CHAPTER
21
Output 1: Your Approach to Executive Coaching
AS YOU READ THE PREVIOUS CHAPTERS, YOU STARTED BUILDING A FRAMEWORK FOR YOUR PERSONAL MODEL BY REFLECTING ON WHO YOU ARE AS A PERSON, WHAT YOU BRING TO WORKING IN ORGANIZATIONAL CONTEXTS, and your preferences for coaching concepts, practices, and techniques. Putting these three inputs together informs this first and most comprehensive output of your Personal Model—a description of your approach to coaching.
Integrating all of the elements mentioned surfaces a surprising number of issues. Many of these tap directly into the coaching process options that were described in the chapters of Part II. Your understanding of that content, filtered by your own preferences and experience, gives you a basis for choosing how you operate as a coach.
Statements about coaching approaches are as varied as the coaches making them. We encourage you to find ideas and concepts that appeal to you and articulate the elements that go into your approach to coaching. Some coaches emphasize the ways they help clients; others focus on the theoretical lenses they use to understand clients, or they put a primary emphasis on their relationships with clients. Every coach brings his or her own history and character into the relationship, and some reflect on these as a starting point for explaining a preferred approach.
The following statements are excerpts from the first output of Personal Models we have read, sorted into several categories. They may be helpful as you think about this first output for yourself.
Helping Clients
Coaching is helping someone maximize his impact and effectiveness.
The development plan will be a dynamic statement of my client’s aspirations and ideas for getting there.
My approach to coaching is a results-oriented process that helps clients discover and implement solutions to meet their leadership challenges.
Theory Preferences
I think about change in cognitive terms while always aiming for behavioral outcomes. Thoughts and feelings come through in our words and language, which in turn determine behavior and job performance. Along the way we will surface client assumptions, causative beliefs, and other mental models.
I use emotional intelligence as a core framework to help clients target their learning opportunities.
My primary approach to coaching involves leveraging mindfulness to fully investigate, understand, and empathize with the client’s intentions. Each session with a client should encourage unstructured conversation about thoughts, feelings, events, and challenges.
Relationships with Clients
The coaching process allows me to run alongside the moving train that the client is already on, so for a while we can move at the same speed. I will be a journey partner for my clients, drawing out stories and looking at situations from a variety of perspectives to unlock new possibilities.
For me, the cornerstone of effective coaching is the coach-client relationship. My first challenge is to build trust, which I do by being fully present and an active listener. I need to move along the continuum of empathizing with the client versus challenging her, based on what a client needs at any particular moment.
Acknowledging How Personal Style Affects the Coach-Client Relationship
I have tools that I use with clients, such as goal evolution, informational interviewing, and use of self. Importantly for me, I also have tools that stay inside my head to guide what I do: organization development/process consultation values and existential psychology or the importance of client choice.
My approach to coaching is anchored in my naturally friendly and disarming style. My demeanor makes people feel comfortable and reduces obstacles to openness.
Learning and Change
My coaching presence tunes into what a client needs at each moment to learn and grow. I work with clients to build awareness about needed change, gather others’ perceptions, explore interpretations, commit to change, and implement new behaviors.
Clients are always in a state of personal and professional transition. Their current story needs to be reframed into the next story, and my job is to help them make conscious choices about what to do and what to leave behind.
As a coach, I see myself as a catalyst for the client’s lifelong learning and change effort. I believe people are capable of doing this at any age. With my support, the client can keep experimenting until the desired change becomes internalized.
As an internal coach, I focus on coaching leaders during change initiatives. This requires that I juggle the organization’s objectives and the individual leader’s strengths and gaps.
The Coaching Process
I collaborate with my client and the sponsors to determine a coaching process that fits their needs. If they charge me to design the process, it would have the following steps: determine readiness for change, gather and interpret information about the client, implement the change process, check for progress, and sustain the change.
My approach is collaborative and customized. I want to ensure that the client’s experience is productive and that the organization sees the effort as value-added.
I think that it will help clients, sponsors, and me if I write up a guide to the coaching process and share that with everyone. It will include the following steps: discussion of process and boundaries, discussion of felt needs with client and manager, start of coaching with self-discovery and data collection, feedback to client and goal setting, three-way meeting with manager to gain consensus on goals, writing action plan, implementing the plan and having the client get feedback from the manager during regular one-on-one meetings, targeting end point to the coaching and reaching closure.
