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Coaching approaches

Constructive-developmental coaching

Constructive-developmental coaching is built on Robert Kegan's account of how adults make meaning, in which a view you are inside of can later become one you can look at. A session works with the way you make sense of a situation, not only with what you do about it. Trained practitioners often use a structured interview, the Subject-Object Interview, as part of the work. No peer-reviewed outcome study of this coaching form turned up in the literature searched for this page, so the sources here describe the approach and its interview.

What it is

A constructive-developmental conversation works with the assumptions you are operating from, the things you cannot yet see past because they are how you see. The aim is to make some of those assumptions visible, so that you can hold them as something you have, rather than something that has you.

Coaches in this tradition often use a structured interview to hear how a person makes sense of experience. The coaching then works with what the interview shows, and with the person's own words. The interview is a measurement tool as well as a conversation.

Where it comes from

Robert Kegan set out a constructive-developmental approach to reflective practice (Kegan & Lahey, 2009). Jennifer Garvey Berger wrote on using the Subject-Object Interview to promote and assess self-authorship (Berger, 2023).

Tatiana Bachkirova's chapter on developmental coaching is titled “Developing the Self” (Bachkirova, 2012). Van Thor (2014) describes what it was like to learn to administer and score the Subject-Object Interview in a coaching context.

The principles underneath

Meaning-making can grow

Adults are understood to make sense of experience in increasingly complex ways. A way of seeing that has been your whole view can become something you see from.

Subject and object

What you are subject to, you cannot see. What you can see and hold at a distance is object. Coaching works on moving assumptions from the first to the second.

Your own words are the material

The conversation is built on what you actually say, and the coach listens for how you structure your thinking as well as what it contains.

Structure is not a verdict

The approach describes how meaning is structured. It is not meant as a judgement of a person's worth or ability.

How a session runs

  1. You bring a situation or a pattern you keep running into, and say what you want to be different.
  2. The coach asks how you understand the situation: what you rely on, what you cannot step back from, and what you feel responsible for.
  3. Where a structured interview is used, you answer questions designed to show how you make sense of experience, and the coach listens closely to your own wording.
  4. Together you look at what the answers show, and where a different way of seeing might open up.
  5. You finish by working through one different way of seeing the situation with the coach, and saying what it would change in your next step.

When it tends to fit

  • You keep handling the same kind of situation in the same way, and cannot yet see what else you could do.
  • A piece of feedback lands harder than the words seem to warrant, and you want to know why.
  • You are making a larger change in how you lead or relate, and the usual advice does not change how you see the problem.

What the research shows

Evidence: Practitioner tradition — little or no outcome research

No peer-reviewed outcome study of constructive-developmental coaching turned up in the literature searched for this page, so this page does not report effects. The sources describe the approach (Kegan & Lahey, 2009; Bachkirova, 2012; Berger, 2023), describe learning to use the Subject-Object Interview in coaching (Van Thor, 2014), and set out a model of mature adult ego development (Cook-Greuter, 2000). The approach is graded P because none of these sources reports an outcome study of the coaching form. Research on adult development is a broader field than this coaching.

Where the evidence is thin: The Subject-Object Interview is both a conversation and a measurement tool. Van Thor's account describes learning to administer and score it. Nothing in the literature searched for this page shows whether coaching changes how people make sense of experience.

Sources

  1. Kegan, R., & Lahey, L. L. (2009). From Subject to Object: A Constructive-Developmental Approach to Reflective Practice. In Handbook of Reflection and Reflective Inquiry. Springer.
  2. Bachkirova, T. (2012). Developmental Coaching – Developing the Self. In The Wiley-Blackwell Handbook of the Psychology of Coaching and Mentoring.
  3. Berger, J. G. (2023). Using the Subject-Object Interview to Promote And Assess Self-Authorship. In Development and Assessment of Self-Authorship. Routledge.
  4. van Diemen Van Thor, F. (2014). Using the ‘Autodidact’ Subject-Object Interview in coaching: The experience of learning to administer and score the Subject-Object Interview through self-teaching. International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring, 12(Special Issue 8), 9–23.
  5. Cook-Greuter, S. R. (2000). Mature Ego Development: A Gateway to Ego Transcendence? Journal of Adult Development, 7(4), 227–240.

Where it stops

The approach asks you to examine how you make sense of things, which can be unsettling. If that brings up trauma or a sense of losing your footing, a trained clinician is the right person to work with.

Developmental language can be used to rank people or to decide who is ready for what. The approach does not ask anyone to use it that way, and it is easy to misuse.

It is not a substitute for care in depression, in a crisis, or in a relationship where someone is unsafe.

Practices for this approach

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