How can Coaching help the Church?
A buzz word in the secular business world nowadays is “coaching”. Organizations, Corporations, and Companies are looking to providing their employees, especially supervisiors, managers, all the way up to the CEO’s, with leadership coaches. This idea of “coaching” is not very widely knonw within the the Church or non-profit sectors. Many of us are more familiar with “mentoring”. We might stop and wonder, what is a “mentor” and what is a “coach”? Is there any difference? And most importantly, why should leaders in the Church look to leadership coaching in the first place? Well, I hope my reflections might break it down.
First off, a “coach” and a “mentor” acts very differently. A mentor is someone “who has been there and done that” and can guide another who has little or no experience performing the duties expected of that person. The mentor helps the mentee “avoid the pitfalls” and advises the person on what action or decision might be the best one. A coach, however, serves to help the individual to make his or her own decision, looking deep within one’s own self. During my research into leadership studies, a stumbled upon the work of Lori Mazan, a prominent leadership coach and author of a book called Leadership Revolution: The Future of Dynamic Leaders. Reading this book, it became clear what leadership coaching is all about. According to Mazan, a coach is a “thinking partner” someone who asks the leader to ponder those critical questions about what steps need to be taken to be an effective leader. In other words, rather than “telling or modeling the leader what to do next” as a mentor would do, rather the coach provides the space for the leader to figure out for themselves what should be done.
As I look at coaching in the context of the Church, especially the Catholic Church, a few things come to mind. First, discernment done in the conext of spiritual direction. Consider Ignatius spirituality and the idea of looking deep inside one’s soul, asking the deep questions, “where am I being called to in my life? and where is God leading me?” Perhaps the answers, like in leadership coaching, may require us to go beyond our comfort zones and do things that are new and different, and might I even add, difficult. Just like the athletic coach challenges the player to go beyond what skills and techniques they are comfortable with in order to become even better in their sport. So too, within the Church, the coach challenges us to take that step that God is calling us that might be scary or uncertain.
The next thing that comes to mind is the process used in the Synod on Synodality, which will be the topic of my next blog post. Conversations in the Spirit is a specific way of listening and dialoguing that is designed to help the Church determin what direction the Holy Spirit desires for the Church to go. So often, we human beings want to do all the talking. We are used to being busy: planning, setting goals, taking action, etc. Sometimes we need stop and listen! Listen to whom, you might ask? Listen to the Holy Spirit and one another. So often, if we stop and listen, we can hear the Spirit both in the quiet of our hearts and in the voice of one another. Conversations in the Spirit teaches us to do that.
At Gifted in the Spirit, we use a leadership coaching approach to leadership development. We journey with our clients by becoming a “thinking partner” with them, as they work through the challenges of leadership and realize what those critical steps need to be an effective leader. We also teach the process of Conversations in the Spirit and help leaders model the process in their own unique context.
