The Coaching Cafe Podcast

Ethical Practice - Open Forum

• Open Door Coaching

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Over the past few weeks, we’ve explored ethics in coaching through the lens of the ICF Core Competencies - not just as a checkbox for membership renewal, but as a lived practice.  

We’ve explored: 

✔️ Our own ethical decision-making as coaches
✔️ Stakeholder agreements & confidentiality
✔️ The ethical use of AI in coaching 

Now join Natalie and Paula our final Coaching Café Podcast in this series, as we open the floor to your biggest ethical questions in coaching. 

💡 What are the ethical dilemmas you’ve faced in your coaching practice?
💡 How do you navigate ethical grey areas (if any) when coaching in organisations?
💡 What questions do you have for us?  

This is a chance to reflect, challenge, and strengthen our ethical coaching practice. Let’s make it an insightful, engaging, and valuable conversation! 

If you are a regular, you know the vibe and the great contribution that you make to our discussions; so we look forward to welcoming you back and offering you a value-packed 30 minutes each Tuesday

If you’ve not joined us for a Coaching Café Podcast, now is your opportunity to schedule this time for your professional and personal development.  In no time at all, you’ll be looking forward to Tuesday lunchtimes, just like we all do!

Thanks for listening! If you enjoyed the podcast please leave us a 5 star review where ever you listened to us! It helps promote the podcast to streaming services and other people.

Watch the webinar of this episode or read the blog by visiting our website.

