people who are the decision makers in higher ed who maybe don't realize this tool is available to them, and maybe don't realize that this is an opportunity where they can actually meet the moment in a different way than they may have anticipated.

Karen:  It really makes me think about how books have like a life of their own. We put it out there, and then it lives on. And Susan, I'm wondering, what do you hope this book does in the world?

Susan:  Yeah, thanks for that question. Karen, and I want to build on what Kitty was just saying about the ways that a coach mindset can really infuse so much of what we do beyond just working one-on-one with people in a more traditional coaching setting. So mean, I would love for this book to inspire people to think about infusing coaching throughout an institution, an organization, sort of like a mindset, to be curious, to be listening carefully to other people at any given meeting.  We can all do a better job of tuning in to what is not being said or whether other people's words are, you know, really resonating and to bring that kind of coaching care and also generosity, because part of coaching is believing in the best for everyone that you work with in our settings. And I think that can be transformational in an organization, one person at a time.

I will say, I think there are some universities who are already moving in this direction, and it's pretty exciting. A couple of years ago, I was able to take part in an online conference called the “Sea Change in Coaching and Higher Education.” It was sponsored by some Canadian institutions, and in fact, one of the chapters of our book by Dana Wetherall and Jenn Wicks, they were organizers of that event. I learned there that the University of British Columbia is kind of way out in front here, and they not only offer coaching for faculty and staff, but really think of it as an organizational value. And so I think, you know, this is exciting and we need to adopt the good advice that many of our programs and organizational leadership offer to embed coaching as an important part of our organizational effectiveness.

Karen:  Thank you, Susan, this makes me think about how many institutions are working on coaching, are bringing coaching to faculty and staff, as you said, kind of beyond HR, and that was something that was surprising for me to see how much is happening already. We kind of had a sense that that was the case. But it's so exciting that this work is out there, that folks are doing this important work.

So behind the scenes, stories about research, about projects, is something that I always love, despite the fact that when I was in graduate school, I had a professor who told us, “Never tell the story of your research!”  Which even then I thought was so wrong, so wrong headed!  So we're going to tell the story of our research here. We're going to share a little bit of the behind-the-scenes process. And Susan, can you tell us about how we came to write this book?

Susan:  Yeah, it was a fun coming together. Karen and I had connected as a way of proposing a “Birds of a Feather” session for the POD Network Conference in Pittsburgh. And that would have been 2023, I think. And so we hosted that session. It had a great turnout, kind of a surprising number of people, among whom was Kitty Maynard. And so after that session, Karen and I had planned to meet and sort of follow up on what other people were doing, what we might want to take forward.  Would we like to write something? And then, because we had gathered the list of participants from that “Birds of a Feather” session, Kitty reached out and got in touch with us and said, “What's going on? Could we all work on something together?” And we said, “As a matter of fact, yeah, it would be great. Let's keep talking.”  

And within a couple of weeks after we started discussing the possibility of a book, Kitty said, “You know, I want to ask Katie Linder to be part of this. She's just such an important voice in this coaching world.” And we said, “Awesome. See if she's got time.” And so Katie was immediately willing to join the group, and we were off to the races. And so I think it's just been a really happy working relationship. It's been at least 18 months. I'm thinking that we've met on a fairly regular basis, usually early in the morning, and it's been such a nice way to work as a team.

Katie:  I would also jump in to say Susan's being very gracious. This is Katie.  I saw what this group was doing, and I glommed onto it. I raised my hand and was like, “I want to join you. This looks so exciting. It has so much potential.”  And it's just a lesson in reaching out and raising your hand if there's something that you're interested in. They had already started the work, but it was still early stages, and I thought, “Oh, I can get in on the ground level of this,” because I knew I was going to submit at least one chapter, and I had done editorial work in the past, and really wanted to work with this team, because they're so fantastic.

So just want to note that that you can reach out to people and say, “What role can I play with this? Because I'm excited about it, and I think it has really good potential and meaning for our work.”  So thank you all for allowing me to join the team.

