CHAPTER
4
Managing the Coaching Engagement
ENGAGEMENT MANAGEMENT DESCRIBES THE ENTIRE ARC OF THE COACHING PROCESS. AS THE COACH, YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR MANAGING THIS PROCESS IN ITS ENTIRETY, FROM INITIAL INTRODUCTIONS TO THE CLOSURE MEETING. This chapter provides an overview and introduces the many topics that are part of an executive coaching engagement. Figure 4-1 provides an overview of the typical phases of an executive coaching engagement. As you read this chapter, you can observe the flow of the elements and be confident that those that interest you are explored in greater depth in subsequent chapters within this section.
If coaching can be compared to building a house, your role is equivalent to that of the general contractor—working closely and respectfully with those who will live there as well as with the neighbors, being guided by plans that the owners have contributed to, conforming to various practices or codes, staying within a budget and time frame to complete the project, and supporting the transition to the new space. The following are some important considerations to keep in mind regarding that role:
You are the expert about the coaching process; your clients are the experts about themselves and their situations.
Figure 4-1. Typical phases of executive coaching
As process expert, you are responsible for anticipating the flow and providing the client and sponsors with guidance about each step and expectations for it.
Doing process checks with the client and sponsors will help you stay attuned to their reactions and needs, allowing you to address any concerns that arise.
While there may be pressure to define coaching goals early in the process, it is more important that goals feel right to the client and motivate action, even though that may take longer.
The essential challenge of engagement management is alignment: you and the client, the client and sponsors, and you and sponsors. This can be tricky but it is what makes executive coaching challenging and gratifying.
Pre-Engagement Events
Although you cannot begin the engagement until the organization contacts you, the events that led up to the decision to find a coach influence how you set up and manage the engagement. Whether triggered by a problem, an opportunity, or possibly both, the possibility of coaching for your client was likely to have been discussed by the client’s manager, human resource professional, and others in leadership development or a related function.
They have agreed that coaching would be the intervention of choice for your client. You can therefore assume that they considered and rejected other alternatives. Their decision implies a consensus that both the client and the need are important enough to warrant the expense and effort of retaining an executive coach. You can also infer that they believe coaching has a higher probability of success than other possible interventions. However, the strength and consistency of their agreement may be more uneven than it appears. Exploring the events and decision process that preceded your arrival may provide valuable information about how your client is perceived, the goals that have been discussed, and the ways that sponsors work together and with the client.
Effective Communication Is Key
How well you are able to manage the engagement depends on how well you communicate with the sponsors and the client about their expectations and vision for the process. In particular, you need to know what factors caused them to call you in and what they hope will be different after coaching is finished. With this knowledge, you can propose a coaching process that is most likely to achieve what is envisioned.
Some sponsors may have clear opinions about process requirements and others will defer to your judgment and your recommended engagement steps. As you become a more experienced coach, you will be able both to explore options with sponsors and to offer variations based on the details of the case. It is through such give-and-take that you have the best chance of reaching agreement on the coaching process and milestones that everyone believes will support successful outcomes.
Initial Steps in the Process
Engagement management begins from the minute a sponsor calls you to discuss using your services. In addition to the issues described thus far, there are other important topics to cover even before you meet the client. Among these are the client’s prior development efforts, assessment data about the client that may be available, and existing development plans. This history may provide you with indications about the potential challenges in the engagement. It is also important to explore the client’s key relationships, such as those with sponsors and with others in the client’s organization (such as dotted-line managers, mentors, talent management professionals, and coaching coordinators).
Building on information from the sponsors, you can then use your initial meeting with the client to get a sense of whether this is going to be a workable coaching assignment with a good likelihood of success. In particular, it is important to evaluate whether:
The need, as described by the sponsors, is an acceptable starting point for the coaching even if it differs somewhat from the client’s articulation.
There are no major personal or professional impediments to the client making a commitment to coaching.
The organization has the capability and willingness to support the client’s development in terms of sponsor involvement and organizational values that encourage development.
There is mutual interest in a coach-client developmental partnership, sometimes called positive chemistry. (Typically, coaching clients are interested or even excited to engage in coaching, even though feelings of uncertainty and nervousness may be present, too.)
You are comfortable with the proposed terms of the contract—time frame, fees, deliverables, and general objectives.