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[Music] Welcome to the Coaching Cafe podcast. [Music] Join Natalie and Paula for the final podcast in this series, as we open the floor to your biggest ethical questions and coaching. What are the ethical dilemmas you've faced in your coaching practice? How do you navigate ethical grey areas when coaching in organisations? What questions do you have for us? We hope you enjoy the podcast. If you do, consider leaving a five star of... [Music] We acknowledge the traditional owners and custodians on the lands on which we meet today and they continue to connect into the land, borders and communities of Australia. We pay our respects to them, their elders past, present and emerging. It's a very big welcome to you wherever you are listening to this podcast, either live or on your favourite streaming service. My name is Natalie Ashdown from Open Door Coaching. Welcome to the Coaching Cafe where today we're talking about ethics in coaching and we're having a bit more of an open forum today and thinking about different ethical challenges that we've faced and how we might approach those challenges. And I am joined on the line by our resident HR specialist who will be just like be calling on her opinion today. Welcome Paula to the line. Happy Friday everybody. Well, our topic today, as we mentioned, we've been talking over last few weeks about demonstrating ethical practice, the ICF core competency, and today we're wrapping up this series by having an open forum thinking about the different ethical challenges that we might have faced as coaches and how we might have approached those ethical challenges. So as always, if you are new to the Coaching Cafe, we say welcome to you. We come together every Friday except for my taking breaks, which is coming up soon. And we are really welcoming back all our alumni for our Coaching programmes and all the regulars that join us. Feel free to interact with us in the chat as you always do. We're all about creating shared learning experiences and we are celebrating this week 10,000 downloads of our podcast, which is absolutely amazing. So we know that you are listening to us on your favourite streaming service and we are really excited to have you listening. And thanks for sharing that wonderful milestone with us and making our podcast so popular. It's really exciting. You might be vacuuming, you might be listening in the car, you might be using us to, in order to fall asleep, whatever you're doing. Thank you for joining you to our thought-provoking conversation. If you are here because you are also collecting your CCE, well done, you are focusing on your professional development. They will be available to you at the end of the session. There we go. We've been discussing over the last couple of weeks the demonstrating ethical practice, the foundation core competency of the International Coaching Federation. And it's about how do we reflect on this? How do we understand, consistently apply, coaching ethics and the standards of coaching? So we've been talking about that. We've been digging into the different parts of the ethics and you can pick up those on our YouTube channel, on our blogs or on your favourite streaming service. Keep our podcast ticking along. We'll get to that next milestone in no time. Today with ethical practice, we're thinking about the different types of challenges that we've actually experienced in our coaching that might actually call for a review or a reflection on our ethical practice. And we went out to the alumni and we asked them to share where have they been challenged in terms of ethics? Where have they needed to think about their ethical practice in their coaching and what was the approach that they took? So thank you to all of those, all of you, who actually gave some insights. I took some time to really sit down. I've been coaching for 22 years now and I thought, "When have I been challenged ethically?" And what was it that actually challenged me personally? And Paula and I having this big discussion about it as well. And this is the six that we came up with and we're going to go through these six with you today and we're keen to hear your thoughts well. So the six for those of you that can't see the screen, the six ethical dilemmas we came up with is, "Should I work for this company? Our private lives versus our personal lives?" Thinking about, "Am I the right coach? Should I make a referral to support services?" Number four is disclosing what's happening to stay cold as an athlete. And actually that was the one that people gave us the most feedback about. Another ethical challenge is, "Should I coach around this topic?" And the sixth one that we came up with was discontinuing the service. What if they really want something other than coaching? And in this case, it was, "What if they really wanted mentoring? What do we do about discontinuing our services?" So these are the topics we'd like to delve into today and I'm going to ask Paul for your opinion as we go along as well. And of course, everyone else can jump in with their opinions. We're keen to hear your thoughts. So let's go for the first one. As I mentioned, I've been coaching for 22 years now and there's only been to be really open with you. Only a couple of times actually in my career where I thought, "Should I work for this company?" Now that's the first one. What happened here was we were offered a coaching assignment and we go into normal mode in terms of needs analysis and we go into normal mode of thinking about putting a proposal together. But before we went into that process of needs analysis and putting a proposal together, there was an instinct that I found. A gut instinct, something kind of moved in me, which we do need to trust, don't we, yes, coaches? And that was, "Should I even be tendering for this work? Should I be working for this company?" So an ethical challenge for us is to think about different organisations that we work with and are we aligned from a values perspective? Are we aligned from a, how we're trying to make a difference in the workplace perspective? Are we aligned ethically with that company? And it might be actually that we might say, "Thank you." We are unable to tender at this point. You may or may not feel comfortable giving your reasons. What happened with us in this situation was it was a kind of a tie-of-kicking exercise. So with more of an exercise to see, would you be interested with, we wanted to do this work? And the work didn't go ahead. They didn't ask us to actually tender in the end. So there was no ethical dilemma in terms of implementation, but it came up, I think I want to try and explain, it came up before we actually did any tender in. So we're not going to mention any names, but we can think about any industries or anything like that, but it's an interesting thing for us to think about in terms of who we want to work with, how we want to work, and the ethical practice behind that. Paul, are your thoughts here? I think Elythlin II comes up when you're doing a needs analysis, and it's actually what they're asking you to do is to performance manage someone as opposed to provide coaching. So for me, that's