Must Coaches Always Hold Their Clients Accountable to Their Plans?

This is a big issue for coaching and a bigger issue for those commissioning coaching, not always the same person in a workplace setting. The coach will always begin work with a client by helping them clarify their objectives and then work throughout the session to assist them to identify actions which will help achieve the desired goals. In many ways this process defines coaching. The question here is whether or not the coach must always apply external pressure to the client to ensure that he or she completes the planned goal-directed activity within the agreed timescales.

This external pressure may take a number of forms, anything from ringing clients up between sessions to a gentle reminder of the previous session plans at the start of the next session? 

My coaching practice is undertaken from a Solution Focus perspective. SF coaches ask clients to describe the future in which all of what they wish has transpired, we encourage clients to work through this in some detail, exploring how important people in their lives or at work will notice the changes that will take place when this “preferred” future is brought to fruition. We then ask how much of this ideal future is already in place and what would be the first things that would happen that told the client that they were moving very gradually towards how they’d like things to be.

In SF work the emphasis is on descriptions – what would the client “notice”, see, feel, hear that would tell them that things were improving. The underpinning theory leads SF coaches to believe that in this detailed descriptive process helps the client to vividly construct their future, actually making changes happen as they speak and leading naturally towards the client making the changes needed to start to achieve their goals. 

SF practitioners, including myself, love to argue the relative merits of small signs as opposed to small steps, often known as action planning. In my practice I tend not to be too doctrinaire. Clients often want to make a list for themselves about what they’d like to do to help make the small signs and that seems fine for me, but I don’t insist that they do so. It’s also my experience that people come to the second session with goals that have nothing to do to those that they express in the previous meeting. They are now energetically focused on something else and I don’t remind them of what we talked about last time, I tend to assume that these things are either resolved or of less importance than what they are talking about today.

This seems to work well for the coachee but wonder how it plays for their employer, particularly when there are urgent performance matters to address. 

I was contacted recently by a HR Manager in a large public sector organisation in the South East to deliver coaching for a senior professional in their organisation. There was something about her tone that told me that this was urgent and as she described the situation it was clear that approaching me was a “last ditch attempt” at avoiding a serious capability situation and possible dismissal. The caller went on the say that the coaching would begin with a three way between me, the coachee and their line manager to ensure that the correct objectives were identified for the coaching and by the coachee.

A number of things became clear 

• the client in this situation is the organisation not the coachee
• the consequences of failure were severe
• the timescales were short as there was an immediate need for performance progress

This caused me to reappraise my position somewhat. The organisations expectations about performance were understandably unequivocal. I could do what I usually do, help the coachee understand their own goals in the context of their employers and hope that sufficient progress would be made quickly to secure the performance for the employer and the job security for the client.  

The risks seemed too high. I concluded that I would need to work smartly and juggle the notion of a self-directed client whilst taking something of a whip hand. I would use my firmly held notion that people are “most convinced by what comes out of their own mouth” to engage the client in their successful future. However I would also apply some of that gentle external pressure that I’d heard other coaches talk about, doing some gentle reminding during session, making cajoling and encouraging phone calls in between meetings, anything in fact to keep this person safe and their employer satisfied.

In conclusion there’s nothing wrong with a “horses for courses” approach. It seems to me that if people are at serious risk all of us would prefer to take immediate action to prevent disaster. In this case holding the coachee to account seems the best course of action.