Charles Klink: Well, you know, it’s interesting because I, I can’t think of another time in my career where coaching would be as valuable as it is now.

When you think about the current landscape in higher education, in student affairs specifically, um, the amount of stress and strain and chaos, the amount of pressure points. The complex number of constituents that you’re serving. You know, I often think of people in executive positions and student affairs as middle managers, but it’s coming from around 360 degrees.

So you know, you’re having to manage relationship with students, with faculty, with administrators, with boards, with the people you report to. Increasingly in Virginia and other places, the legislature, your board of visitors were appointed by the governor. So there’s just a lot of complexity and the pace is incredibly swift.

Keith Edwards: Hello. Welcome to Student Affairs. Now I’m your host, Keith Edwards. Transformative coaching for faculty and staff in higher education is a new book that argues that the next great innovation in higher education leadership isn’t another initiative or program. It’s the art of asking better questions.

This book positions coaching not as a corporate import, but as a deeply human, ethical and relational practice that can re-energize the people who make higher education work. Drawing on the expertise of more than two dozen higher ed coaches, the volume offers a roadmap for integrating coaching into the full ecosystem of campus life.

From faculty development and leadership to student affairs and organizational change. I so excited to have several of the authors of this volume and to talk about coaching in higher education. One of my favorite topics, student Affairs now is the premier podcast and online learning community for thousands of us who work in alongside or adjacent to the field of higher education and student affairs.

We release new episodes every week on Wednesdays. Find details about this episode, or browse our archives@studentaffairsnow.com. This episode is sponsored by Evolve Institute. Evolve is a series of leadership coaching journeys designed to bring clarity, capacity, and confidence, empowering courageous leadership to reimagine the future of higher education.

And as I mentioned, I’m your host, Keith Edwards. My pronouns are he, him, his, I’m a speaker, author, and coach, empowering, exceptional, higher education leadership for better tomorrows for us all. Through leadership, learning, and equity. You can find out more about me@keithedwards.com, and I’m recording today for my home in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which is at the intersections of the current and ancestral homelands of both the Dakota and the Ojibwe peoples.

Thanks to all three of you for joining. We’ll just start with introductions, and Chuck, you’ve been asked to kick us all off.

Charles Klink: Thanks so much, Keith. It’s a pleasure to spend some time with you this afternoon and Kitty and Gypsy and talk about something that I’m really excited about. I’m Chuck Klink.

I’m an Associate Vice President for Student Affairs for Holistic Wellbeing at Virginia Commonwealth University. I’ve been in higher ed and student affairs specifically for 45 years, and I’ve worked at three different institutions, two large research public universities, and one smaller liberal large university.

And I’ve been fortunate to have a variety of positions in student affairs. I’ve. Served seven years as a vice president. Nine years as an Associate vp. I’ve been a director of a counseling center. I’ve been a staff psychologist. I’ve worked in career services and disability, so I feel in residence life and housing.

So I feel like I bring a pretty rich background. To my experience and what Gypsy and Tim and I wrote I got interested in coaching. Really, I’m gonna blame Gypsy because she was the first of the three of us to go through the training. And I’m a counseling psychologist by profession and by discipline.

And what she shared with me about coaching really resonated. And I felt wow, this is something that would be helpful to add to the skillset I have. So it’d be personally fulfilling, but I also felt like it was another tool that I can use, I working with individuals. So that’s a little bit about me and again, I’m very grateful to be here this afternoon.

Keith Edwards: Yeah, we’re glad to have you. And that’s a great segue over to Gypsy to tell us about you.

Gypsy Denzine: Hello and thanks for joining us today. And Keith, thanks for the invitation. I am appropriately named. I have bounced around the country. Like many of you people say, wow, are you military? I said, no higher ed.

So I’ve had a lot of jobs all great. Loved every experience. Probably the best job I ever had. Was when I was a first year student and I was selected to be a resident assistant. My second year of undergraduate, I changed my major. I wanted to be a sports writer. I wanted to write sports biographies in particular.

And it was just a spark I knew right then and there. So initially that career goal is to be a dean of students. Thought I was on track for that. As we all know there is no undergraduate degree in student affairs, so I was really fortunate that I knew about the role and the opportunity. A 19-year-old, I could craft my experiences and I was grateful for a lot of opportunities.

And then, yeah, fast forward, I worked mostly in residence life. I could go back and be an RA tomorrow. Many of you are probably hiring you can track me down. I loved it and I loved working in residence life. Unfortunately I never got that Dean of students role. I ended up on the academic side of the house.

