CHAPTER
13

Strengthening the Partnership

THERE ARE MANY CONSIDERATIONS AND CHALLENGES IN AN EXECUTIVE COACHING ENGAGEMENT. SPONSOR ROLES, CONTRACTING, GOAL EVOLUTION, DATA GATHERING, AND DEVELOPMENT PLANNING ARE ESSENTIAL ELEMENTS FOR successful outcomes. At the same time, there are factors operating at the interpersonal level that are equally important but can get overshadowed by the more visible aspects of coaching. One of the less obvious but critical factors is the coach-client partnership.

To summarize from Chapter 7, the quality of the relationship you are able to build and sustain with your client is the most important factor that you have control over when it comes to influencing positive outcomes.1 Trust, honesty, caring, and credibility should characterize relationships you establish with your clients. Your ability to foster these qualities depends upon:

Image Modeling the communication and interpersonal skills conducive to a productive relationship.

Image Awareness of how to adjust your behavior to strengthen the partnership

Image Avoiding responses that may distance you from clients

Clients and coaching situations that trigger your fears, frustrations, or anger can be especially challenging. For example, clients who do not follow through on committed tasks, clients who work at a different pace than you do, or sponsors who offer support but are unavailable—all these situations can be very frustrating. You may feel angry, misled, or even irrelevant. These are natural reactions, but expressing them spontaneously is not useful and can damage a fragile relationship. Even when your reactions are related directly to how the client treats you, such as canceling appointments on short notice, the ability to contain, consider, and productively channel those reactions is an important skill for you to develop. Self-management, which is part of the concept of containment (illustrated in Figure 13-1), involves noting your reactions as objectively as you can, reframing them as data that may be used later, or quieting yourself meditatively so that you can listen to the client more closely.

Your time in the coaching role and the accumulation of experiences with different types of clients will help this self-awareness and self-discipline happen. Also supporting this growth is reflection and discussion with trusted colleagues or case supervisors about the difficult moments you have experienced with your clients. Turning those encounters into learning experiences contributes to your skill in tolerating and modulating your reactivity to your clients, sponsors, and other organizational contacts you may have.

Figure 13-1. Containment equation

Image

As you become better able to look honestly at the quality of your relationships with clients, you may discover areas for improvement. You may feel stuck, lose your focus, talk too much, give advice too quickly, work too hard, or evidence other less-than-ideal behaviors or feelings. These reflect insecurities and skill gaps that you need to address more productively. You may decide to prepare for sessions with greater self-awareness or consciously calm and balance your interpersonal posture. You may seek counsel from more experienced coaches about these challenges or scan the coaching literature for ideas. The point is that you cannot tune into the client’s emotional state if you are confused and unsettled in your own feelings.

Make choices that enhance the quality of the coaching relationship. Consider: your pacing, client feedback readiness, work context pressures, stage in the coaching process, and behavioral traction with the client.

Once you gain an awareness of your reactions to clients and are better able to sort out your own emotions, your intuition becomes very useful. For example, you might notice that you feel unsure or unsettled with a client. On reflection, you realize it is because the client is sending mixed facial cues, such as smiling when angry or frowning when thinking about an issue. Furthermore, you hypothesize that the client’s direct reports may experience the same confusion. This hypothesis becomes something you listen for during the informational interviews. Alternatively, you may decide to share that observation with your client based on your intuition that it could be important to his or her development.

Deciding if and when to use your observations, feelings, and intuitions with a client, which can be thought of as use of self, is an important skill for coaches. Use of self is a key component of building an open and trusting relationship with clients (also discussed in Chapter 2), but its very subjectivity makes it challenging to learn. As you gain coaching experience, you will gain confidence about noticing and valuing your own reactions to clients. Refining that skill involves becoming an astute observer of client words, behaviors, and nonverbal signals, noticing your reactions to these characteristics, and allowing those sometimes discrete elements to coalesce into an observation, intuition, or hypothesis. Although your skill at doing this will grow over time, it is never too early to begin reflecting about, and describing, your perceptions about clients.

If you choose to share an observation or reaction with a client, examine your words for any hint of negative judgment. Deconstruct your observation to get as close as possible to your own experience of the client and be descriptive of the client’s behavior. For example, saying, “I have noticed that you seem uneasy when we talk about Bill,” is better than saying, “Why are you uncomfortable when we discuss Bill?” As the coach, phrasing feedback as an I message makes it more neutral, immediate, and inviting.

It is important to bring immediacy to those moments and speak directly to your client without apology or lengthy explanations. Invite discussion of possible parallels between your observations and broader issues or challenges that your client is facing. As you take prudent risks with sharing honest and interesting use of self observations about clients, your partnership with them strengthens.

To augment your use of self with clients, here are a few suggestions:

Image Become more confident about the usefulness of your own personal and emotional reactions to clients and sponsors.

Image Be able to empathize with a wide array of different personalities and backgrounds, even if your life experiences are very different.

Image Tune into what is going on in your own emotional reactions during an otherwise intellectual conversation with a client.

Image Improve your verbal facility to channel your reactions into observations about your client and their situation; be willing to be controversial.

Image Practice narrating your feelings and reactions in your journal, with a supervisor, and with a trusted colleague. Distill those feelings and reactions into messages that may be useful in coaching.

Image When you feel stuck or lost with a client, reflect on what the client is saying or doing that has diminished your control or confidence; then consider what to do to rectify the situation.

As you experiment with these suggestions and make choices about how best to connect with your clients, you can be confident that whatever contributes to the quality of your relationships has the highest probability of paying off in terms of coaching outcomes.