With those examples as a springboard, below is a series of questions that will help you be comprehensive in articulating Output 1 of your Personal Model. Your answers to these questions represent the core of your approach to executive coaching. Writing answers to these questions may take several pages or more, depending on the detail you wish to include. A visual image, diagram, or flowchart might be useful and illustrative of your approach. Bulleted points, descriptive paragraphs, and your own examples may be helpful in capturing the essence of what process steps and coaching methods you want to include. Working on Output 1 of your Personal Model will prepare you to answer the question that clients and sponsors are likely to ask, “What’s your approach to coaching?”
Your Presence as a Coach. Envision yourself working as a coach and reflect on any coaching or helping experiences you have had: What stands out as unique about you? How do you use your own feelings and reactions to understand others (use of self) during coaching interactions? What is likely to be your interpersonal style with clients?
Your responses:
Your Boundaries as a Coach. Where do you prefer to help clients focus on the continuum from personal insight to organizational results? In your view, what topics, roles, and activities are key parts of your executive coaching, and which ones are not? How prepared are you to create clear coaching contracts with sponsors and clients? What are your preferences in handling confidentiality and other aspects of containment?
Your responses:
Your Approach to Relationship Building with Clients. What facilitation skills will you apply to building a relationship of trust and discovery? How might you use client stories as an intervention? What are your self-management issues and how will you address them? How will you address reluctance and difference issues that may arise with clients?
Your responses:
Your Approach to Sponsors. In what ways will you include the stakeholders in immediate proximity to your client and those somewhat more distant? How will you balance individual development goals with organization expectations for coaching outcomes? In what ways will you support the client in enlisting resources for development after your engagement is concluded?
Your responses:
Your Current Coaching Process. What types of coaching are you attracted to delivering and what sequence of steps do you envision using? What elements of a coaching process would you contract for and how would you structure coaching sessions? What may be milestone events in your coaching process?
Your responses:
Your Use of Assessment Methods. What assessment tools and methods do you expect to use and which ones may be optional for you? How much emphasis will you place on assessment within coaching and how interested are you in expanding your repertoire of assessment tools? What is your approach to providing feedback to clients so that assessment results inform development goals?
Your responses:
Your Dialogue/Conversation Methods and Eliciting Stories. What questions and facilitation techniques will you use to engage clients and facilitate openness? What will you do to take their answers to a deeper and more reflective place? How will you foster and interpret their stories? What questions will you use with sponsors?
Your responses:
Your Grasp of Leadership Concepts and Issues. What leadership ideas and models appeal to you and how might you use them with clients? What level of leadership do you feel ready to coach? How firm is your grasp of management and leadership competencies to help define client development goals? What will you do to help leaders leverage the stories they tell followers?
Your responses:
Your Approach to Development Planning. What is your approach to helping your clients evolve and structure compelling development goals? Describe how you will help translate those goals into on-the-job action ideas that can result in observable change. What process will you and your clients use to share development plans with sponsors?
Your responses:
Your Approach to Evaluation. How will you know if your coaching is effective, both during the process and after? What methods will you use for progress checks and post-coaching evaluation? What will you do to capitalize on evaluation for your own learning?
Your responses:
Organizing Principle
Some coaches find that in reflecting on their approach to coaching, a unifying theme emerges that links the elements together in a cohesive way. We call such a theme an organizing principle.
An organizing principle for a Personal Model tends to be a simple statement that connects coaching with your personal view of what matters most in finding fulfillment and effectiveness. This statement is often anchored in your values. As such, it can offer a useful way to tie the elements of your approach together and foster clarity in your work. It also offers a powerful way to explain your coaching approach to others.
Some examples of organizing principles are:
I believe everyone is responsible for making their own choices, and my role in the relationship is to help clients clarify their options and support new choices.
In my view, learning is a continuous process and an underpinning of all change.
To my way of thinking, the synergies and possibilities of combining action and reflection are enormous.
My core belief in coaching is that managing oneself is invariably linked to managing others.
My coaching emphasizes the struggle to bring an honest understanding of complex feelings into day-to-day roles.
Because I approach clients as whole people, it is important for me to help clients find a work/life ratio that feels right to them.
If an organizing principle emerges for you, it may be useful to incorporate it into your explanation of your approach. In practice, there is no set script to use in communicating your approach. All executive coaches are similar in some ways, but a Personal Model helps to identify the ways in which you are unique and different from other coaches.
Having articulated your best thinking about Output 1 of your Personal Model, you are in a much better position to explain your approach to coaching to clients and sponsors. In addition, your approach to coaching provides a foundation upon which your model can grow and evolve as you gain more experience and become a more confident coach.