Karen:  Of course, we are enriched by your presence. Katie, I think we've just seen play out a kind of coaching, a coaching approach to working together, to collaborating. When I mentioned to one of my classes a year or two ago that I was writing a book about coaching with three other coaches, one of my students exclaimed that must be the most supportive writing experience ever. And yes, absolutely, that's been my experience. Kitty. I'm wondering, how do you think our identity is as coaches shaped our process?

Kitty:  So first of all, your student is totally right. It was an incredibly supportive experience. I know it was for me. We've talked about this a little bit before, and we were saying that on one hand, coaching tends to attract people who are helpers, people who want to support others, people who want to help others get where they want to go. And so I think it was natural in some ways that we all were ready to support each other, as certainly that's been the case in this group.

I think we've offered each other so much grace when it's been needed. And one of the things that was really sort of a mini-miracle about this group is that whenever one of us had something going on and we were not able to contribute, for whatever reason, someone else was able to. So we've had this very nice kind of passing along different tasks and keeping the project moving, even when maybe one of us, or two of us was down for the count for a little while.

I know for me, I was really grateful. I had a pretty challenging summer, and it was right when we were getting all of the emails from the press about, “Please complete all of your edits in the next six hours” kind of thing. And it was really high pressure, and I would just read those emails and be like, “I am not going to be able to do that.” And fortunately, this team stepped up, and they were really, really gracious about helping out for that. So it's been such an amazing experience. Thanks to you all, and I'm a little sad to see it ending. Frankly, I think it's like, “What are we going to do next? We need to keep this going.”

Karen:  This is sort of the heart of this book, right? That that we have built these relationships together as editors and hopefully as well with our contributors.

A question for all of you, what kind of impact are you observing that coaching has in your communities?

Kitty:  Well, I have one that comes to mind right off the top of my head, because it happened yesterday. It's someone that I've been coaching off and on for the last couple of years who came to me originally with a big project, but also with a with a sense that they weren't going to actually be able to accomplish that project for any number of reasons.  And that person is now accomplishing that project and has a book contract and is moving it forward.  It's so gratifying to be able to see that our conversations with each other and that coaching support was something that made that project more feasible and possible for that person. So I think that those moments, those glimmers of moments, they're reflecting back what we know coaching does so well. But also I'd like to think that that might be a moment that I'm aware of, but there could be all sorts of moments that I'm not aware of that are also moments that support people that we won't hear about, but are still happening.

Katie:  I always love when someone, a client, will circle back and say, “Hey, this was really helpful.” Or, you know, “This is what happened.” They kind of report back on something and like Kitty's saying, we don't always get those experiences. But I remember I had a session once where a client said to me, “We've just done in 45 minutes what I tried to do for four years.”  Like it kind of unlocked something for them. And I remember it was so impactful. This was years and years ago, and I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is so amazing.” We see the power of coaching in a lot of our sessions, where people are really trying to unlock or get clarity on something.

I would also just mention that now that I've trained almost 100 coaches, academics who come into coaching, we're a little bit of a skeptical bunch. I mean, we ask critical questions. We want to know that this is working. And so I have a lot of people come in that maybe have not experienced coaching, but they're kind of drawn to it.  And watching the moment where they kind of get it, and they're like, “I see this now. I see what this is doing for people.” That's a really powerful moment too, because I think that we're one of the most questioning group of people out there that is interrogating what is coaching? And what can it be for people.  And when those folks get kind of won over and become like evangelists for coaching, it's a really powerful thing too. It's always fun to watch.

Susan:  Likewise, I love watching people who either I have coached, or I know have taken part in our internal coaching program, step into leadership roles, be recognized for their work in a way that makes me feel so proud of their growth and the way they're becoming the people that they really wanted to be.

But I wanted to say as well that being in the role of a coach has moved me to want to be my best self as well. It's a lot to step into the role of presuming that you're the person someone else wants to trust and partner with in sharing you know, their struggles, their goals, and so it changes the way that I want to show up in the world, and that I want to model what a coaching mindset looks like for others that has really touched my life.

Karen:  It's a privilege to coach right to witness the kind of transformation and to walk with people on their various journeys. It really is a privilege.

Susan:  It is.

Karen:  Katie, I wanted to follow up with you. You were talking about the skepticism that academics sometimes bring to coaching that's often paired with a curiosity or like, what's this about? And I'm wondering, what advice would you give to folks in higher education who are new to coaching, maybe are just encountering it, or they're curious, “coaching-curious,” as we say in the book.

