Ethics and Duty of Care - Navigating the Complexities and Challenges in Executive Coaching

Hosted by APECS, the Association for Professional Executive Coaching & Supervision.

A webinar hosted by Dr Benita Mayhead.

Coach practitioners, supervisors, organisations and educators of coaches have a legal and an ethical duty of care. Yet, complexities and challenges related to this are seldom addressed through a dedicated lens. For the executive coach, there are greater degrees of complexities due to the multiple people in the coaching relationship, and the executive coach often experiences a more complex case load due to the level of seniority of those they are coaching. During this 90-minute interactive session, Benita will take participants through her research, the first empirical study to explore how executive coaches make sense of and enact duty of care. Her research positions ethics and duty of care firmly in coach’ development and the findings provide guidance to coaches on navigating contemporary challenges related to duty of care.

The session will cover the following areas:

• Outline of the research aim and brief overview of the methodology and data analysis process
• Explore the key findings and implications for theory and practice in executive coaching and supervision
• Invite participants to reflect and share experience on how these implications relate to them
• Discuss implications and next steps for our coaching and supervisory community

For those interested in learning more, please do come along and join the session. And fear not, this will not be a dry talk on the legal elements but an engaging and conversation led exploration on a topic that impacts us all as practitioners.

Bio

Dr Benita Mayhead – an executive coach, coach supervisor and one of the founders of North-52 Limited (www.north-52.com) – received her doctorate in coaching and mentoring in 2022 from Oxford Brookes University after successfully conducting the first empirical research study of its kind on duty of care in executive coaching. She also holds a Masters in coaching and mentoring and is an EMCC Global Master Practitioner and Chartered Fellow of the CiPD. Benita is a published author in academic journals, a peer reviewer for journals and a presenter at global research conferences. She also holds a non-executive advisory board member role for an app-based software company.

With a background in learning and development, Benita has built a strong reputation as an executive coach, coach supervisor and facilitator of leadership development programmes. She is a former senior Human Resource leader at Citigroup, Merrill Lynch and the oil and gas industry, and now works with leaders and organisations globally in the development of people through one-to-one coaching and group programmes. With extensive experience in helping leaders navigate the contemporary complexities they face, she brings a pragmatic and supportive coaching philosophy to her work.

Following completion of the doctorate, her research on ethics and duty of care in coaching has continued with interest and support from universities, professional coaching bodies and corporate organisations on the importance of the findings and implications for theory and practice, thus continuing to inform and enable best practice in coaching.