I was a couple times an academic dean but still had that passion for helping students. And currently, and this is the first time I get to introduce myself in this way, I am a professor emeritus. And it sounds wonderful. I’ve had a wonderful career. My passion has always been bridging student affairs and academic affairs.

That’s my happy place. Which is why Chuck was such a great colleague for me.

Keith Edwards: Wow. Beautiful. Beautiful. Those are two tough acts to follow, Katie, but you get to do it. Go ahead.

Katherine (Kitty) Maynard: I’ll do my best. And what a, what an honor to be here with Chuck and Gypsy today. And Keith, thank you so much for having me on as well.

I really appreciate the opportunity. I actually am down the road from Chuck Gypsy and Tim who are at Virginia Commonwealth University. I’m here at the University of Richmond, so we’re all in Richmond, Virginia. And here I serve in. As the, I serve as the Director of the Faculty Hub which is our faculty development slash teaching and learning center.

So at the University of Richmond, I work with faculty members on teaching, but also on productivity and writing and scholarship, and very often on issues that relate to faculty career cycles. And it was really in that capacity that I first encountered coaching and started to learn coaching skills. And I really use these skills every single day in myriad ways.

I might also add that I had a previous career. As a faculty member, I’d a full faculty career cycle myself, going from a tenure lined actually going from an lecturer, an adjunct to a tenure line faculty member, to a tenured faculty member, to a full professor before I really fully got into this work, working more directly with faculty, and those experiences really sparked my interest in thinking about how we can support people as they strive to create sustainable and su satisfying work lives in higher ed.

Keith Edwards: Great. I am excited to have all of you here and have this conversation about coaching. A couple of you touched on it, but I was a student affairs professional for many years and one of the first things I did when I went on my own is got my coaching certification. ’cause it’s really hard to do that while you’re working full-time in student affairs, a lot of three day weekends.

And I went into that thinking, this is gonna be silly. Like I, I have a whole lifetime of student affairs. Icebreakers and team builders and what could possibly you teach me. I have a PhD and that kind of stuff. And it was really great. I learned so much through the process. I describe it as a psychologist going to a sociology conference like this is different, but it fits right.

It’s not contradictory. It really fits. And as I, I think Gypsy said, I use coaching stuff every single day. It shows up in my workshops. It shows up in how I host the podcast and how I have conversations with other awkward parents at the PTA meetings and how I parent my kids. And so it’s been just really a gift.

And this is a book about transformative coaching and higher education, specifically in doing that, in those different roles. Kenny, maybe you can kick us off here. How did this book project, as we said, more than two dozen, I think folks doing coaching a lot of examples, a lot of case studies, a lot of short little, here’s how this works in different contexts, different ways of coaching.

So how did this book come to be?

Katherine (Kitty) Maynard: That’s a great question, isn’t it? So I attended a session on coaching that was led by two of my co-editors, Susan Rock and Karen Gonzalez Rice at the pod network conference in 2020. I’m not sure what the student affairs equivalent of this is, but POD Network is where we go for an educational development.

It’s the big conference. And they often have one or two sessions on coaching. So I went to the session on coaching because at the time I was already in a coach training program, which was, is. It was, and still is actually being run by our other co-editor, Katie Linder. And that session at POD was really electric.

There was so much enthusiasm in the room and it really left me craving more resources to do the work that I was doing and really wanted to continue to do using coaching in my work. So I actually thought. It might be great to create a resource when I, when, this is one of my biggest problems, honestly, is I get the idea and then I have to execute it myself, which, that’s not always the best way to do it.

Yeah. So I approached Susan and Karen about creating a resource and they were really already thinking about this as a next step for what they were working on. And luckily for me, they were really receptive to the idea of working together. And then I told Katie, my coach, training trainer about this, and she was really excited and offered to join us, which was an incredible stroke of luck because she has a depth and breadth of experience that she brought to this project.

I should pause briefly here also to say that I can’t imagine having better co-ed, co-editors than Karen and Susan and Katie. They’re just fantastic in every way, so I’m sending them gratitude today as well as some greetings. From the podcast. So the project really grew from there. And when we embarked on this project, because most of us were working in that educational development faculty development realm, we were really originally thinking about creating a resource for coaches, working with faculty members.