Katie:  Yeah, that's a great question. I mean, I think that some people think of coaching depending on how they've encountered it is just being very “woo,” it's not based in science or other disciplines, like psychology and it kind of crosses over into a lot of these different fields. And, you know, I think about…One of the examples I use in coach training is if you know of coaching because of the life coach you saw in The Gilmore Girls, this is a very different kind of practice. Like, it's not necessarily that, although it can be that too. I mean, I think it's a really broad spectrum. And people coach in so many different ways and with so many different styles.

So I do think if you're new to coaching, one thing to consider is just try it out. Try being a client and seeing how that is for you. And just like most service professions, you want to find the right match. You want to find someone who's coaching in a way that makes sense for what you need, or has a niche that makes sense for what you need. I also think that you can talk with…there are so many coaches, including all of the contributors in this book, that would love to talk to you about their practice and how it's going and how they've integrated it into their lives and work. And I think that that always creates an opportunity to kind of learn more about it from people who are experiencing it directly and who are in the field and thinking about it.  There's some amazing international and national organizations that work with it always provide a ton of information. We mentioned extensively in the book the International Coaching Federation, which is one of the gold standard credentialing agencies and accreditation agencies for coaches and coach trainers.

And I think that part of what is nice about this volume is it really does run the gamut of a lot of different kinds of coaching that we see in higher ed. And there's a little bit of something for everyone, kind of, like what Kitty was saying before about the audiences. And I think that's really why we designed the book the way we did, is because we knew that a lot of people had questions. So there are a couple of chapters early on that talk about the foundations of coaching that give you some of the structures that we use in coaching, if you're brand new and you have no idea what this is. And also a chapter that talks about training, and what is training? What's the purpose of training? Is it worth it? I get that question a lot from people, “Do I need to do this?” And so we address some of those questions directly in the book, and allow people to think about the different pathways of coming into coaching, because there's just a lot of different ways to do that.

But I will warn you, if you have never experienced it, and you kind of start to dip your toe in it, you might catch the bug. And I think that's what happens to a lot of us that come to coach training, is we're like, “Okay, this is really powerful!” And we feel we need to continue the deep dive into learning about the practice.

Karen:  As we're wrapping up our conversation, I am curious about what idea or what coaching tool from this book do you keep coming back to?  What has really stuck in your mind over the last 18+ months that we've been working on this project?

Susan:  I can jump in here because I was really taken by an idea from Mary Carney’s chapter on legacy coaching for late career faculty about helping people to become synergistic citizens, which I just love.  This idea, not only for late career faculty or faculty, you know, looking beyond their retirement, but really all the way along, helping people to feel fulfilled about what they're contributing to the institution, the organization beyond their very specific role in it. You know, how can I be giving the strength that I have to offer to the wellbeing and benefit of the others in this organization, the people outside of my department, the people outside of my classroom? That's an idea that struck a chord with me.

Kitty:  I think for me, because I'm working in educational development and faculty support in general, this book has so many applications that it's actually really hard to pick just one. I would say there's a whole section on career cycles. So there's a really nice piece by Kimberly Hale on supporting new faculty. Susan just mentioned Mary Carney’s piece on legacy. There's some great resources for group coaching. And one of the things I'm really looking forward to trying soon is Leslie Ortquist-Ahrens's model for group coaching, which she shares in the book. So it's very…for me, I just can't pick. It's just too many, too many options. But I do think it'd be very, very helpful for folks working on my space, particularly.

Katie:  I really agree with Kitty. It's hard to pick just one thing from this book. I mean, I think that the idea that I keep coming back to is how translatable coaching is to different spaces. I mean, just when you think, “Oh, this is too niche, or it can't happen here,” like some of the audiences that are addressed in this book, and we already mentioned, IT and instructional designers, we talked about student affairs and very specific populations and demographics of folks that need to be coached, maybe in some unique ways, or with certain kinds of disciplinary frameworks in mind. There's so much translation that can happen into all of these spaces. And I think for folks who may have thought, “Oh, coaching is really just for industry, it's not for higher ed,” or you've seen it in other spaces that feel more corporate, I think this book really shows that this is a very translatable practice, and that it allows you to take some basic concepts, relatively basic concepts, and pivot them in all these different directions with all these different groups. And that just is so affirming to me. When I think about…we often ground ourselves in this concept of expertise or knowledge currency. You know, we need to know specific things. And I feel like coaching is more about the how than the what. You don't have to be a chemist to coach a chemist. And I think that you know that that translatability of these practices is really demonstrated very well in this collection.

