CHAPTER
6

Sponsor and Stakeholder Involvement

EVEN IF THE CLIENT INITIATED CONTACT WITH YOU, IN AN EXECUTIVE COACHING ENGAGEMENT, THERE ARE OTHER PARTICIPANTS WHO ARE STAKEHOLDERS AND ESSENTIAL TO ITS SUCCESS. THESE PEOPLE INCLUDE YOUR CLIENT’S immediate manager and, if appropriate, a Human Resource manager who has an interest in, or some actual responsibility for, the client’s organization. We call these participants sponsors of the coaching. In larger organizations there may be others in this sponsor group, such as a centralized coaching coordinator or talent management professional. In most coaching situations, sponsors have responsibility for evaluating your qualifications and approving your proposal to deliver coaching.

Engaging sponsors productively is a key difference between executive coaching and other types of coaching in which the client contracts with you directly. Establishing your relationship with sponsors at the same time that you build and maintain a partnership with your client reflects both the definition and a key challenge of executive coaching. Sponsor involvement, while often stipulated in the contract, has significant upside potential in supporting your client’s development, so it is worth your effort to keep them appropriately involved. During most coaching engagements, you are also likely to interact with a wider stakeholder group around the client, such as peers and direct reports, especially when gathering information about your client.

In working with sponsors and other stakeholders, keep in mind that:

Planning for the participation of sponsors and other stakeholders will make their involvement more useful and productive.

The client, usually in conjunction with the sponsors, determines which other stakeholders to include in the process and how to approach them, relying on your guidance as the coach.

The involvement of sponsors and stakeholders in the coaching process needs to be transparent to the client.

The Role of Sponsors in the Coaching Process

Coaching is just one of many elements in the ongoing relationship between the sponsors and the client. It is your responsibility to be sure that coaching does not replace any aspect of that relationship or get lost in the flow of usual work interactions. In fact, an implicit goal in your management of sponsors is that coaching improves relationships between client and sponsors and enhances their developmental collaboration.

Engagements that become frustrating or disappointing can often be traced back to the lack of sponsor involvement. When sponsor involvement in coaching is planned, there are fewer distractions in your relationship with your client, and you are better able to capitalize on sponsor intentions to support the effort. Without such planning, sponsors may feel the need to push for involvement or insert themselves at inappropriate times.

You can anticipate the sponsors’ legitimate needs for input to the coaching process and interest in its progress by building sponsor touchpoints into the process. These touchpoints may have different schedules and content depending upon the type of coaching you are doing and the process you have contracted.

Touchpoints for Sponsors

Of all the participants in the coaching process, sponsors are involved over the longest period of time. There are six points at which they participate during a typical executive coaching engagement:

1. Before coaching in screening coaches

2. During the contracting of the coaching process

3. At the point that a development plan is drafted

4. As support during the implementation of the plan and for providing feedback and course corrections

5. At the conclusion of coaching

6. During post-coaching evaluation and client support

Touchpoint 1

Usually, a coach is brought into an organization because the sponsors have evaluated developmental options for the client and recommended coaching. Less frequently, the client may approach sponsors to initiate coaching. In both cases, sponsors usually set up criteria and screen coaches before any are introduced to clients, even if the organization already has a pool of qualified coaches. For most engagements, therefore, your first contact in a coaching engagement will be with sponsors as they screen coaches and discuss contracting details.

Touchpoint 2

As discussed in the previous chapter on contracting, sponsors are involved in all aspects of designing and approving plans for the coaching process. The key decisions they need to make in creating the contract have to do with the budget for the engagement, the time frame, how confidentiality will be maintained, and what assessments will be used and whom to sample in data-gathering. Clients are involved in some of these decisions, too.

Paying attention to how sponsors handle the contracting process may reveal information that will later be helpful in your coaching. You might note the speed at which the organization makes decisions, the organization’s preferred arrangements with vendors, how much involvement the sponsors ask for, whether this is the first time the organization has used coaching, and what the sponsors know, or think they know, about the process. It is also very important to explore the sponsors’ perspectives about client development needs. How they describe felt needs may inform your recommendations about assessment choices and how development goals are phrased.

