Using Clean Language to explore the subjectivity of coachees’ experience and outcomes

Abstract

Objectives: This paper aims to contribute methodologically and substantively to understanding how coachees experience and evaluate coaching. First, we explore the use of ‘Clean Language’ as a phenomenological approach to coaching research, including the eliciting and analysing of data into findings and insights for coaches and coach trainers (Tosey et al., 2014, p.630). Second, we explore the nature of events, effects, evaluations and outcomes reported by coachees after a single coaching session. Design: Three coaches accredited in the same coaching methodology each delivered a single session to two randomly allocated coachees. The coachees were subsequently interviewed twice using Clean Language, in person two days after the coaching and by telephone two weeks later. Methodology: The transcribed follow-up interviews were analysed by an expert in Clean Language (the second author), using a form of thematic analysis within a realist/essentialist paradigm (Braun & Clarke, 2006, p.85). Findings: The interviews elicited detailed information on many aspects of coaching without the interviewer introducing any topics. Coachees’ events, effects and evaluations happened during the coaching session, between that session and the first interview, and during the two weeks between the first and second interviews. Coachees emphasised coaches’ style of repeating back, pacing, setting goals and questioning, maintaining the focus of the session, confronting and challenging, as well as their responsiveness (or lack of it). Increased self-awareness was mentioned by all coachees. Outcomes occurring after the session were maintained two weeks later, at which time new outcomes were also reported. Conclusions: Clean Language Interviewing supplements and extends existing methods of phenomenological interviewing and data coding. The study yielded nuanced findings on the coach behaviours that led coachees to give favourable versus unfavourable evaluations, with implications for coaching psychologists with regard in particular to coaches’ ability to calibrate and respond to coachees’ ongoing evaluation of the coaching, the pace of the session and how the timing of coachees’ feedback affects the findings.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 6 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.