Page - 20 - in Coaching im digitalen Wandel

Clutterbuck20 and a host of meeting platforms. To the second belong the emerging capabili- ties of artificial intelligence. Time and space I find it hard to believe that less than 20 years ago, I was expressing great doubts about the viability of email based mentoring and coaching. Surely, the quality of interaction and conversation would be much poorer. With experience of using both synchronous and a-synchronous media and of studying the subject (Clut- terbuck & Hussain, 2009), I rapidly learned that both face-to-face and virtual coaching and mentoring could be highly effective. Each had its key pluses and minuses. Face-to-face meetings were rich in communication at multiple levels – for example, rapport building, body language and intuition. But they are also prone to information overload. Coaches and mentors constantly have to select what to take notice of and which path they want to follow in the conversation. (Every time they ask a question, it directs the flow of conversation along a path they have chosen.) Much of the richness of conversation is, therefore, lost. Email-based conversations, at the other extreme, are »thin« in the sense that they capture only the written word, sometimes supplemented by emojis. But the potential to analyse the content of the conversation, identifying hidden themes and undercurrents (revealed, for example, by recurrent use of partic- ular words or phrases) is much greater than face-to-face. If a coach or mentor were to capture such detail, they could not possibly be fully present with the client. Moreover, it is possible with email to track back and compare evolving conversations over time. Another point of comparison is thinking time. With face-to-face conversa- tions, the dyad has to work at creating space to reflect. It is easier for a coachee or mentee to react immediately to a question, rather than ponder on it deeply. With asynchronous e-mail conversations, thinking time is built in – and this leads to deeper reflections by the client and more considered questions by the coach or mentor. In-between face-to-face and asynchronous e-mail lies a spectrum of other media choices. Video connection and other forms of meeting room allow both parties to see each other, but the head and shoulders frame provides only facial and vocal clues to the client’s emotional reactions. Bandwidth problems still cause irritating interruptions – often at critical points in the conversation. The old-fashioned non-visual telephone relies solely on the words spoken and the ability of the coach or mentor to intuit emotional and other clues. (One of the Open-Access-Publikation im Sinne der CC-Lizenz BY-NC-ND 4.0