Welcome to the Nexus of Ethics, Psychology, Morality, Philosophy and Health Care

Welcome to the nexus of ethics, psychology, morality, technology, health care, and philosophy
Showing posts with label Coaching. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Coaching. Show all posts

Saturday, September 17, 2022

Ethical knowledge, dilemmas and resolutions in professional coaching

Hannah K. Heitz & Mark M. Leach (2022) 
Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, 
Research and Practice
DOI: 10.1080/17521882.2022.2112247

Abstract

There is little understanding of coaches’ ethical knowledge, means to resolve ethical dilemmas, and how these dilemmas might align with those experienced in other helping professions. Using purposive convenience sampling, 260 coaches were asked about their training, the ethical dilemmas they have experienced, and how they have resolved their ethical dilemmas. The qualitative and quantitative results indicated that coaches reported a variety of dilemmas, with the three most common types being dilemmas related to conflicts of interest, confidentiality, and boundaries between therapy and coaching. The most reported methods of resolving dilemmas included informal resolution, referral to therapy, seeking supervision, seeking consultation and referring to the ICF Ethics Code. The results highlight common ethical issues that arise in coaching and their relationship to other helping professions.

Types of ethical dilemmas

Almost half of the participants reported having experienced an ethical dilemma as a coach. There were multiple types of ethical dilemmas reported by coaches, although the most prominently reported included conflicts of interest (36%), confidentiality (32%) and boundaries between therapy and coaching (20%). The remaining ethical dilemmas (12%) included a range of themes (e.g., misuse of services, criminality, compensation). Approximately 19% of coaches who reported experiencing an ethical dilemma reported more than one type. See Table 3 for themes and sample responses.

Ethical dilemmas

Approximately half of respondents indicated that they had encountered an ethical dilemma, and those most reported parallel the most common dilemmas reported by psychologists and counsellors. Coach responses most frequently acknowledged ethical dilemmas around conflicts of interest, confidentiality and boundaries of competence, similar to those of a multinational study by Pettifor and Sawchuk (2006) who indicated that practicing psychologists reported confidentiality, multiple relationships and competence as most common. Coaches did not report ethical dilemmas related to multiple relationships as frequently as psychologists in the Pettifor and Sawchuk study; instead, coaches reported a higher percentage of dilemmas related to conflicts of interest. At the time of data collection, multiple relationships were not explicitly mentioned in the ICF Ethics Code, except within the specific context of romantic relationships with clients, so other forms of multiple relationships may not naturally come to mind for coaches. Given that broader multiple relationships were not included within the ICF Ethics Code and the code emphasised conflicts of interest, it was difficult to discern whether coach dilemmas that were described as conflicts of interest were similar to what could be described as multiple relationships. After data was collected, the ICF Ethics Code was updated to include a broader definition of multiple relationships.

Friday, November 13, 2020

Cracking the Code of Sustained Collaboration

Francesca Gino
Harvard Business Review
Originally published Nov 2019

Ask any leader whether his or her organization values collaboration, and you’ll get a resounding yes. Ask whether the firm’s strategies to increase collaboration have been successful, and you’ll probably receive a different answer.

“No change seems to stick or to produce what we expected,” an executive at a large pharmaceutical company recently told me. Most of the dozens of leaders I’ve interviewed on the subject report similar feelings of frustration: So much hope and effort, so little to show for it.

One problem is that leaders think about collaboration too narrowly: as a value to cultivate but not a skill to teach. Businesses have tried increasing it through various methods, from open offices to naming it an official corporate goal. While many of these approaches yield progress—mainly by creating opportunities for collaboration or demonstrating institutional support for it—they all try to influence employees through superficial or heavy-handed means, and research has shown that none of them reliably delivers truly robust collaboration.

What’s needed is a psychological approach. When I analyzed sustained collaborations in a wide range of industries, I found that they were marked by common mental attitudes: widespread respect for colleagues’ contributions, openness to experimenting with others’ ideas, and sensitivity to how one’s actions may affect both colleagues’ work and the mission’s outcome. Yet these attitudes are rare. Instead, most people display the opposite mentality, distrusting others and obsessing about their own status. The task for leaders is to encourage an outward focus in everyone, challenging the tendency we all have to fixate on ourselves—what we’d like to say and achieve—instead of what we can learn from others.

Wednesday, May 1, 2013

Antidotes to Burnout: Fostering Physician Resiliency, Well-Being, and Holistic Development

By Herdley O. Paolini, Burt Bertram, & Ted Hamilton
Medscape News
Originally published April 19, 2013

Florida Hospital -- an Orlando-based 8-campus hospital with 2200 beds, a 2000-plus physician medical staff, and more inpatient admissions annually than any other hospital in the United States -- is home to Physician Support Services, a pioneering program created to address physician burnout.