And that book definitely is that. But as we encountered more and more coaches working in higher ed, multiple audiences in the higher ed ecosystem emerged. And that is reflected in several of the sections of the book. And I think that Gypsy Chuck and Tim’s chapter actually addresses one of those audiences that emerged as an audience that really can benefit from coaching a as we’ve, a as we have developed that project.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. Chuck, what would you add to that?

Charles Klink: I think really student affairs is an untapped and underserved. Population with regards to coaching? I think over my time in higher ed and unlike sometimes in the academy, when you bring out a new dean or senior level person, it’s automatically now offered to them as a resource.

And I think that happens to some degree in student affairs, but less often. And so I was delighted that. Our chapter was included in the book because I do think raising the visibility of how it could benefit individuals really across their lifespan and student affairs is gonna be incredibly helpful.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. Gypsy, anything to add here? No, I think they, they covered it. All right. Let’s shift to a little bit more of the content. So I think everyone has heard this word coaching and I think a very small percentage of those people who’ve heard it, understand it, know what it is, know what it means, but we, because it gets used in so many different ways.

Gypsy, maybe you can help frame for us what is coaching and what is a coaching approach in higher education.

Gypsy Denzine: I wanna share, Keith sent us the agenda in advance. So when I saw my name attached to Defining Coaching, no one was more excited than me. My, my doctorate’s in educational psychology.

You, we know our disciplines. It’s like we’re known as the theory and data people. So when I saw, wow, I get to define coaching, I could take the whole 50 minutes and compare how the International Foundation of Coaching defines it compared to the European. Professional associations. And then it hit me that because my favorite classes to teach were theories of learning college student development theory.

I’d love to operationally define coaching, but my guess is that’s not gonna be all that useful.

So instead, what I’d like to prompt anyone who’s listening to literally just pause take 10 seconds ’cause it’ll come up that quickly. What’s a problem you’re trying to solve right now?

What’s top of the mind? What’s something that you’re trying to chip away at? Could be a small challenge. A big challenge could be everything from budget, facilities, supervision, probably supervision could be a new boss. The list goes on. That’s really what coaching is about. It’s about putting together a network of supportive team members who help us solve those problems.

And we often in the coaching space talk, gone, are the days of the guru mentor. Decades ago you hoped that you landed the perfect mentor, the one that everybody wanted, and then your career was just gonna take off. They were gonna give you advice, they were gonna open doors, be your sponsor.

That’s no longer the case. Now we need a network. One person can’t do it all for us, so putting a coach in our corner can help us solve those problems, just like a good family member can. Could be a rabbi, could be a hairdresser. The list goes on, but we need a network. Today’s problems are just too complex.

So what’s a coach gonna do? People often ask, what’s a coaching session look like? It’s gonna depend on the theoretical orientation of the coach. I’m an applied educational psychologist, so it’s gonna look a lot like positive psychology. That’s just who I am. But every coach is gonna help you identify your strengths.

It’s gonna help you set goals and action tasks provide clarity. Keith mentioned that in his introduction clarity and be that accountability partner. Check in. How did it go? The other thing that’s helpful is it’s that one hour outta your week or even your month where you, especially in student affairs, where you get to focus on your issues you are working on or your own professional development.

I hope it’s both of those. Briefly, I think it’s helpful to just mention what coaching is not. It is not a mentoring relationship. Mentors, we need them. Oh they’re the best. They give us advice. Coaches don’t give advice, and sometimes that’s frustrating for the person working with the coach.

And they’ll scream, tell me what to do regarding those complex problems. They’re, we’re also not a consultant. You don’t pay us to tell you what to do. We make the assumption you have all the skills. We’re gonna help you guide through that tunnel and we’ll just leave it that briefly. It is most definitely not counseling.

It is not therapy. We’re not trained for that. That would not be appropriate. We have a code of ethics and today what we’re mostly focusing on, I’m making an assumption here, is really individual coaching with the student affairs professionals, but there’s also cohort coaching. Team coaching, peer coaching, self coaching, learning how those skills, and of course now we have AI coaching.

But today we’re talking about that human connection one-on-one.

Keith Edwards: I also just I love all of that, that, an I were to think is remarkable and rare, and then to have someone listen is even more remarkable. Yeah. And offer a little, a few questions here and there. I also think it’s a big difference is.

Having that person not be your boss. Yep. Not have an obligation to the organization or the institution. Those supervision roles are great, but to have someone who doesn’t have those responsibilities, those kind of obligations, who is just focused on you, who might tell you should leave and get a different job, this is terrible, right?