generally where it's that ethical dilemma because you know that performance management isn't coaching and being really clear about what you can offer from a coaching perspective and making sure the stakeholders are really aware that your job is not to provide them with a report that allows them to terminate someone based on the coaching. Yeah, so it's really around is coaching the right tool that you need at this particular point in time? Yes, I think that's talking about should I coach around this topic, which is another topic we're going to talk about. What I pick up on though is if an organization is only using coaching for that purpose, then it's about what I want to work for a company that is only using coaching for that purpose. So it's interesting from that perspective as well and we'll get on to that should I coach around this topic? The other thing I'm thinking about around should I work for this company is the company is doing certain things, their products, their services, the way they generate their products or their services, the way they help the community or don't help the community, the way they move their company values or are seen in the community, not to be living the company values. Are those company values aligned to our values? Is what they are trying to do for their people and with their people aligned to what we are trying to do for people and with people? And I think that's where your point is really relevant for like if their company is not using coaching for the purpose that we actually want it to be used for, then that might actually ask us to ask the question. Feel free everybody to jump in, tell us what you're thinking of this topic as well. The second topic, let's continue that conversation then, Paula, it's almost like we're pulling out a mystery question and exploring those mystery questions, except that they're right there in front of you. Should I coach around this topic? So you mentioned in particular that if the coaching assignment is not coaching but it's performance management, then we would raise that. That has actually been the case for me on a few occasions where I've actually thought, should I be coaching around this topic? And what comes up for me is as we do that needs in our system, we find out more information. The red flag for me was the question I asked is, has a decision already been made? So you want me to coach this person, it's sounding like performance management, which is not what we're doing. It's sounding like the coaching is the thing that they're doing before they actually make the person redundant or they put a person on a performance management plan, and all of these things become red flags for me. And the question I like to ask is, have they made a decision? What performance management is in place if any? And what are they expecting of me as a coach? Because ethically, I don't want to be coaching a person if the decision has already been made, if this is performance management because it's not my job. It's not that I don't want to coach the person, what I'm worried about is setting the person and myself as a coach, setting us up for failure. The decisions already been made that the person's going to be sat. So what are we doing here? And I don't mind engaging in that conversation and that coaching assignment, but I want to be really clear about what's the purpose of the coaching. And if the purpose of the coaching is to grow and to develop or to offer the person alternatives or whatever it might be, help them think about their future and their plans, okay, we can talk about app services or whatever that might be. But I'm trying to be really clear because I have had a situation in the past where the person really turned themselves around in terms of the metrics, the measurements, everything that they were doing, the change of behaviour, the achieving the results, and at the end of the process, at the end of the coaching sessions, when we summarised everything that they had achieved, the person was sat, they were made redundant. And that sick feeling I felt there, and that it was still the outcome because the decision had already been made. In my early days of coaching, it stuck with me from an ethical practice point of view. Paula, I know that you've experienced this and you did bring it up. What would you like to add to our conversation, for you? Yeah, I guess it is really about understanding what the expectation is from the coaching. So getting a really clear idea, because I agree with you, there's no point in coaching that person for performance within their organisation, if that's not the expected outcome or the required outcome or what they're focusing on, you would be much better spent using that coaching around what's the transition to the next role for me, and I understand that they might not have known they were making them redundant, but I guess what I'm coming back to is that expectation of what is it that success looks like, from this coaching perspective, allows you to then coach around that expectation around success. Absolutely, and it comes to also the ethical practice element around what is the purpose of the coaching, and am I doing coaching? And performance management, you can use coaching techniques, and we're going to start our new series on performance management coming up right after our outbreak. So we're going to be using coaching techniques in high performance, and to support people who are underperforming, obviously. I shouldn't say obviously, but we're going to be doing that. It is, as you say, getting clear about the needs and answers and what the purpose of the coaching means. You're listening to the Open Door Coaching Coaching Cafe podcast, and for more information on programs run by Open Door Coaching, head to our website at opendoorcoaching.com.au Now back to the podcast. So that leads us to the third topic we're talking about here from an ethical practice point of view. Should I make a referral to support services? So the ICF Code of Conduct is very clear that we should be able to make referrals to support services, and thinking about the difference between coaching and other services. And so for me, this one is a bit of an easier one to be honest. I'm not really challenged from my ethics point of view, because I'm clear about my boundaries where I should be making referrals to support services, or suggesting to the person or finding out for the person what support services they do. You have in place how I might be able to support them, how other services are their doctor, for example, supporting them or their psychiatrists, supporting them or their counsellor, supporting them. So I'm very comfortable in that space. It doesn't come up as an ethical dilemma for me. I've had to do this on a number of occasions throughout my career. But as I said, there's no ethical dilemma, I think, because I'm clear about the boundaries, and we've talked a lot about this and reflected a lot about this in our coaching. Paula, what would you like to offer around that? Yeah, I think it comes into the, should I coach around this topic? So if the topic is specifically around mental health, or if it's around there's deeper issues that are happening, and