Jose, an experienced coach who has long been a pacifist, has found it increasingly difficult to sleep since he was offered to enhance the performance of a military team; he feels extremely conflicted that he is betraying his values while at the same time telling himself he is not there to advance his personal agenda.

On her side, Flora, after realizing that her client is victim of moral harassment, wonders whether she should discuss this realization with her coachee: Who is she to open his eyes while he never requested such a discussion? But can she continue to “enjoy a cup of tea while the barn is on fire?”

For Laetitia, the challenge is about caching a socialist mayor of a large French city despite her own leanings towards conservatism; Jacky, a strong pro-life catholic, works with an atheist client who wished to abort after discovering her unexpected pregnancy.

Finally, Adam wonders what would happen if he started judging companies: “well maybe I should not work with Coke companies, or junk food companies or pharmaceutical companies or petroleum companies, or banks”…

The above struggles experienced by coaches, those increasingly popular professionals called  by organizations to support the development and performance of managers and leaders, is illustrative of an implicit principle of neutrality in practice, which revolves around providing objective support as an expert third-party while avoiding biases, personal interest or involvement. Some have gone so far as to call coaching the “Switzerland” of helping professions (Einzig, 2017), given its pretentions to engage in a balanced way with the heterogeneous parties within organization.

Coaches struggles with neutrality principles

Easier said than done, neutrality in coaching practice is fraught with complexities. These challenges arise partly from the tensions inherent in managerial practice and from those arising from the importation of helping techniques derived largely form psychology into a new setting. Also, while coaches have been presumed to act neutrally, this principle has barely been theorized; practice has outrun theory (Bachkirova & Borrington, 2019), with the result that scholarship must turn to practice to formulate its theoretical insights. For this reason, the current study published in Journal of Management Studies begins with the question. How do coaches implement neutrality, and with what implications for their conceptions of professional practice? Inherent to this question is the observation that lessons about neutrality practices in coaching can also contribute to understanding of neutrality in the professions more generally, and thus to an understudied aspect of professional practice.

To research this question, we conducted a qualitative study of 57 executive coaches. Using a critical incident technique, and focusing on complex coaching situations, we explored how coaches implemented neutrality when confronting these situations.

Responding to struggles through individualization or socialization of tensions

Specifically, we identified tensions arising at three levels. At the level of values, the ideal of suspension of judgment involved a risk of compromising important values key to the coach.  At the level of relationships, we identified a tension between balancing relations and the risk of distorting relationships through personal manipulations. At the level of emotions, a tension arose between the ideal of detachment and the risk of reification as coachees viewed as “objects”.

In response to these tensions, we identified two broad strategies taken by coaches, involving individualization and socialization. In the individualization strategy, the coaches saw themselves as individually responsible for embodying and resolved the tension within their own person, leading them to a psychologized view of tensions. By contrast, the socialization strategy located the tensions in the social environment and tended to interpret them in terms of power relations.

These different strategies led, in the end, to distinct, but overlapping, modes of engagement with neutrality practice. Both strategies, on the one hand, involved a value-awareness, in which coaches attempted to navigate their practice with an ongoing evaluation of their values. However, individualization strategies led to a focus on self-awareness, with an associated sense of self-blame and internalization; this strategy posed the risk of a loop of maintaining pre-conceived versions of neutrality and facing impasses, given that the underlying structure of tensions remains unaddressed in these psychologistic approaches. On the other hand, socializing strategies persistently challenged the possibility of neutrality as pre-elaborated, discussing hidden assumptions and highlighting power-awareness and the politicized organization; such approaches drew attention to the structural fissures within organizations rather than the psychological fissures within subjects, leading to a potentially more engaged approach to neutrality and coaching more broadly.

Educators and supervisors are encouraged to support reflexivity on neutrality enactment

The above struggles experienced by coaches, associated with impasses, self-blame or leading to distance with inherited models through a more personal and reflexive dynamic engagement with practice (Fatien Diochon & Nizet, 2019), allow to reflect on the theoretical state of coaching, as well as the current approaches to the practice (including education, supervision, and professionalization).

First, given the increasing popularity of coaching and the lack of theoretical knowledge in this field , the current study contributes to a situated theorizing of coaching practice. By studying neutrality in situ, we reinforce the importance of understanding implicit norms in coaching while describing how, in practice, their enactment is less than straightforward. Given the increasing mobilization of coaches around socially impactful topics such as environmental, political and social issues (Shoukry & Cox, 2018), the dynamics of neutrality are likely to be increasingly brought into question. 

Our study, through its theoretical contributions, impacts coaching education and supervision. In fact, educators and supervisors can support and develop a reflexive understanding by coaches of whether and how neutrality is enacted in their own practice, the different tensions they could face as a result, and the strategies put in place as a response. This could ultimately lead to a more conscious stance by coaches vis-à-vis their neutral position, and the strategy they choose to adopt when facing such situations.

Finally, while we have focused on coaching, the neutrality norms we analyze here are not unique to this profession but run throughout the professions more generally. Neutrality is demanded in some form across the professions, from law, to medicine, to accounting and beyond. In an organizational world increasingly embedding in social and political stakes, understanding the vicissitudes of neutrality is both conceptually interesting and practically urgent.

Bachkirova, T. and Borrington, S. (2019). ‘Old wine in new bottles: exploring pragmatism as a philosophical framework for the discipline of coaching’. Academy of Management Learning & Education, 18, 337–60.

Einzig, H. (2017). The Future of Coaching: Vision, Leadership and Responsibility in a Transforming World. New York: Taylor & Francis.

Fatien Diochon, P and Nizet, J. (2019). ‘Ethics as a fabric: An emotional reflexive sensemaking process’. Business Ethics Quarterly, 2, 4, 461-489.

Shoukry, H. and Cox, E. (2018). ‘Coaching as a social process’. Management Learning, 49, 413–28.

Photo: https://unsplash.com/fr/photos/VDvNL1CsUsM