Or you should spend less time at work. You’re really out of balance. So I think beyond that supervision line, I think could be helpful. Kitty, you mentioned you’re more in the faculty realm. What would you want to add here around coaching and coaching approaches in higher education?

Katherine (Kitty) Maynard: Yeah, and I’ll say my training is in the International Coaching Federations framework, and so we have per perhaps some particularities, I think it’s the most common training program around if you’re trained in coaching, likely this is your coaching. But I’ll just add the side note that sometimes it does get misunderstood because there is, it’s the wild west in terms of who can call themselves a coach.

And you might see somebody calling themselves a life coach or a coach with no credentials, except they’re just charismatic and have a strong opinion. But ideally you wanna look for somebody who has a credential has a theoretical grounding in what they’re doing. And I would just say that, in the faculty world, what it looks like a lot is.

Probably not dissimilar in some ways to the student affairs world in the sense that it’s also helping people who are very busy, who don’t have a lot of time sometimes to. Just devote time to think about themselves and where they’re going and what they wanna do. And it gives them an opportunity to have someone listening to them, asking really insightful questions back to them to help them dig deeper and to give them that reflection time.

And what I really love about it is the autonomy that it allows the people that you’re working with. So it isn’t about me. I’m really there for. The person who, who is coming in to talk to me, it’s really about what they need on that given day. It’s really about what they wanna find out, what solutions are gonna work for them.

And I really as an educator myself, I try to approach by students in the classroom in a similar way, although there are other structures and frameworks there that, that determine things. But I really. See the power of that kind of autonomy. And we all know if you’ve studied burnout, that autonomy is a really important thing for folks to feel confident and content in their work and their lives.

So that’s probably my favorite part about coaching.

Keith Edwards: When I was first introduced to coaching, I was still working on campus and I started using this approach with a student who was not doing well academically, and I spent a number of meetings telling him what he needed to do and what he should stop doing and what he should do, and it wasn’t working.

And after a coaching experience, I thought I’ll just try asking him what he thinks. And his ideas weren’t great, but he liked them better than mine and he was more committed to them, and he followed through with them and it really worked. And it was just such a great example for me. Rather than trying to know the answers and give advice and tell someone what to do to flip that to, what do you think you should do?

What do you think would work? What would be important to you? Which is just a simple way of that coaching flip. And it was really quite powerful. Two other things you mentioned that I wanted to pick up on is, yes, anyone can call them a coach. That doesn’t mean that they’re a good coach.

I think the things to ask for are what training do you have? What credentials do you have and what certification do you have? And I think those will lead you some good conversations that help you learn if that coach is a good fit. And you mentioned I think we’ve all mentioned time. One of the things that I tell my coaching clients is, if you’re tempted to cancel our session because you’re too busy, you better keep the session because that’s when you need coaching the most.

When you are overwhelmed and too busy. That’s the worst time to cancel. And they usually, if they keep it, they walk out of that going, I’m so glad I did this. You have saved me hours of things that I thought I needed to do or had to do that I’ve recontextualized. So I think it can be really helpful in that way.

Chuck, we’re what else do you want to add here? Generally, and then we’ll move into student affairs specific.

Charles Klink: Yeah. I I really appreciate everything that folks have shared and the thing I like about coaching is. It really empowers the individual because there’s an innate belief that they have the answers that they need.

And that our job is to be a partner in helping them uncover those, discover them, actuate them and then celebrate them. And as a psychologist, when I practice it’s more problem focused. It’s more past focused. And the thing I like about coaching is that it’s forward thinking.

It’s really setting goals that are, that you can help the client achieve in a way that I think really creates a lot of energy for them and confidence. And that’s just a wonderful thing.

Keith Edwards: Yeah, I was recently with some friends who were complaining about their boss, and they said, Keith, you’re a coach.

I should send ’em to you. You’ll fix them. And I said, oh, I don’t fix people. And they all laughed and said, what? You’re a coach. What do you do? And I was like I help people realize that they have the answers within them. And then they just, they stopped laughing and wanted to know a lot more.

And so that notion, as you said, Chuck, helping people realize they have all the resources within them. But sometimes you need someone else to believe that in you first. And that’s what a coach can do is believe, I believe you can solve these problems and let’s figure out how you’re gonna do That can be a real key pathway to that.

That’s, I think, some super helpful framing. And I think we as coaches, all of this is of course, but I think to many people listening, we’re talking about some quite radical approaches to conversations and addressing the issues that we face. But let’s focus in here from broadly on coaching and higher education to student affairs specifically.