CASE ILLUSTRATION: PRAISE CAN INTERFERE WITH A RELATIONSHIP

Coaches often find themselves caught between their natural human reactions and what they feel are the responsibilities of the coaching role. Especially when you are put off by something the client has done or said, there is ambiguity about what you should do in response. You could do nothing and continue with coaching, but if your reactions are getting in the way of a productive relationship or they are reflective of others’ experience of the client, you need to find ways to share those reactions with the client. Some of the most pivotal coaching moments happen when you are able to use your reactions wisely and sensitively to provide in-the-moment feedback to your client. This case shows how one coach handled that challenge.

Hani, an organization development professional, had received training to provide internal coaching services in her organization. She was very excited about the one-on-one activity of coaching and more directly using her interpersonal skill set. In one of her first engagements, she contracted with Elliot, a new managing director, to help him step up to the demands of his new level. He had gotten feedback about empowering his direct reports and setting higher performance expectations. Also, he’d been told he needed to improve his strategic thinking and longer-range planning skills

Hani knew that Elliot had worked his way up in the organization during his eight years with the company from supervisor to manager and now to managing director. She learned from Elliot that he had enjoyed his managerial work and was considered an excellent developer of people. He also felt that he was a good team player and supported his peers as they worked toward organizational objectives. Elliot reported that he did not see himself as ambitious or competitive, but did see himself as very committed. After his recent promotion, he realized he was taking on broad responsibility for areas completely new to him, and so he had requested a coach to help him with the transition.

Hani and Elliot met several times. They were moving toward drafting a transition plan that would have developmental elements for Elliot. He seemed very open to the process and eager to apply what he was learning. In fact, after each session, Elliot repeatedly thanked Hani for “giving so many good suggestions.” While Elliot’s gratitude appeared to be sincere, Hani felt put off. She was intentionally avoiding giving Elliot suggestions, consistent with her training as a coach and her Personal Model. If he was experiencing what she said as suggestions, maybe she was doing something wrong. She reexamined how she was listening to his stories and exploring his ideas. Yet his effusive thanks continued to grate on her. She saw herself as a journey partner, not the expert at what was best for her client. Hani knew she needed to address her feelings in some way and yet hesitated; it felt risky.

Internal coaches at Hani’s company were provided with case support by an outside, experienced coach supervisor. Hani and her supervisor quickly determined that her own reactions to Elliot were getting in the way of her listening because she experienced Elliot’s frequent thanks as ingratiating. Hani wondered if others might have the same reaction to Elliot. She also wondered if being so nice was preventing him from empowering others because he might have to deal with performance shortfalls.

Hani resolved to use her own reactions more directly with Elliot, although she didn’t want him to feel criticized for being appreciative. Still, she believed that this was useful data for Elliot to have, and so she rehearsed several ways of phrasing her feedback.

At the end of the next session Elliot once again thanked her by saying, “Hani, your ideas are great; I wish I had you with me all the time.” Hani paused before responding, “It feels good to be thanked, but if I were with you all the time, who would actually be making your decisions?” Elliot was listening, so she went on: “We spent time discussing your situation and coming up with ideas, but I don’t see myself as needing to be with you to help you run your department.” Elliot was quiet and thoughtful. He agreed that she was right and would think about why he said what he did.

Hani didn’t have to prompt Elliot at the beginning of their next meeting. He was excited to share that her comment had made him think about other situations when others had expressed discomfort about being thanked. This topic had come up recently with his direct reports because he was asking them to do more, but thanking them so effusively was confusing. He and Hani agreed that this apparently habitual behavior was not supportive of his new role. They continued their discussion to understand its unintended but negative impact on others and what he could do to modify his behavior. They also contracted for Hani to gather early perceptions of Elliot from direct reports to see how they would describe his leadership style. This time when Elliot said “thanks!” for the session, it felt genuine and appropriate.

Supervisor’s Observations

Strengthening a coaching relationship requires the coach to notice and understand reactions to a client’s behavior and then to determine if it might be useful to share them. This is not as easy as it sounds because our reactions can sometimes be confusing. Hani had mixed feelings about being praised for something that she believed she shouldn’t be doing in the first place. Rather than trying to ignore her reaction, she made it a topic for discussion with her supervisor. She then began to consider the meaning of her feelings, and several interesting hypotheses emerged. She concluded that the client’s behavior might extend beyond the coaching relationship and that her reaction to it could be useful.

A coaching relationship has the unusual potential to take those reactions seriously and put them on the table for discussion. Very few other relationships in life support that level of attention and honesty. Most clients will experience these use of self moments as indicating true caring and deepening the coach-client partnership.

Use of self can seem very challenging to a newer coach, but it is eminently learnable. It does require self-reflection to understand your reactions, but as you get better at figuring out those reactions, you can use them more quickly. While using a reaction spontaneously can have great impact, a client’s patterns tend to repeat themselves, so other opportunities are likely to arise. Although you can’t always be sure where sharing your reactions will lead, tapping into them will enhance the relationship and self-discovery for the client.

Takeaways

Image The quality of the coach-client relationship is the most important ingredient under the coach’s control in the client’s progress and change.

Image It is important to monitor and manage your conduct in order to be experienced as a caring and receptive partner as well as a model of effective communication and interpersonal characteristics.

Image Your reactions to the client are an important source of information and insight, but it is important to distinguish your reactions about the client from those that come from your own concerns or insecurities.

Image There are a variety of choices about what to do with your useful reactions to the client. Deciding if and how to use your reactions is a coaching skill called use of self.

Image Use of self involves taking risks, but it can be learned. Even experienced coaches can deepen their ability to self-monitor and capitalize on tuning into the impact clients have on you.

Image If you choose to share an observation or reaction, deconstruct it and be descriptive of the client’s behavior. Then invite dialogue to explore its meaning for the client.

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