Nine ethical guidelines for narrative coaches

As part of our due diligence as professionals, it is incumbent upon coaches to be aware of our own unconscious biases and preferences that shape what we see and do with people and the stories they share with us. What are the acceptable shapes of a life we find ourselves promoting based on our training, professional/business pressures and aesthetic preferences? What our preferred formulation patterns and how do they keep us from more courageously and cleanly meeting others and their stories? In closing, I would offer the following nine ethical considerations in working with peoples’ stories; they serve as the bedrock of a narrative approach to coaching:

1. Coachees expect their coach to create a safe container for their storytelling.
2. Coachees expect their stories to be heard in a nonjudgmental, non-assumptive manner.
3. Coachees expect to have their community and cultural stories taken seriously.
4. Coachees have the right to tell their own story in their own way.
5. Coachees tell and understand their story as best as they can at the time.
6. Coachees have the right to change their stories, lives and selves as they choose.
7. Coachees are accountable for the impact of their stories on themselves and others.
8. Coachees expect their coach to manage their own stories, agendas and participation.
9. Coachees expect their coach to be exemplary stewards of the stories that are told.

I hope you have found these posts helpful in giving you some practical strategies for taking a more narrative approach to your work. We are scheduling master classes in various parts of the world for the latter half of 2010 and in 2011. It looks like Zurich and London will be next. Let us know if you’d like to host one in your area. You can reach us an director [at] narrativecoaching.com

As the United States approaches the election of a new President later this year, it is clear that there are no easy solutions to our ill-conceived and ill-fated intervention in Iraq. I use this picture in my narrative coaching workshops to explore with people the power of symbols, the cognitive and narrative patterns that shape our reactions, and the role of power in being able to tell our stories.

I learned a key lesson about power in the early days of my training business. I was doing a two-day program on leadership and coaching for 100 new managers in a federal social services program. 98 of the participants were women, the majority of them were non-Caucasian, and many of them had started out as low-income parents in the program. While I intellectually recognized the disparities as a upper-middle class Caucasian male, I didn’t fully grasp what that meant until part way through the first day when I realized that the program was not working well. I stopped the session and explored with the group where they were experiencing the disconnection.

In the end, I came to realize that many of the leadership theories, models and admonitions about leadership were written by and for people like me—and implicitly assumed a sufficient privilege and access to power. As a result, I dropped the rest of the design for the workshop and asked these women to talk about who had power in their communities, what enabled them to have this power, and how they used their power. We used these stories to develop some new models about what effective leadership and coaching would look like in their programs.

Much of the work in narrative coaching is to help people discern and transform the often unexamined boundaries of their narration. I work with coaches to get clear on the ethics and implications of narrative work. I am reminded of the work in this area by my colleague Paul Costello. I close here with a quote from Salman Rushdie as a reminder of the role of power in being able to tell one’s story.

Those who do not have power over the story that dominates their lives, the power to retell it, to rethink it, deconstruct it, joke about it, and change it as times change, truly are powerless, because they cannot think new thoughts.