What, Chuck you’ve talked about a long history. What are some of the applications specific to student affairs? And we’ll get gypsy and Kitty to chime in here too.

Charles Klink: It’s interesting because I can’t think of another time in my career where coaching would be as valuable as it is now.

When you think about the current landscape in higher education, in student affairs specifically the amount of stress and strain and chaos, the amount of pressure points. The complex number of constituents that you’re serving. I often think of people in executive positions and student affairs as middle managers, but it’s coming from around 360 degrees.

So you know, you’re having to manage relationship with students, with faculty, with administrators, with boards, with the people you report to. Increasingly in Virginia and other places, the legislature, your board of visitors were appointed by the governor. So there’s just a lot of complexity and the pace is incredibly swift.

And I think a lot of student affairs professionals will tell you day to day you’re putting out the fires, you’re dealing with the crises, and it’s hard to take the time to think, reflect. Strategically, and it’s even harder as everyone’s mentioned. And you have to Keith to take some time to gather yourself.

And get a sense of where you are, how you can use yourself as a tool, and the complexities and problems that you have to solve. And I think the thing about our work too in student affairs is it varies so much by. Type of institution, type of structure you have? Is it hierarchical? Is it more collegial?

Who’s in your division? What are the different elements of that division? So I think coaching at this point in time really gives people the bandwidth and a certain amount of depth. To really look at issues that they’re concerned with and problems they need to solve in a pretty unique way, with a very unique lens.

Keith Edwards: I just wanna highlight the challenges because this podcast is just barely five years old. In just that time, I feel like we’ve experienced several eras, and not just Taylor Swift albums, but there was the pre COVID, which was a whole higher ed experience. Then there was COVID, which was a whole higher ed experience.

Then there was the post ish COVID, OID. Then there was the Trump administration and. That feels like that started a lifetime ago because things are moving so quickly. We just had our host meeting this morning and a conversation that happened yesterday. We thought we can’t wait two weeks to share this out ’cause it’ll be dated already.

That’s how fast things are moving. If you had folks who are listening lists, what are the five biggest challenges facing you as a student affairs leader right now? I think,

Then ask them, did you learn about those things in graduate school? Yeah. The answer is probably no. Ai COVID Dear Colleague Letter, things like that are also new.

Charles Klink: Mental health is humongous now. Yeah. Yeah. And I think you’re, I think you’re so on the spot, Keith, because. A lot of times academic programs are academic. And where the rubber hits the road, it are the things that you just enumerated in how you address those. And if you’re lucky to have mentors that assist you with that, but I think the reality is now everyone’s so busy that it’s hard to find someone that’s got the time and the bandwidth to really sit with you.

For even probably a half hour. Less than an hour

Keith Edwards: yeah. And Kitty, you’ve had an opportunity to work with your co-editors and certainly collaborate and observe some of your student affairs colleagues. What do you see as some of the unique applications in student affairs?

Katherine (Kitty) Maynard: Yeah, I think that, chuck and gypsy and Tim’s article does a really great job actually of highlighting some of the particularities that. You might not think of if you’re coaching in other sectors as particularly if someone from Student Affairs comes into your office for a coaching session. I found it really interesting to think about, and I think intellectually I know this, but to hear it from Chuck and Gypsy and Tim in that article about how the schedule is so rarely your own, because.

You walk in and you don’t know what the fire is that’s, that’s been ignited at whatever moment that you’re showing up for work. So there’s a lot of unpredictability in your schedule. There’s a lot of crisis management that’s going on. I think one of the other things that I hadn’t really thought about that I found helpful was the fact that.

I think it we’re, I’m going back to something that has been mentioned already, which is that there isn’t a degree that you get for this field, per se. It depends on what you’re doing, but generally speaking, there’s not, one pathway that everybody takes to get to this particular vocation.

I would say the same thing actually happens in faculty and educational development that you’ll see people from. All sorts of places who find their way to this work. But but that’s helpful as well. In terms of, one of the things that was mentioned in this article were that folks sometimes have different degrees, right?

So they may have an ma, they may have an EDD, they may have, a combination of degrees and sometimes. In an area in a sector higher ed, which is so credentialed and so mindful of credentials that sometimes that can feel like depending on the room you’re in, that can be a stressor. So that was interesting for me to have an opportunity to think through that a little bit more and have, that might have an effect on the people that I’m meeting and talking to.

Keith Edwards: Gypsy, I’m so far I’m tracking. It can be helpful with the challenges we face with students, supervision, leading teams, and leading ourself. You want to add to that or expand on any of that?

