Is academic coaching worth it?

A perspective paper on the value of engaging with academic coaching and whether this is right for you

Different types of academic coach FOR FACULTY

Let’s start with the the fact that outcomes of coaching depend on the type of coaching you access - you need to ensure you are getting the right coaching for the right result.

There are various types of academic coaches for university faculty:

• those working with motivation, habit and accountability - often provide exclusive 1-1 coaching, writing retreats or one-off workshops. Good for inspiration.

• those coaches who work directly on text alone - they are offering developmental editing of specific papers in progress. Excellent at solving single paper problems.

• those coaches who work specifically in the area of disability or ND coaching where the coaching focuses on helping 1-1 researchers with actual work organisation. Excellent for helping managing diarys etc.

My coaching model does not fit neatly into these market descriptions, precisely because it has been elaborated over many years to meet academic researchers and faculty wherever they are in their academic career and writing journey. My coaching practice started when I was still an academic, in the white heat of being a full time reader in a research intensive university, I offered coaching for my faculty members because I could see it’s value. Once I became a full time coach, I could see over many years that coaching is rarely adequate when it focused on a single specialism, because any single coaching problem is interrelated to a panoply of others. As you can see from my offer suite, my coaching offers range from building a solid writing habit, to learning repeatable techniques of writing articles, to how to write monographs, to career development programmes. My coaching has an an integrated approach weaving both coaching and training together, because, for example, fixing one paper for a client does not solve the real underlying issues around writing.

When someone comes to a coach saying ‘I can’t get this paper published’, it turns out the issue is rarely limited to that one paper. Sure, I can fix that one paper with you through developmental editing, but what use is that to you going forward? You will need to keep coming back. Problems with a specific paper are usually bound up with weak publication strategy, uncertainty and inability to pinpoint audience correctly, poor ideation skills, perfectionism, lack of editing skills, absent or weak writing systems and process, and underdeveloped, genre specific techniques. Maybe clients are trying to get a grant, or a promotion, and this paper is actually one single part of a much bigger picture that is affecting all their decision making and are undermining its success.

Fixing the one paper in isolation will only require you to come back for more coaching.

WHAT DOES MY ACADEMIC COACHING ACTUALLY CHANGE?

My coaching philosophy means that you don't have to choose between improving your writing on this problem paper and improving all aspects of your academic practice wholesale; you can develop a sustainable writing practice, and strengthening your publication strategy, and learn how to build a pipeline, and learn how to better ideate projects, and learn specific techniques; and you can think more strategically about your academic career.

You don’t need to choose between improving one paper and getting over the line and learning a whole framework of writing that will serve you for the rest of your career and your next 100 publications. These challenges are interconnected, and my programmes are designed to solve them together.

Academic coaching isn’t to me about providing you with accountability, although of course regular interactions with me as your coach will help you to embed and keep centred the changes you are trying to make. But accountability coaching alone keeps you dependent on the coach - it’s critical you are developing the long term skills at the same time. Any coach should be offering you the skills and frameworks that enable you to develop self accountability.

In my programmes, we inculcate accountability through multiple different avenues: live coaching calls, direct feedback on your writing, writing sprints 6 x per month, structured curriculum and frameworks that move you along, being in community with other writers, accountability assignments and so on. But you also learn through these avenues self accountability - it is what the curriculum and frameworks are there for.

What you really gain through coaching and training is confidence in your judgment and decision making, your own frameworks and systems and processes that we build so you can rely on these going forward without external accountability. You know which publication should be next, which journal how to frame your contribution, how to choose what is in or out of a paper, a promotion application or grant. You know which opportunities to take on or turn down, you know for sure you are choosing the right path.

It is this certainty in decision making that comes as a consequence of everything you learn - and it is a skill we explicitly practice together - that really moves the needle on your career. You gain writing skills, publication stategies, strategic career decision making, confidence in your scholarly authority and intellectual direction, your thinking and your execution, but mostly, it’s judgment.

