Coaching academics can accelerate careers
Coaching has more than its share of success stories to trumpet as the field emerges and expands around the world, but how about his for an unexpected selling point—coaching can help up-and-coming academics establish themselves faster by shaving months (if not years) off the time it takes to get a PhD.
“It appears…that support is crucial for early career academics to accelerate productivity at the beginning of their careers and internal coaching refines and enhances that support,” concludes a just-published study at the University of Witwatersrand, in South Africa.
The lead researcher, Hilary Geber, writes in the International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring that her research may force South African academics to re-think their impressions about coaching.
“Coaching is such a buzz word in the world today and is a sought after luxury for executives, senior managers and all sorts of ordinary individuals,” she writes. “Life-coaching is becoming popular in South Africa as well, but universities ‘pooh pooh’ the idea: surely well-qualified intellectuals do not need ‘touch-feely’ life coaching to get through a PhD?”
And yet, as Geber’s research has revealed, perhaps they do.
According to Geber, few academics in South Africa get their PhDs within the minimum four year time period—a majority taking about five years. The reasons for the longer-than-minimum time required to complete the degree? “Early career academics may develop all the desirable individual characteristics of highly productive researchers but without institutional support and appropriate leadership, they are likely to be less than optimally productive and it may take many years for them to begin to establish their publication records,” Geber explains.
So in 2007, the University of Witwatersrand decided to invest in institutional support for its early-career academics, designing a program that was aimed specifically at assisting faculty in attaining advanced degrees and the publication of research.
“Unique to the program at (Witswatersrand) was the coaching of the participants when they began the program,” writes Geber.
Coaching in this environment was, for most of the study’s participants a first-time experience—a marker of coaching’s newness not only in South Africa, but also on college campuses—which was reflected by the attitudes toward coaching of the faculty in the study.
“Some participants had very low expectations of the process,” reports Geber. “One man had this to say about his expectations: ‘absolutely none. I only endured the coaching, or was willing to go through the coaching process because it was compulsory as part of the course. So my expectations were that it was going to be a waste of time and that it was probably going to involved a lot of hard work on my part, in terms of trying to pretend that I was enjoying it or getting something out of it, so my expectations were low.’”
The results? Changed attitudes—and enhanced effectiveness among the participants in reaching their degrees.
“My coach was helpful in getting me to keep the momentum going when it seemed to be stalling,” reported one Master’s degree candidate who took part in the experiment.
As Geber reports, not only did participants feel empowered in meeting their immediate goal—getting the degree—they also felt stronger and more effective in their roles on campus.
“Although coaching was specifically included to enable participants to achieve research goals it had much wider effects than that,” said Geber. “Participants used the coaching as a personal development space to explore areas directly linked to the research and writing process, they also explored areas beyond work/life balance, interpersonal skills, communication, assertiveness and dealing with criticism, departmental politics, etc.”
For the academics, having a coach meant having a safe place to work on often high-stress conflict that can arise in the otherwise tranquil settings of university campuses. Half of the participants in the study reported having a “critical incident” during the course of the research project.
“Helping early career academics become more assertive with colleagues and senior academics not only helps with them to complete higher degrees but it cuts down on individual frustration and keeps morale up,” writes Geber. “It increases the through-put rate of post-graduates for the University and the government funding which results.”
The study’s results found a significant boost in productivity and goal-completion among the participants—with some faculty members describing their published output going into overdrive.
“I normally have an average of three publications in a year,” said one participant. “Last year, I have six and I achieved it through coaching.”
That added output? Geber concluded those added articles—and the increased university funding they directly contribute to—would essentially mean the university’s investment in coaching would pay for itself.
“Not only is there a significant ROI in monetary terms but there is also a return through the retention of early career academics, their high morale and their increased ability to develop productive relationships with their senior colleagues, peers and students. They may also be instrumental in decreasing the drop-out rate of postgraduate students because they had learnt to supervise them more effectively during the coaching. So the tangible outputs have percolated down to the bottom-line in terms of a quantifiable performance measure for the organisation.”
Cristina Madeira, Certified Executive and Team Coach by ICF
Cristina Madeira Certified Executive and Team Coach by