Gypsy Denzine: I think and please know, I don’t mean to put in a shameless plug for another chapter that I had the opportunity to be involved. Please do. We would love. It was

Keith Edwards: a great book with a

Gypsy Denzine: ton of chapters. I like coaching in that space of career curve balls. How you prepare for ’em. We’re all gonna experience ’em.

We, if it hasn’t happened to us, it’ll happen to a colleague or a what’s friend? What’s a career curve

Keith Edwards: ball? Could you give us a couple examples?

Gypsy Denzine: Boom. Tomorrow you’re the new boss. Your president brings you in and says, I wanna go in a new direction. I think one of the things that’s unique about student affairs and I am in awe of it, to lead a complex unit with a lot of people and not have tenure in most cases.

My entire academic administrative career, I’ve had tenure and you just lead differently. So I’m always sensitive. In student affairs that, that, that’s a different nuance for career curve balls and professional development. But one thing I wanna piggyback on that, that Chuck talked about just the pace and all that, he and I had the opportunity to report to the same provost when I joined Virginia Commonwealth University.

And he knows, ’cause we’ve talked about it so many times. And she would repeat to us over and over. And I was in faculty affairs that there are no emergencies in academic affairs. There are urgent matters. Chuck smiling. ’cause we sat at those meetings together and I needed to hear that in my career.

Prob I wish I would’ve heard it earlier, to be honest, but she made the point and said, in academic affairs there are urgent matters. There are important issues. There are time sensitive, but there are no emergencies. Yeah. But I always had the respect for my colleague and friend Chuck and everyone else in student affairs.

There are truly emergencies. Yeah. It, that it’s just the nature of the role, it just puts a different challenge. So to have a coach in that network, and I hope it’s a big network ’cause we. We need it is so important. And then again, the pace. I am always cognizant of the, I knew when I saw Chuck in a meeting early in the morning, I knew he had been at three events the night before.

The ethos in student affairs to show up. Most of you can’t imagine not showing up to a groundbreaking ceremony if your colleague had a. A new building, say in athletics or a training center or training room it’s just baked in to show up. And that creates a different pace.

Charles Klink: Keith I’d like to add something else too, that I’ve been thinking about recently is that people get into student affairs work because of who they are as people. They like people. They wanna help people grow. It’s really value driven. And I think one of the strains now for people in our profession is those values are challenged, or sometimes they’re in conflict with the values of the institution.

We are trained to put students first at the center of all we do, and institutions now aren’t always at that same place. And so it creates this conflict of values. And I know I’ve talked to more people in the last probably four or five years that start to question, is this a profession for me?

Can I adhere to my values and things that are deeply meaningful to me, keep doing the work when I feel like sometimes I need to compromise.

And I think a coach can help an individual kind of work through those kinds of questions. And come out a place where they feel good about what they’re doing.

’cause we all wanna feel that there’s an alignment, that we can live with and that value and how we,

Keith Edwards: yeah. I also think the coaching time and the relationship gives you a chance to move out of that reactivity and just a knee jerk reaction into choosing a response. And what aligns with my values, my professional training, my care and concern and compassion rather than my rage and frustration or my hurt and pain.

But more into that, and I think that can be. Really helpful, just giving moments of time, particularly when we’re so busy. If you’re so busy and you don’t have time to think or be or connect with yourself, you can fall into that reactivity real easily. Let’s shift into sort of a, an assets and concerns.

We’ve pointed to, gypsy sharing a lot about what coaching is and what it isn’t, and I think that’s a really important thing to cover. But I’d love to hear from you and Kitty, we’ll start with you. How can coaching be an asset in our practice and what concerns might folks want to think about or be mindful of?

Katherine (Kitty) Maynard: Sure. I feel like it, throughout our conversation, we’ve been touching on a lot of the assets related to coaching. And to go back to something that Chuck was talking about earlier, I think it’s an understatement to say that we are working in a challenging context right now. There’s been so much change at a rapid.

Pace. Keith, you were talking about the different stages of the pre COVID and the COVID, and the almost post COVID and the, all of these different things where we have, a really, we had the pandemic. We have an evolving political climate, and I see this a lot on my side. The arrival of generative AI has been a real disruptor for faculty in terms of the way that they approach courses.

And let’s face it, change is just really hard for all of us. We don’t like it for the most part, right? That’s not a good, in fact, Katie often is my trainer my, my coach trainer, Katie Linder often says the reason that people seek out coaching, like 90% of the time is because of some sort of transition, some sort of change that they’re trying to navigate.

