Learning leadership for academic deans: Implications for leadership coaching

This paper is the result of a unique combination of PhD research and an intensive leadership coaching among Academic Deans and equivalent leadership roles within a university in the Middle East. Academic Deans have a complex ‘in between’ role. This level of complexity can create significant leadership and personal challenges. Coaching can offer an opportunity to enable these middle leaders to develop insights and strategies to cope with these challenges. However, a competent coach is not enough to work with the complexities of this group of people. A more flexible and adaptive coach is needed with a repertoire of skills and processes to draw upon to serve the needs of the coachees. Employing an Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), the study identified some key themes in the findings about the ways in which the Deans learned. These include developing a mindful, reflective and calm environment, learning preferences are associated with the subject disciplines of the Deans and learning by observation. Drawing on adult learning theory and the research data this paper explores the development of such a process framework and concludes that a competence based approach to coach develop is inadequate for the complexities of the task.