Be careful about assuming that the sponsors know much about coaching, even when they talk authoritatively about it. Especially with the client’s manager, it is safer to confirm all touchpoints, need for support, and how the coaching process will unfold rather than being disappointed later.

Touchpoint 3

After data gathering and giving feedback to the client, you and the client will distill themes from the feedback as a basis for drafting a development action plan. The development plan (described in detail in Chapter 11) typically lists between one and three developmental goals and ideas for on-the-job actions to help achieve those goals.

Obtaining sponsors’ reactions to, and suggestions about, the development plan is an important part of most executive coaching. Not only can their suggstions strengthen the plan, but their input to it builds buy-in and support for the client’s development. Involving the sponsors, particularly the client’s manager at this point, demonstrates that the development plan is shared and provides an opportunity for collaboration, while indirectly supporting the confidentiality of all other content in the coaching relationship. It should be noted that while the Human Resources representative may get the engagement started, the client’s manager more often takes the lead during the development plan discussion and subsequent implementation.

Sponsor involvement in development planning is frequently accomplished during a three- or four-way development planning meeting with coach, client, and sponsors. Other options for getting their involvement might have the client eliciting comments from the sponsors and bringing that information back to you. Whichever way it happens, sponsor buy-in to the development plan is essential to the success of coaching.

Touchpoint 4

Once you are assured that you have the sponsors’ support for a development plan, you and the client can focus on its implementation. This is when sponsors can really enrich and empower the client’s progress. With a well-founded and motivating development plan, the manager is in a much stronger position to provide feedback and managerial coaching to the client. The HR professional can do the same, often observing aspects of the client’s behavior that the manager may not perceive. Following up with the manager and HR during this phase keeps them involved and provides useful feedback on progress to you and your client.

Touchpoint 5

Often at the conclusion of coaching, sponsors participate in a program review meeting. Also structured as a three- or four-way meeting, it reaffirms the key role of the sponsors in continuing to support the client’s development once coaching comes to an official close, even if the coach will also provide predetermined follow-up support steps.

This is the point in coaching when you officially hand the client’s development back to the sponsors and, particularly, to the client’s manager. It is important for the closing meeting to highlight progress as well as those areas needing ongoing developmental attention and vigilance in maintaining the changes that have started during coaching. Coaching initiates a process of continuing development that sponsors are now expected to support. You may find yourself offering suggestions to the sponsors about how they can support the client’s development. As in a relay, you are passing the baton to those who are continuing the long-distance event.

Touchpoint 6

Some coaching contracts anticipate the value of follow-up support, but more often it is discussed as coaching comes to a close. With sponsor approval, you and the client can decide the best way that you can support the client’s ongoing development. This is also an appropriate time for you to ask for feedback from the sponsors about both their satisfaction with the overall process and their evaluation of its effectiveness.

Some organizations require that you provide sponsors with progress reports at key milestones in the engagement. Other organizations may ask for a jointly written report from you and the client after initial goal setting and then later with the development plan. These requests are meant to be helpful to the process in fostering accountability, although coaches and clients sometimes experience them as intrusive. In order to respond to those requests without unsettling the trust that you establish with clients, make your contacts with sponsors transparent to the client whenever they occur during the coaching process. In addition, whatever is conveyed in progress reports to sponsors can be prepared jointly by you and the client.

The Wider Group of Stakeholders

Beyond the sponsors, a wider group of stakeholders, comprised of colleagues who interact with the client, may be invited by the client to provide their perspective to inform the client’s development plan. Stakeholders might include peers of the client, the client’s direct reports, executives in a matrix relationship to the client, internal customers, and others. Their involvement with the coaching process is limited but useful, and it would have been incorporated into the contract with sponsors and your client. (How to tap their input is covered in Chapter 9.)

Some clients may involve stakeholders more than others. They may, for example, ask you to sit in on meetings to observe their interactions with stakeholders (sometimes referred to as shadowing the client), share all or part of their development plan with them, or encourage them to provide ongoing feedback about areas the client is working on. Other clients choose to have coaching and their development maintain a lower profile. The preference depends on several variables: the client’s openness to feedback, the visibility of the development goals, the organization’s culture about feedback, and the way that coaching is structured in that organization.