The program provides whole-person care through specialized professional resources aimed at maximizing the personal and professional well-being of Florida Hospital physicians and their families. The direct financial benefit of the program to Florida Hospital is in excess of $5 million over the past 2 years, and the program has rescued the careers of more than 100 physicians in the past 10 years.

The service includes confidential psychotherapy and coaching, continuing medical education (CME) with credit that is focused on helping physicians integrate their personal and professional lives, dialogue programs about cultivating meaning in medical practice, physician leadership development, and marriage retreats.

The Florida Hospital program is based on an in-depth and compassionate understanding of the forces affecting physicians and the practice of medicine, as well as the belief that physician leadership is crucial in envisioning and operationalizing the changes that are needed in the practice of medicine. Rather than ignoring, stigmatizing, or penalizing distressed physicians, Physician Support Services pragmatically addresses the emotional, spiritual, family, and performance issues associated with physician burnout, while intentionally developing physician leadership.

The entire story is here.

Thursday, July 14, 2011

Positive Coaching and Ethical Practices


In the high stakes world of elite level athletics, coaches are king -- but that lofty perch can prove a sword of Damocles. More often than not they're regarded as the undisputed authority on what it takes to train an athlete to maximal performance potential, and being placed on a pedestal doesn't allow for proper reflection about their coaching practices or any margin of error when there are Olympic finals and medals at stake.

As a consequence, that doesn't always mean they're always doing the right thing for their athletes, says Dr. Jim Denison an expert in coach education at the Faculty of Physical Education and Recreation at the University of Alberta, and co-author of a new paper on positive coaching and ethical practices for athlete development. 

"Coaching is complex, continually changing and influenced greatly by the context, athletes' circumstances and the developing relationship between the coach and the athlete.

"Good coaching, as we talk about it in our paper, means thinking about these complexities and dealing with them positively, proactively and ethically," he says.

Denison says one of the greatest dangers is that coaches can become set in their ways and practices of working with athletes, positioning themselves as experts, who brook no criticism or questioning of their expertise. "They become entrenched in methodologies that worked in the past and they expect those methodologies to continue to work," says Denison.

"There's good research that shows that when coaches achieve this expert status they tend to want to maintain that," he says, "so admitting that you don't know becomes a threat to their expertise."

Once on the pedestal, he adds, "it's hard for that person to express uncertainty, or be open to new ways of looking at a problem or consulting with others." Athletes play their part too in entrenching the idea of the coach as oracle, placing great faith and confidence in their coach, expecting him or her to help them deliver the performance of their lives. If they don't, consequences are often dire: the coach is fired, the athlete finds another coach or the athlete quits the sport.

Denison, a sport sociologist and coach educator who directs the Canadian Athletics Coaching Centre, is working to break down these harmful paradigms. He says coaches need to take an integrated approach to coaching and look at their athletes as individuals rather than trying to find a system or template they can apply to all and, importantly, learn to "problemetize" an issue before coming up with a solution. In essence that means thinking critically about a problem, determining whether it is in fact a problem, and having the confidence to look at themselves because their behaviour might be contributing to a problem.

"Often the most successful coaches are the ones who are most willing to adopt a lifelong learning approach and to admit that they don't know," says Denison, who advocates "problem-setting" -- determining whether there is indeed a problem, before "problem-solving."

He gives the example of athletes reaching a plateau in their training. "This is common in swimming and running," he says. "Many coaches see that as a problem because the logic of sport and coaching is that you continue to progress, but that doesn't always happen. If you see an athlete's plateau as a problem, you've already made the assumption that it needs to be fixed. A coach must first ask whether it is a problem because a plateau can be a good thing: it shows that the athlete has reached a standard level of performance. But you're bringing with you the assumption that the athlete should be improving continuously."

Denison says the assumptions we hold and that influence how we diagnose a problem may not be positive, healthy or ethical. "If you challenge your assumptions, what looks like a problem isn't always a problem."

At the coaching centre Denison and his team have developed a national coach mentorship program in partnership with Athletics Canada to enable this cultural shift from being the unquestioned expert to the thoughtful coach. "To us (at the CACC) you cannot begin to 'problemetize' until you acknowledge and recognize that the knowledge you have is socially constructed based on a lot of take-for-granted ideas and traditions that have become dominant. We invite coaches to think more critically about how they think and what they do, to 'problemetize' their assumptions and to open their minds to look at their coaching practices critically and with the opportunity to try new things without feeling threatened by change."