And so this volume, the subtitle of the volume actually is called Powerful Tools to Address Institutional Changes. And I think what we’re promoting here is coaching is a set of tools to help individuals and groups reconnect with their sense of purpose, manage conflict, navigate competing priorities, and more generally I would say reassert their sense of self and their values in a way that we know can lower levels of burnout.

And also really, help an individual have a happier work condition, but I think it won’t be something that can solve a systemic issue alone. And I think we need to recognize that, and maybe that’s the concern, is that it’s not going to necessarily be able to resolve a systemic issue. But I would argue, I think it does create the conditions for us to address some of them.

And I think this article mentions as well as it wraps up the chapter that, chuck and Gypsy, and Tim wrote that supporting student affairs professionals has a ripple effect, right? It can really bolster the overall health of an institution in multiple ways, because these are the folks who are also working a lot with students.

They’re working in the administration, so their effectiveness and their happiness in work is going to be something that radiates out from ’em. In terms of concerns I think that. There are a few. I think what I think of when I think of concerns is more the implementation piece of it. I don’t have any question personally that this is a really effective and important practice.

It’s really just about how do you scale it, how do you scale it to reach the maximum amount of people so that it’s not just the Cadillac option for a couple of people, and how can we make it something that’s more embedded in all of our practices? I think that it really does need to be implemented in a thoughtful way. And I would hope though, my secret hope we say, and the secret audience of this book is really the people who make the decisions in higher ed who come to see more, more, holistically to how important coaching could be to an institution and what it can do.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. Yeah. I think it’s important to recognize what coaching can do for the coachee. For the coach for the team, for the impact for the organization for the culture. Just so much of helping people show up as the best selves can really clean up a lot of the challenges. And I just came back from a space institute on the curricular approach where we talked about the unprecedented challenges we’re facing and we agreed that this is the, an unprecedented use of the word unprecedented.

And really the merging of all of these together, right? As, as we’ve talked on this podcast, that many of the challenges we’re facing aren’t really new. We faced them before in different iterations but all of them together at the same time. That’s a new kind of thing. Chuck, anything else you wanna add here about the asset and any concerns?

Charles Klink: I think as a coach, it’s important to have. Good referral sources. Oh I think it’s really important to distinguish when someone comes to you for coaching, but what they really need maybe is some therapy before you’re able to really maximize the work that, that the two of you could do.

And there’s other, I think, experts that you can pull into your coaching referral. Resources that are really helpful to individuals. And then, I do think it’s important also to have a pretty clear contract with the individual about the scope of your work. Because at some point it is important to end the work, maybe take a hiatus.

I think sometimes when that doesn’t happen, it. Gives a mixed message to the person about their ability to independently navigate what you know, they can navigate. And it’s a little bit of a comfort issue, but I think there’s ways to continue to support them in a less intensive coaching way.

So those are a couple things that I think of.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you. How about you, gypsy?

Gypsy Denzine: Much to my surprise, I’m gonna talk about a concern, probably more a caution or it’s just a reality of where we’re at with the coaching profession. And I do think it’s a profession. We have ethics, we have a professional association.

But. This is my opinion. We’re about 50 years behind compared to some other professions, and I often like to do the analogies to an EAP counselor employee assistance program. 50 years ago, they were not certified, they didn’t have specific training programs. Anyone could be an EAP. The same is true of financial advisors and financial planners.

Now they are regulated, they have judiciary, code of ethics, the list goes on. I liken it on a college campus to an ombudsperson. Back in the day, boom. You have a degree in counseling. You’re the ombuds person for the university. That’s not true today. They have certification, they have professional associations.

Coaching just isn’t there yet. And Kitty made the point that anyone can call themselves a coach. And I’d be happy to share it. I have a very ugly handout that just says, how do you find a coach? How do you interview a coach? To ask questions about what assessments, if any, do you require? Do you do a 360 with my team?

Is that required? What is your theoretical orientation? But my other related to that concern, I guess is about equity. And it’s like. How do you get a coach? And you’re sitting in a meeting and you find out that somebody else is working with an executive coach you didn’t even know. You could ask who pays for it.

What does that look like? So I still think we’re in our infancy. Campuses are rapidly trying to figure this. They’re trying to decide should we contract out with the external coaching organization? Should we create our own internal coaching program? We’re all trying to figure this out together.

But there, it’s a big community out there to ask good questions.