You can influence the degree of stakeholder involvement, informed by your Personal Model of coaching. Your preferences about contact with stakeholders reflect your beliefs about how best to foster change. Some coaches make the involvement of stakeholders, both as contributors to development planning and as evaluators of progress, a central element of coaching. Other coaches place more weight on building deep and trusting relationships with clients, fostering self-insight, and learning. The question of stakeholder involvement deserves attention in how you shape your approach to coaching. Having a clear sense of the rationale for your preferred level of sponsor involvement will allow you to advocate for your approach during contracting.

Supervisor’s Observations

In hindsight, it is easy to see that Rita and Sal were in different places about how best to involve sponsors in coaching. This can happen for many reasons: The coach’s contracting may have assumed too much; the manager’s expectations may have been wishful thinking; or unexpected pressures may have emerged. But when a manager does not follow through on a meeting time or on another commitment the manager made to the coaching, it is very apparent and unsettling to both coach and client. The coach is excited to be working with the client, and hopefully the client is excited too, but the manager may not realize how pivotal her involvement is to capitalizing on that enthusiasm. In fact, managers sometimes worry about interfering in the coaching and pull back too far. It is not unknown for a manager to be quite enthusiastic about engaging a coach and then disengage, perhaps relieved to have delegated development as if it is a task that the coach can do by himself or herself.

Keeping managers aligned with the progress of the coaching engagement is a key challenge in executive coaching. Their involvement is essential to creating a well-founded development plan, as well as demonstrating support for the client’s development. Later in the coaching, the manager’s involvement is equally important because once coaching is ended, then the manager again must assume a lead role in the client’s development. Gaps in understanding can occur, and in this case, Sal’s efforts to engage Rita were being watched by the client, most likely because Marco wanted to gauge his own challenges in getting more time and attention from her. This made it more important for Sal to succeed in a way that would be a model for Marco.

Sal made good choices here. First, he avoided publicizing his frustration, no matter how much it reflected the client’s own experience with the boss. Second, he took responsibility for the lack of contact and thought creatively about what he could do differently. As a result, he started operating differently in terms of actually getting on her calendar and in mirroring her enthusiastic style and emphasizing her importance to the engagement. He also reached out to the HR sponsor to get some useful perspective and advice, viewing it as a challenge to be solved rather than personalizing the situation and becoming overtly frustrated. Sal’s success in renewing Rita’s involvement was both important to the coaching process and encouraging to Marco in his other dealings with her.

This is not to say the challenge won’t happen again. Managers can be extremely busy; some schedules are truly impossible, and even high-priority items can get postponed without much explanation. It is natural to be puzzled or frustrated by a sponsor’s lack of involvement; after all, the organization is paying for the coaching, so you would think the sponsors would do everything requested in support of it. But there are many ways in which good intentions can go astray, and coaches need to model optimism, resourcefulness, and accountability, especially when the client is tending toward powerlessness or blaming others. In all circumstances, you need to find ways of working with the situation as it presents itself, even when sponsors are not helping as they should.

Takeaways

While your relationship with the client is your first priority, you are also accountable to the sponsors of the engagement.

There are at least six touchpoints where you will want to anticipate and plan for sponsor participation.

Other colleagues, such as peers and direct reports, are frequently important to the process as well, both as feedback providers and progress observers. We refer to them as stakeholders because they stand to benefit from the client’s development.

The stakeholders’ involvement in the coaching process is much more limited than that of the sponsors. It is usually determined by the client, the sponsors, and your preferred coaching approach.

Communications with sponsors and other stakeholders are most effective when kept transparent and done in partnership with the client.

One of the more challenging parts of a coaching engagement is to keep the right amount of connectivity between sponsors and you as the coach. It is your responsibility to find ways of keeping to the contracted process and engaging with them, even when schedules are truly challenging.

Your dealings with sponsors serve as a model to your client beyond the coaching engagement.

Responding to sponsor absence with optimism and resourcefulness can foster those same qualities in clients dealing with disappointment.