it is going to, it looks like it's like grief counselling. And anything around that that comes up as a topic, that's when I, then it is about talking about what the coaching is, versus what counselling can offer, and should I make a referral to a support service is, yeah, I agree with you. I don't necessarily think it's an ethical dilemma. I think it is being mindful of the person that you're working with and what they specifically need for that particular topic for them. Yeah, it's absolutely. So it is in the code of conduct to be aware of that, and to be aware of how we make referrals. So it's part about if it will code of conduct. What we're both saying is in summary is that it's clear for us, so it doesn't create that dilemma because we're clear about our boundaries. And yes, as you mentioned, they're kind of linked to aren't they, all of these topics we're talking about. It comes back to, should I coach around this topic, which is our fourth one there, and we've already touched on this as well, just to add a little bit more to this area, there may be topics that you feel uncomfortable to coach around. And so it's just worth reflecting. Now, we talk about staying out of the space, and this is not about us and partnering with the client, etc, etc. But I really think that we need to trust our thoughts and instincts here. If there's a topic that the client has brought up for what is the reason, if it's not aligned to our values, we feel uncomfortable. For whatever reason, then that might be something that creates that ethical dilemma, and it might be something that we need to think about. In my career, this has only happened a couple of times, and I think that was because I had to remind myself that this is not about me, and I'm pretty sure it was in the early days of coaching. And it was as simple as saying, "I have to remind myself that this is about, not about me, this is about coaching the person to make the best decision for themselves." So it was around a decision that the client was making, and I had to focus on the fact that there is no harm here. So the ethical dilemma is there's no risk of harm to the person, the self, the others. So it is about helping the person make the best decision for themselves, even if that is not a decision that I would make. I'll leave it at that in terms of coaching around the topic, because I want to share with you what the topic actually was. So really thinking about here is reflecting, tapping into our instincts about not red flags, but what's happening for ourselves. And the ISEF call competencies at a senior level of coaching is encouraging us to be vulnerable as well. And so I think as I've gotten more mature in my coaching, I would be able to express that vulnerability to the client, whereas back then I wouldn't have done that. Call up, what are you thinking about this kind of ethical space we're in now? I think it depends on what the topic is. I think it depends on how far away it is from aligning to your values or for whatever reason it's feeling unethical for you. And I agree that I think there is a maturity in being able to express that if needed. Or as you said, if it's not going to cause harm and it's not, is it something that needs to be raised as an ethical dilemma as well? Yeah, thank you. And acknowledging that we've got a really huge international community on the line here, we acknowledge that our ethics and our values, etc, are driven from our culture and from our countries and our communities and are laid down by the people that are important to us, such as our parents, etc. So we're not in any way suggesting that this is the way it needs to be. This is more of a reflection on an opportunity for us to think about what it means to us in terms of our values. So in no way are we judging anybody's ethics during this discussion. We're having an opportunity to reflect. And the reason I offer that is because Wendy has actually said, thank you for jumping in. You're offering that in the US some states are considering legislation, preventing coaches from coachy topics like emotional regulation with the reasoning that it belongs with therapists. And Wendy, you've said that I don't agree with you that, what are our thoughts? And I would jump in and agree with you straight up actually. I think we're actually, we're often coaching around topics around emotional regulation, particularly when you relate it to things like emotional intelligence. Emotional regulations for me is actually about coaching a person about what's going to be the most supportive approach. So, you know, I feel fired up, I feel really angry, I want to walk into that meeting and tell the person that, well, we would coach around what would be the benefit of that, what would be the downside of that, what makes you feel that that's what you want to do, what's another alternative. There's so many things that we can actually coach in terms of bringing out a coaching question. I agree with you, I don't think emotional regulation and if we move into emotional intelligence sits with therapists alone, I think there's a lot that we can actually do there. And actually that's part of our partnering isn't it? So the coach is partnering, the coach from an ethical point of view is aware of their emotional regulation. That's the, that is built into our core competencies. And so because we're aware of our own emotional regulation, we can be also aware of their emotional regulation with the client. Don't forget, emotions are not just the angry, the frustrated, the ones that need to be kind of, you know, come down the ladder a bit. What about emotional regulation around joy or feelings of happiness or just yesterday in a coaching session, a person said she felt like crying. And they were tears of, wow, I've never been able to express this to someone and I feel like we've gotten to the core of who I am as a leader. The more tears of joy, so I'm not going to try to emotionally regulate that with the client. So thank you, you're making, making us really think Wendy, thank you. Alrighty, we've got a couple more to share with you here. Let's talk about our private lives, this is our professional lives. And this is now talking about, am I the right coach? So we're thinking about here a couple of things. Yes, ethical, ethical, am I the right coach for a person? So we may be wanting to build our coaching business and build up a number of people that were actually coaching and build our coaching books and the number of people with coaching. But we do have to think about am I the right coach for the person and it might be an opportunity to make a referral. And that happens on a semi-regular basis with the open draw team, we're thinking about who's the right coach and we have no problem thinking that person would be the right coach or this person be the right coach. So we're demonstrating ethical practice by having that conversation. In addition, last year, a person in my private life approached me from a coaching point of view. So now my private life is coming into my professional life. I felt that I was not going to be the right coach for the person just because I wanted to maintain a boundary between our private lives and our professional