Wexbourne Fire and Rescue Service operates 22 fire stations across a county area, employing 780 wholetime and on-call firefighters alongside 190 support staff. The author is a Station Manager responsible for three stations, with four Watch Managers and approximately 90 operational personnel reporting through them. Organisational detail is illustrative and anonymised.
Table of Contents
Learning Outcome 1: Understand the benefits, types and application of coaching used by leaders
AC 1.1 Critique the types and forms of coaching used to empower individuals and teams to achieve success
Coaching is not a single practice. The label covers approaches with different purposes, different evidence bases and different degrees of suitability for a leader working within an operational hierarchy, and critiquing them requires separating what each actually claims to do.
Performance coaching. Focused on a specific capability gap or objective within the current role, typically short and goal-directed. Critiquing its use at Wexbourne, it fits the operational environment well because the objectives are concrete and observable, such as a firefighter developing incident command decision-making. Its limitation is that it treats the person as a set of performance variables and can become a polite form of instruction where the coach holds technical authority, which in a uniformed service they almost always do.
Developmental coaching. Longer term and concerned with the person’s growth rather than a defined task, addressing self-awareness, confidence and professional identity. Its strength is that it reaches the things that actually limit progression, which for several Watch Managers is not knowledge but reluctance to exercise authority over former peers. Critiquing it, the approach requires a degree of psychological safety that a rank structure does not automatically provide, and it demands considerably more skill of the coach.
Executive coaching. Delivered to senior leaders, usually by an external practitioner, addressing strategic and personal effectiveness. Its advantage is independence, since an external coach carries no reporting relationship and no organisational agenda. Critiquing it, cost restricts it to a small population, and the independence that makes it valuable also means the coach lacks the operational context to challenge a leader’s account of events.
Team coaching. Working with a group on its collective functioning rather than with members individually. At Wexbourne this has clear application to watch-level performance, since a watch operates as an interdependent unit under pressure and its effectiveness is a property of the group. Critiquing it, team coaching is considerably harder to deliver than the individual variety, and it is frequently attempted by facilitating a conversation among people who then return to the same structural conditions.
Peer coaching. Colleagues of equivalent standing coaching one another under a structured arrangement. Its strength in this service is credibility: a Watch Manager will accept challenges from another Watch Manager that they would resist from above. Critiquing it, quality varies widely without training, and peer arrangements can drift into mutual reassurance rather than challenge.
Internal and external delivery. Cutting across the categories above, coaching may be delivered by someone inside the organisation or bought in. Critiquing the trade-off, internal coaches understand the operating context, cost far less and are available at short notice, but they carry organisational history and cannot offer genuine independence. External coaches offer independence and specialist skill at a cost that restricts access, and they can be told a version of events they have no means of testing.
The directive to non-directive spectrum. Cutting across all of these, coaching approaches sit on a continuum from telling at one end through to pure enquiry at the other, with instructing, giving advice, offering guidance, asking questions and reflecting positioned between. Critiquing the common assumption that non-directive is always superior, Passmore (2021) notes that the appropriate position on the spectrum depends on the coachee’s competence and the consequences of error. In a service where a wrong decision at an incident has fatal potential, insisting on pure enquiry when someone lacks the underlying knowledge is an abdication rather than a discipline.