Coaching leaders of Communities of Practice

Yesterday I was talking with a graduate student who’s studying e-coaching — a subject that seemed broad enough that I wanted to define more precisely what kind of coaching we’re studying in this project:

Coaching a community leader happens through a sustained conversation that is focused on the ongoing leadership practice of one partner (the coachee), drawing upon the experience and background of the other (the coach).

There are several reasons that the definition matters and several points follow from it:

• The “sustained conversation” part is necessary because all of the
  community leader’s practice isn’t visible at once, much less at the beginning. Neither is the context within which
  that practice takes place, partly because leadership always changes the context.
• Ideally, community leaders are expert in the domain of the community they are leading, not in community leadership as such. In fact it’s rare that they want to become expert in the subtleties of community development. So at the beginning of the coaching relationship the most important contribution that a coach can make is to help with “noise reduction” — suggesting which of a myriad of issues can be ignored for the time being. A sense of “the practice of community leadership” may emerge gradually and only over time.
• The topic (or the curriculum) of the conversation is concrete and time-bound — the issues that the coachee is facing at that moment. Therefore coaching needs to be focused on a “live practice” — where the community leader is working with a community that responds to leadership moves, leading to further learning and development.
• Technology comes into the coaching conversation for two reasons. First, because technology plays a part in how we collaborate and have conversations; from that perspective technology is part of the practice. Second, because most communities use technology in one way or another and all of us are learning how to make technology serve our communities rather than allowing technology to swamp or hobble them; from that perspective technology is part of the domain.

Designing in some judicious symmetry is important in coaching and in leading communities of practice. In this project that principle means we’re trying out our interview questions on each other. We’ll also interview some of each other’s coachees, both to “test the questions” and to see what we learn from them and about ourselves and about our coaching practice.

We started this self-interviewing part of the process yesterday. It was Lauren’s turn to be interviewed. One thing that struck me was that Lauren’s responses really spoke to our questions. She really understood them. That may be unremarkable, since we wrote and refined them together, but it got me to thinking about how, despite the power of questions, there are some big differences between the question “as asked,” the question “as heard by the other person,” the question “as answered,” and “the real question.” If the questions are problematic, then the answers must be, too. A fundamental characteristic that a coaching relationship and a community of practice have in common is sustained conversation. The differences between those various versions of a question can get ironed out over time. That gives me confidence that the common meaning that’s developed is really shared.

A one-off interview isn’t the same, so we need safeguards to detect and repair misunderstandings. In the case of this research project, we share written notes with everyone we interview for their inspection and editing. That doesn’t directly go to the question of whether the question is really understood, but it helps looking at the answers together. Toward the end we’ll share our conclusions and discuss them, probably as a group.