What are the costs of struggling alone?

Perhaps I can start here by recalling the thing I hear most often from every single person I coach: why didn’t I do this 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago? Many people contact me and then wait maybe 6 months or a year before they come and actually start and it is always the same thing: why did I wait? It is the most common lament because they have now seen how different their life and career can be now they have accessed this coaching. It is never too late, and my client’s successes prove that over and over.

Time is your biggest cost. The most precious resource you cannot get back. The academic costs look like years of slow, frustrating writing where you imagine writing torture as the correct identifyier of scholarly activity, rejected papers that take multiple submissions and multiple journals to find a home (which costs you more time); opportunities missed - for collaboration, for advancement, for grant opportunities, for career capital because you did not build the track record in a timely fashion; stalled promotion which costs you money, but just as critical, it costs you agency over your career; entrenching boredom as you shrink what you think you can manage and avoid the ambitious research that you started out being driven by. All of these losses compound to make you ask the question: am I really cut out for this job? Imposter syndrome, feelings of shame and so on proliferate. These result from mounting stress as you feel more and more boxed in to doing your job in a way that closes off opportunities, and no longer seems to fit with how you imagined your career unfolding.

When coaching probably isn’t worth it

Coaching is not worth it for people if they are already content where they are in there job, their skill-sets and their academic career. Coaching means learning new things, and challenging the way things are right now. It does mean some uncomfortable questions and interrogating your way of thinking about things, and this is not something everyone wants to embrace. So if you are:

• already publishing happily at the speed you want, in the journals you want, doing the research that you want

• your career is exactly where you want it to be and have complete control of your workload

• looking for someone to just proof read your work

• not prepared to change how you work or indeed think about work (whether you are currently happy or not)

• looking for someone to write your papers

• looking for therapy

Then coaching probably isn’t the right investment for you. Coaching can make a quick intervention into a pressing specific problem, but that problem reoccurs as soon as the coaching is removed if the coaching provider cannot provide holistic frameworks and training that you can rely on going forward.

when coaching has the highest return

There are four types of return on investment in my academic coaching:

Return on outputs

• more and better papers published, and the consequences that flow from that throughout your career

• higher quality grant applications, and the consequences that flow from this

• stronger (finished) monographs which means creation of a vital career asset in the shortest time possible

• higher completion rates of projects - no desk drawer data, abandoned papers, time wasted

Return on career

• promotion (and therefore money, let’s not be squeamish)

• agency in your career because you have both authority and hierarchy

• impact of you research in places where you want it to move conversations within and without the academy

• ability to apply for grants / fellowships that give you the space to work on big projects

• visibility and reach of research through better collaborative networks

• being competitive for better institutions and being sought after as a collaborator, giving you job security, mobility and better working conditions

RETURN ON TIME

Suppose you save just 3-5 hours per week through coaching (very easy with my systems) that would be around 150-260 hours per year at the most conservative estimate. Think about that over the course of your career.

My clients usually save between 10-12 hours per week, around 520 hours per year, and over an academic career, that’s extraordinary. This is time reclaimed from overwriting, procrastination in all its forms, and decision avoidance. It’s reclaimed from leaky pipelines, inadequate systems around pre-writing processes, and a lack of clear direction.

Unlike a software productivity app, this time gain does not stop once you stop paying me for coaching, these learned skills compound for the rest of your career.

Return on confidence

This is not about feeling more motivated today. It is confidence in your decision making - I know how to approach this paper, what to say no to, when enough is enough, what strategic decisions to take and when, how to handle that tricky situation.

how do you measure success?

Over the past seven years I've worked with hundreds of academics across 40+ disciplines globally. The clients who receive the greatest return are rarely those looking for a quick fix.

They're the ones investing in capabilities they'll use for the rest of their careers. Not that one paper, but everything that connects with it.

Continue reading: Client success stories