When all these variables have been explored and found to be acceptable to you, to the client, and to the sponsors, the coaching process has an excellent foundation for more detailed contracting, which is discussed in the next chapter. However, even before those details are agreed to, you are beginning to build a working relationship with your client. Rapport may emerge easily out of this collaboration, or it may take longer. Either way, there is information to be noted about your client on variables such as communication style, interpersonal comfort, openness, and self-insight. These early impressions may prove useful later as you gather other perceptions about your client and provide feedback.
An especially pivotal discussion is about what you and the client should work on. In most cases, this is a substantive exchange that has several discernable stages. These stages fall under the heading called goal evolution, and they represent an important aspect of engagement management. They are summarized here and discussed in detail in Chapter 8.
Goal Evolution: Starting with Felt Needs
Identifying goals begins in the earliest stages of coaching as you and the client explore ideas about what to focus on together. We call these ideas the client’s felt needs. The sponsors are likely to also articulate their own versions of felt needs for the client’s development. In most cases, there is conceptual, if not literal, overlap between client and sponsor felt needs. Alignment between the client’s and the sponsor’s felt needs should occur at some point, but it does not have to be forced in the early stages of coaching.
With the client’s felt needs as a starting point, you and the client will begin to discuss goals for the coaching assignment: “What should we focus on together? What goals are realistic to achieve?” Those discussions are likely to result in greater clarity and understanding of what you and the client will work on. When that happens, we say that negotiated goals have emerged. These goals are often felt needs reframed to be engaging and actionable for clients. They may contain client aspirations and ways to expand the client’s repertoire of behaviors. For example, a client’s felt need might be to Become a stronger leader, or Step up to the challenges of my new role. Your early coaching conversations might have helped these felt needs evolve into negotiated goals such as Set and maintain higher performance standards for my team, or Build relationships with my new peers.
Articulating negotiated goals often triggers interest in confirming that these goals are worth working on. You may already have the sponsor’s felt needs to guide you, but gathering the perceptions of a wider group becomes relevant. Consider these two questions:
1. Who can provide a perspective about the client’s strengths and development areas?
2. Who can confirm and clarify the negotiated goals?
You and the client can discuss these questions and reach agreement about a data-gathering process (often anticipated by the contract and with support from sponsors). This process may utilize coach informational interviewing, a multirater or 360-degree survey, client self-report questionnaires, and other assessment tools.
Providing feedback from data sources leads to the next stage of goal evolution, identifying designed objectives. These are clear statements of what the client would like to achieve. By their nature, they imply on-the-job actions that will support their implementation. The objectives and the linked action ideas are often shared with sponsors in a document called a development action plan. Its creation brings the goal evaluation process full circle and links original felt needs with an articulation that is compelling and contains detailed action plans.
Implementing the actions generated by development planning is a tangible way to foster the client’s growth. Coaching supports that by providing the client with a confidential forum to debrief efforts and make adjustments. You, your client, and the sponsors then can use the development plan as a shared guide to keep your coaching on track and to evaluate progress as coaching reaches closure.
The Importance of Alignment
Alignment occurs when everyone in the process—coach, client, and sponsors—share the same or a similar vision for the engagement and, equally important, for the development objectives. Success in managing the engagement requires paying close attention to alignment and taking steps to reestablish it when gaps occur.
Giving clients positive feedback is an important aspect of sustaining their involvement and demonstrating that you and they are focused on the same objectives. Acknowledging support from sponsors helps to encourage their active participation in the process. Sponsor reward and acknowledgment of the client’s progress brings greater alignment between the sponsors and the client. Your role is to orchestrate as much of these alignment-supporting activities as possible, although some will be outside your purview.
When misalignment occurs, it is usually because one or more of the participants fails to fulfill commitments to the process. Examples include a lack of involvement by the sponsors, scheduling problems, inadequate follow-through by the client, and shifts in the level of enthusiasm exhibited by the client or the sponsors. All of these factors signal the need to address expectations with the appropriate person so that issues can be discussed and alignment be reestablished.
Both gravitas and sensitivity are required in handling these situations. If the client, or sponsors, or both are not meeting their commitments to coaching, you need to call attention to that gap and invite dialogue about it. At the same time, it is important for you to remain flexible. Even with everyone’s commitment to coaching, clients and sponsors have many other demanding obligations. Approaching misalignment diplomatically and with curiosity is always preferred. Most of the time, raising the question is enough to resolve it, although adjusting the contract based on emerging situational constraints or shifting roles is also an option.