Susan:  That's true. And I wanted to add as well, there's at least two, if not three chapters of the book that touch on the role of department chair. And I think we all recognize the role of chair as being one of the more demanding kinds of higher ed administrative roles. So there's some great material for those working with or in the position of chair.

Kitty:  And I would mention too that Rebecca Pope-Ruark’s work on faculty vitality is sort of a universally applicable tool set for anyone working with faculty, frankly, for faculty themselves, actually.

Katie:  Karen, you asked a dangerous question. We could go on and on and on…

Karen:  Fabulous, fabulous!  And of course, I have to chime in here that I think that I'm really holding on to some of the really rich observations and suggestions in the chapters by folks like Anne Marie Edwards, who talks about cultural competencies in coaching, a chapter by Katherine In-Young Lee about thinking about career cycles from the perspective of faculty of color. Kate Henry has a great chapter focusing on productivity from a kind of disability justice perspective. And Liz Norrell has a fabulous neurodivergence chapter. I think there's a lot about identity that is really deeply connected to coaching and really important to think about as coaches. And I'm grateful for the many contributions that we have around identity in the book.

Kitty:  I was going to also mention, since we've talked about pulling back that veil of what happens behind the scenes that I think working with a group of people who are coaches and spend a lot of time talking to people about managing multiple priorities and time management and some of those other skills has been such a delight.  Because, honestly, unbelievably, given the number of contributors we had and the number of pieces we had, everyone got everything in on time. It was really bonkers when I think of some of the other previous experiences I've had trying to pull teeth to get people to turn in their work.  And really nice quality work on top of it, as you'll see in this book, it's really, really exciting stuff.

Karen:  We were so lucky to have such wonderful contributors. I'm so grateful to each one of our authors. I have just one more question for you all. You know, my podcast is called The Good Enough Professor, so you all know my thing is “good enough.” And I'm wondering, what's a place that you're experimenting with good enough in your own life, or maybe what's a way that you think coaching might support us in thinking about or practicing good enough?

Katie:  Like many academics, I have a pretty high standard that I set for myself. I think that's not unusual in our fields, and I do think that coaching is a way for me to release perfectionism. I mean, I think working with my clients across so many different parts of their lives and careers, seeing the kinds of things that other people are struggling with, coming alongside them consistently, it just reminds you that we're all working through it.  We are all dealing with our own stuff, some things you know about some things you don't know about. And it's a constant reminder to me to ask for help when you need to ask for help, to lean into colleagues and friends and family, when you need to lean into that and to remember that everything's kind of in a season. We're continuing to move through things. We're continuing to kind of take on new challenges, new joys, new things that can kind of fill our cups, things that will empty them back out again. It's a constant movement. And I think that coaching really does help me to remind myself to take a beat, you know, when I need to, and kind of like, reflect, and especially if I'm feeling like something feels misaligned, I feel like coaching is one of those things that helps us to come back into alignment with, often the help of someone else to kind of like ask some reflective questions.

Karen:  I hope that our readers of this book kind of come away with a sense of coaching as a generous practice. I feel so grateful for the generosity of our contributors, for the generosity of each of you. Thank you so much for this experience of writing the book and for chatting with me today.

Katie:  This is really fun. Thanks, Karen.

Kitty:  Karen, thanks for bringing us together. It was really nice to see everybody this morning.

Susan:  Likewise.  It's a moment to celebrate.

Thanks so much for listening to “The Good Enough Professor Podcast.” If you want to release academic grind culture and embrace your own Good Enough Professor within, join my email list. You'll get my reflections, gentle challenges, and simple prompts, all aligned with the rhythms of academic life and designed to disrupt the assumptions that get us over committed and keep us overwhelmed. Because remember, you are already good enough.