lives. So I asked another member of the open draw team to actually coach that person. Of course I could coach them, but to create that boundary between our personal lives and our private lives, I decided from an ethical point of view, I wasn't the right coach. So if things like that, we're actually considering in our practice in terms of who's the right coach, what's the right coach, what's going to serve the client best is the question. And also, I don't want to be catching up with that person in that private life, in our private lives, thinking about what might have been discussed in a coaching session. So we're keeping things really separate from that perspective. Go on, Paul, I can feel you nodding there. I was literally just nodding saying that something is that it's the boundaries question that says, yeah, what might I hear in these coaching sessions and will that have an impact on how I approached this or how our relationship outside of the coaching, outside of the coaching space. Yeah, thank you. Let's move on to one that is very common. Well, actually, it used to be very common. I'm happy to say it's far less common now. And it's probably because we are clear and upfront about our position here. And we're talking about disclosing what's happening to the stakeholders. So any form of reporting back to the stakeholders about what's happening in the coaching sessions, we've talked about this quite a bit actually over the course of our coaching cafes together. And we are very clear upfront about what communication we did this in our, we shared this in a coaching cafe just recently, actually, being very clear about what we call the triangle between the coachy, the coach and the stakeholders, being very clear about the flow of information, the flow of feedback, who reports what to what, but most importantly from an ethical point of view, the confidential nature of the coaching conversation. So in terms of what's disclosed to stakeholders, for us, it's only ever key themes across a range of coaching that we're doing. So we'll, we won't disclose key themes around an individual. It's only there. There's a number of people that are actually being coached. The coaching conversations are confidential unless the person discloses with us something that we have a duty of care to report. And if that's the case, then we'll discuss it with the coachy to work out a plan to move forward. So that's our standard line. That's how we set up the coaching agreement and establish the coaching agreement with the stakeholders and the coaches. And if that's in place, then we move forward on that basis. In the past, we have had stakeholders change. So there's a couple of examples I'm thinking about throughout my coaching career where for stakeholders that we had a great relationship changed and new stakeholders. And the first thing they wanted to know is what's the status of the coaching, what's happening, what are the themes, blah, blah, blah. So that the stakeholder in that situation was going way beyond what we were comfortable with from an ethical practice point of view. We wanted to know about the coaching because they were interested in career promotions. Who's doing well, who's not doing well, who do we need to know about. And we just made it very clear that's completely against our code of conduct and our ethics. And we talked about what coaching was and then we're able to move forward, but it was very difficult. So yes, cutting along story short, this area can be a bit tricky. We're doing our best to be very clear up front and then when stakeholders changed, we're doing it again, basically we're having the same conversation again. Paula, you've been in this position. I know we're right on time. So what would you like to share just quickly around this? I guess what I would be interested in is what is the observation about how that person is, is what, what are you seeing from this person that you might not have seen before? As opposed to what information I can give you about the topics because what I think that opening that communication between the stakeholder and the individual receiving the coaching would be a benefit. Yes. So you're asking great questions at the stakeholder rather than disclosing information. That's a very good approach. The other approach I took in one situation is just to put it on the table. Are you asking me this information because you think there's an issue and they said yes. So I said well, how would you like to discuss that issue? If it's appropriate, let's get the coach to involve. So I just put it on the table. Why are we having this conversation? Is there an issue? And in this instance, they were not seeing the changes that they wanted to see. So now we can have a conversation about that which is directly related to what you're saying, Paula. The last one there is discontinuing the service and we have had this. It's a pretty straightforward one for us. The person discontinued their coaching because they didn't like being asked questions all the time. They found that they're asking the questions and making them think deeply about what they want to do. They didn't appreciate it. They didn't like it. What they really wanted was monitoring. And we said, OK, well, we made it clear. We always make a clear upfront what coaching is and what it's not the person was involved in that briefing. And despite that, they still wanted you to tell me what to do. So they still want to be touring from us. It's a really easy one. There's no real ethical dilemma here. What you want is not what we're actually offering. And so therefore that coaching assignment was stopped. So sometimes the coaching assignments will continue. Sometimes the coaching assignments will stop. What's most important is the conversation we're having. And I want to acknowledge everyone who's been on the line, not only today, but over the past few weeks to really reflect on our ethical practice. Not just tick that box. Not just carry on. But we are professional coaches in the workplace. And we're thinking about, well, what does the code of conduct to me to us and how we're living that code of conduct. So acknowledging a wall for joining us. And with that, we're right on time. We have our coaching programs coming up. It's in the financial year. Can you believe it? We're in the final quarter. So we are going to unshamedly say, please spend money with us on our wonderful coaching programs. And as always, we're going to say enjoy your coaching. We're on a slight break now. We've got a couple of weeks off because it's Easter. And then there's a public holiday Australian public holiday. So enjoy a couple of weeks off. And we will look forward to picking up our new topic when we come back, which will be around performance conversations. And how do we enable high performance in the workplace at this time of year when performance conversations are a big topic. So thank you, everyone. We look forward to catching up with you at our next coaching cafe. Thanks for listening to this episode of the coaching cafe podcast. You can watch the full video of this podcast on our website. I'll put a link in the showing home. We'll see you at the next coaching cafe. [Music]