Managing a coach panel

Like any other relationship, in which trust and rapport are important, executive coaching is highly dependent on the chemistry between coach and client. Effective matches take into account:

• The coach’s experience and background (including sector awareness, level of management experience)
• The client’s experience and background
• Demographic factors – location, preferences with regard to age, gender, etc; comfort/ appropriateness of media other than face to face)
• Learning need of the client (e.g. nature of transition, whether the learning need is skills-based, performance based, behavioural or transformational; or a mixture of these)
• Type of coaching the coach is best suited to (i.e. skills-based, performance based, behavioural or transformational)
• Personal compatibility (how well they are likely to “take” to each other)

Coach’s experience

Clients tend to feel most comfortable with coaches, who they feel understand their world. To what extent is it important to the client that:

• The coach has experience in this sector?
• The coach has been a manager at the same or higher organization level?

Observational and anecdotal evidence supports the view that, to be effective, coaches need sufficient contextual understanding and empathy with the client’s environment to:

• Craft deeply insightful questions
• Be safe (e.g. in recognising when a proposed course of action might be damaging or illegal)

However, over-closeness to the client’s world can be very limiting. It is hard for the coach to put aside their own knowledge and experience; and to prevent themselves consciously or unconsciously projecting their own solutions in the questions they ask. Critical questions to ask are:

• How genuinely challenging will this coach be towards clients in roles they are familiar with?
• Will they be able to step sufficiently far outside their own box to stimulate really creative thinking?
• To what extent will a different perspective be of value in this relationship?

Coaches will also vary in the amount of psychological knowledge and experience they have; and in their adherence to particular models or approaches. See the article Coach Maturity: An emerging concept for a description of the four levels of coaching.

Client’s experience

Key questions include:

• Have they been coached before?
  • Was this a positive or negative experience?
• How might this experience impact their expectations of the coach and their own role in the coaching relationship?
  • Will it, for example, make them more or less open?

Demographic factors

In general, gender and racial preferences will not be a significant factor. However, for some key career transitions, clients will have a strong preference for someone from a similar group. For example, a female senior manager in HR may prefer another female as coach, on the grounds that they can better emphasise with and understand the issues she is working through in aiming to become an HR director/ vice president HR.

Most coaching will be conducted face to face. However, some sessions may be by telephone or e-mail. How acceptable would this be to the client? Remember that telephone based coaching is likely to be less in depth than face to face.

Learning need

Key questions here include:

• Is the goal defined by the client, their boss/ sponsor, or jointly between client and sponsor?
  • Understanding and importance of the goal may be very different between client and sponsor.
• What evidence do we have to support the relevance/ importance of this goal?
  • For example, 360-degree feedback, assessment centre data, recent specific performance issues.
• Who else is affected?
  • It’s important to take a systemic perspective – is the issue resolvable by changes in the client alone, or does it require changes in the people around them (e.g. boss, peers, direct reports)
• How specific does the goal need to be?
  • SMART goals are not necessarily appropriate and may sometimes be dysfunctional. Expect the goal to evolve in the first two coaching sessions, in many cases.
• What is the client’s level of commitment to the learning goal?
  • It is important to ensure that the client is sufficiently committed to invest the necessary time and mental energy.
• Willingness to be challenged.
  • At one extreme, clients who have some elements of sociopathy in their psychological make-up, are unlikely to accept challenge from a coach, but need it most. More typically, the client may simply not be used to high quality challenge. A fine judgement is required here between coaches’, whose style might be described as confrontational, and coaches, whose style of challenge is very soft and may appear to the client to be insufficiently assertive.
• How positive is the client towards being coached?
  • Their attitude will have a significant impact on how they approach the relationship.

Type of coaching coach is best at

External coaches operate in one or more of four “modes”: Skills, Performance, Behavioural and Transformational. The amount of psychological understanding needed by the coach will depend on the mode they operate in. Most coaches will have a centre of gravity in one mode, and some capacity to work in neighbouring mode(s). Their self-perception (or marketing persona) may not necessarily reflect the actual mode of their practice.

Getting the coach to describe their approach to each mode can be helpful in identifying where they appear most comfortable. It is unlikely that one coach will equally at home in all four modes.

Type of coaching client needs

The client’s needs may also be in one or more of these modes. If their needs lie at different ends of the skills to transformational spectrum, then it may be appropriate to consider more than one coach. Some questions to consider:

• Does the outcome desired involve a significant change in the client’s sense of identity and self-understanding? (The deeper the shift, the nearer to the transformational end of the spectrum.)
• How long an intervention is required? (The nearer the skills end of the spectrum, the shorter the intervention needed, generally.)
• How SMART is the goal? (SMART goals relate more closely to skills and performance coaching and are difficult to apply effectively to behavioural and transformational coaching.)

The client’s awareness of the mode of coaching help they need may be limited by the level of their own self-awareness and their contextual awareness (e.g. what “good” or “excellent” looks like).

Personal compatibility

Research in related fields indicates that psychometric profiles do not provide a reliable base for assessing client-coach compatibility, although they may sometimes assist coaches to understand the client’s underlying motivations and relationships with others. Personal values profiles (e.g. Reiss Motivational Profiling) appear to offer a useful second tier element to the matching process. It would normally be best to avoid matching a coach and client, who are at opposite ends of the spectrum on more than one or two factors.

Hawkins, P & Smith, N (2006) Coaching, mentoring & organizational consultancy, McGraw-Hill, Maidenhead

© David Clutterbuck, 2015

Prof David Clutterbuck
Coaching and Mentoring International Ltd
Woodlands, Tollgate,
Maidenhead,
Berks, UK. SL6 4LJ

www.coachingandmentoringinternational.org
e-mail: info@coachingandmentoringinternational.org
Company registration number : 08158710