Keith Edwards: Yeah. That. Those are great. Those are great. As always happens in a coaching conversation, we are running out of time. And this podcast is called Student Affairs. Now we always like to end by asking what are you thinking troubling or pondering now might be related to this conversation or just something else that is with you.

And also if folks wanted to connect with you, where would be the best way for them to do that? Chuck, let’s start with you. What do you. Troubling now, and where can folks connect with you?

Charles Klink: I’m on LinkedIn, so that’s a good place to connect with me. I’m actually pretty optimistic about the future of student affairs. The, I’m inspired on a daily basis by the people I work with and by their resilience and fortitude and. Just ability to get up every day and do it all over again and do it really well. And so I think sometimes when we talk about student affairs, there’s a lot of gnashing of teeth, issues around retention of younger staff and who want to go into the profession and we never wanna be a vp, but boy, the benefits of doing the work we do, the relationships that we’re able to form with students.

So the best thing in the world is to have a student that you’ve worked with and now they’re a fully fledged adult. They have a career, they have a family. They’re doing well in life and just connecting with them. So I’m in a space now where I’m thinking a lot about that, about the generative work that we do, how it propels not only individuals forward, but their families.

And just a wonderful thing to be a part of.

Keith Edwards: Great. Thank you. Gypsy, how about you? What’s with you now?

Gypsy Denzine: I’m still thinking about what Chuck said, that it is about values. And I’ve just never met a more committed genuine group of colleagues than those in student affairs. That genuinely care about students and their wellbeing, their academic success, but just their wellbeing.

So if I had anything to say, it’d be, thank you.

Keith Edwards: I came here looking to feel good about being a coach, and now you’re making me feel good about being a student affairs person, so thank you. Ey. Thanks. Kitty, what are you troubling now and where might folks wanna connect with you?

Katherine (Kitty) Maynard: Yeah, of course.

First I just wanna elevate what Chuck and Gypsy just said. It’s so inspiring and heartwarming to hear both of their comments. I can be found very easily on LinkedIn. It’s a great way to get in touch with me or look me up, and I welcome that. It’d be fun to, to hear from anyone who may have heard us talking to today and have any questions about coaching.

I have two things that are on my mind really. One is. Change management. I work as a coach. I think we do micro change management all of the time in a sense, but I also try to think of how that fits in with the larger changes that are happening everywhere. And I see it a lot in my institution. We have some other in, in addition to the.

Stuff you might imagine is going on. We also have some other big changes in terms of platforms we’re using and things like that. There’s a lot of change coming and thinking about how we make those transitions less painful for people. And I’m also thinking a lot about. How we can be our best humans in the age of ai.

So I, I spend far too much time, I feel like, in my life, talking about generative AI and its effects on teaching and learning. It’s interesting, but it’s also very much something that takes all the oxygen out of the room, frankly, when we talking about it. And what I really wanna be thinking about more right now is how we can human better.

How we can lean into the human, the humanity of our classrooms, how we can really make education about our being human more. And I’m actually a Renaissance scholar originally, so humanism is a thing that I studied. So I think I just wanna create a new humanism that has something to do with our lives now in the digital world.

Yeah.

Keith Edwards: It sounds, everything as old, as new. Again, we usually think about 30 year fashion cycles. Maybe we need the 400 year cycle of humanism. Thank you all so much. This has been terrific. I really appreciate the conversation. Obviously I connect with it as a coach, but I really connected with many of your, elevating of student affairs work. So this has been terrific and so thanks for the book. Thanks for the conversation. Thanks to your contributions to this space. We also wanna thank our sponsors of today’s HI episode. Evolve Higher Education is facing unprecedented challenges, as we talked about, and needs courageous leadership now more than ever, and poor leadership has never been more costly.

A new generation of leaders with the capacity to lead forward is not optional. It’s urgent. These challenges are also full of possibilities for courageous leaders who are able to let go and move forward, accepting the challenges we are facing as real, embrace their agency to lead with and through them.

At Evolve, we help leaders face these realities with clarity, capacity, and confidence. We offer leadership coaching journeys for leadership teams and individual leaders focused on executive emerging and emerging executive leaders, and those leading for equity. As always, a huge shout out to our producer, Nat and Bro, who makes us all look and sound good behind the scenes.

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You can also leave us a five star review. It really helps these great conversations reach more folks. I am Keith Edwards. Thanks again to the fabulous guests who are with me today. To all of you who are watching and listening, make it a great week.

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