Achieving Closure
Near the end of the engagement, both you and the client may reflect on it: What has the client learned? How has behavior changed? What requires further developmental attention? How can sponsors continue to support development? Updating the development plan to indicate progress and areas of opportunity is a useful step as the engagement ends. In addition to what happened for the client, you can consider your learning from the engagement: What worked well, what was difficult, and how did your Personal Model fit this assignment? Formal follow-up evaluation of the coaching is also recommended. This is often achieved by polling the sponsors about the effectiveness of the process, goals achieved, and follow-up that would be useful.
This chapter has illustrated that executive coaching is much more complex than just a series of conversations between coach and client. The process must engage sponsors, produce tangible results, and provide for the client’s continued development, as well as trigger the client’s self-insight and increased awareness. Coaches often place less importance on those macro aspects of their work, preferring to focus on the micro aspects of building productive relationships with clients. Our position is that for you to be an exceptional executive coach, you need to manage the overall engagement as well as apply excellent coaching skills within coaching sessions. Subsequent chapters present more detailed considerations about both the macro and micro challenges of executive coaching.
Engagement management isn’t one element of coaching—it’s all of them! There isn’t a complete checklist, although the coach has to think about all aspects of coaching and how they come together: How to do the contracting? Who should be involved? Who has a hidden agenda? Where are the pitfalls? What does the client really want from the coaching? What is the process for making it all happen within the allotted time frame?
Complicating matters, sometimes a coach has his own agenda to get the process going quickly in order to close the sale. The danger here is that moving too quickly can limit the coach’s perspective to understand all the concerns from client to manager and Human Resources. One can easily see how rushing ahead and assuming standard contracting may actually lengthen the time it takes for the client to fully engage and for sponsors to be as supportive as needed. Coaches need to have the presence of mind to build the best foundation possible given the constraints of the participants and the situation. Of course, stepping away from an untenable process should always be an option as well.
Coaches become increasingly confident about managing engagements based on learning from experience, whether that experience is positive or frustrating. Still, even for coaches who have completed dozens of engagements, it takes a measure of courage to advocate engagement management choices that may contrast with what sponsors envisioned. In this case, Mark leaned on Margaret to stay involved to the extent that she could, even as he kept Gail involved as a senior sponsor and relied on Althea for close-in support. Mark accepted that the organization’s felt need (stop the complaints) was different from Cindy’s (broaden her style) and trusted that the process had a good chance of bringing the two goals together. Was that too big a risk? It might have been if Margaret had had a hidden agenda and/or became distant from the process or if other unknown obstacles had surfaced. Still, it is important for coaches to use their intuition in making decisions about engagement details. It is somewhat reassuring that most of these decisions are adjustable, if addressed on a timely basis.
There was much in this case that a supervisor could commend. Mark effectively connected with Cindy as a client, despite Cindy’s tough demeanor and the difference between her own goal and management’s. He took a leadership role in designing a process and getting others involved. He anticipated how the assignment would flow. He maintained good transparency and managed everyone’s expectations. There was solid progress in terms of Cindy’s learning; her leadership behavior also appeared to improve. The organization’s felt need, the cessation of complaints, also appeared to have been met, although as with all outcomes, the causes were multidetermined.
The unexpected can happen and challenges sometimes emerge—in this case, the concerns were Margaret’s potential distance from Cindy and whether those voicing complaints would be quickly responsive to Cindy’s behavior change. To deal with these possibilities, coaches need to pay close attention and build in process checks along the way. When a coach makes all that happen and then makes adjustments as feedback is received, the ending is not a surprise to anyone. That’s good engagement management!
Takeaways
Engagement management refers to the entire arc of the coaching experience. It is a process you lead from design through closure.
As the expert in the process, you suggest and monitor the structure of the engagement. You anticipate steps and obstacles and establish clear process expectations.
You encourage periodic reflection about the process and progress toward change to reveal questions or concerns as early as possible.
You facilitate the evolution of development goals—from felt needs to negotiated goals to the designed objectives in a development plan—as the client gains insight and commitment to change.
It’s important to initiate coaching with as much clarity as possible; even so, adjustments and realignments may be necessary.
You are an advocate for greater alignment between your client and organizational stakeholders. If the client, sponsors, or others involved are not meeting their commitments, you can be a force to resolve gaps.
Each engagement is an opportunity to learn more about yourself as a coach.