A Coaching Dialogue: Being and Doing of a Professional Coach
Carl Rogers (2016) defines coaching as, “the art of facilitating another person’s learning, development, well-being and performance. Coaching raises self-awareness and identifies choices. Through coaching, people are able to find their own solutions, develop their own skills, and change their own attitudes and behaviors. The whole aim of coaching is to close the gap between people’s potential and their current state”. Standing on these coaching principles, I would like to use a coaching dialogue to illustrate the being and doing of a professional coach.
| Coach: Good afternoon, Smarty. Thank you for your time. What would you like to talk about today? | Note #1 |
| Client: Um, I would like you to talk about the difficulty to manage my subordinate recently. | |
| Coach: What I heard is about you want to know more how to manage your subordinate. Could you tell me what the issue is? | Note #2 |
| Client: After I joined this company as the VP position 3 months ago, I think the working relationship with my subordinate, Mary, is not going smooth. Recently there is an issue between Sales and Service department. I raised the issue to Mary, the head of Service, to consider if some operational procedures of Sales and Service need alignment. But all the sudden, she emailed to all staff of both Sales and Service and complained that the service team had lots of frustration about the difficulty of working with the Head of Sales. And she mentioned that I want to make big changes in both Sales and Service operations. She just made things complicated. | |
| Coach: What have you done about it so far? | Note #3 |
| Client: I didn’t do anything. | |
| Coach: Well how is this impacting on your organization if the Sales and Service teams can’t work together smoothly? | Note #4 |
| Client: Both Mary and the Head of Sales must be cooperative. If they cannot cooperate, then the sales operation cannot go smooth, and then affecting customer satisfaction. | |
| Coach: I understand that you must be very frustrating because you are their leaders. You said you didn’t do anything. What is in your mind that you chose not to step in this situation at this moment? | Note #5 |
| Client: Well I am a new joined leader. I didn’t very familiar with what Sales and Service teams are doing. In some ways I have to depend on Mary’s knowledge no matter her attitude is. And I think I’m not a very directive person. | |
| Coach: Can you tell me more? What does that mean of not being very directive? | Note #6 |
| Client: When there is a problem, I always want to seek opinions from my subordinates before making decision. So, I’m very easily persuaded by others. | |
| Coach: If I understand correctly, the concern you have is about not familiarized with Mary’s operation. Seem to me that you are not confident to supervise her because you lack her technical knowledge. You rely on her advice for your decision making. So, what can you change? | Note #7 |
| Client: For this situation. Oh, what can I change? I think I need to get familiar more about what Mary’s department is doing. | |
| Coach: Yes, I agree with you that you can increase your confidence level when you understand more about Mary’s job. Uh, taking another perspective, how about your leadership style and your behaviors when you supervise Mary? What you could be done differently? | Note #8 |
| Client: I might be giving her the direction to ask for ideas, even I’m not 100% sure what to do. I can ask the question to verify if she has difficulty and push her to think about how she could solve the problem. | |
| Coach: Great. To move forward, what support might you need? | Note #9 |
| Client: Maybe I need more practices about communication skills and being more assertive. | |
| Coach: That’s good. Um, what is the best way for us to follow up on this after this conversation? | Note #10 |
| Client: I think that from the conversation, you make me think about some concrete ways, that I never think about before. I think we can set up another time to talk about it. | |
| Coach: Wonderful. Yeah. I will support you. I encourage you to try those actions. After one week, we meet up again to see how it goes. Does it make sense? | Note #11 |
| Client: Yes, thank you. |
This coaching dialogue starts with a simple and short question, “What do you want to talk about today?” This easy-to-answer question aims to let the client feel safe to set the topic for the coaching session (Note #1). Integral perspective is that whatever the topic the client wants to talk about matters most. A coach needs to make sure his/her own understanding is accurate and specific. Asking follow-up question to summarize and clarify the context of the topic are necessary (Note #2, Note #3 & Note #4), which requires a coach’s excellent active listening skills. Active listening is a powerful way to show respect to client, which is the foremost important competency in coaching. A coach must listen and understand accurately what the client is talking about, before asking the right powerful questions. Since the use of words or utterance in crafting questions or responding to client is important in communication (Tannen, 1995), following a structural process (e.g. Whitmore’s GROW model) with clear opening and closing wordings could be helpful (Note #1 and Note #11).
In the middle part of the coaching dialogue is a turning point that allows creating reflection for the client towards the issue (Note #5 – 8). With the end in mind, a coach is helping the client reflect areas for personal growth, for instance in this case, to understand his new leader’s roles and develop assertive communication in leading people. The client is a newly joined leader. In the new work team context, he continuously constructs and reconstructs the meaning of his leadership. According to Kegan’s three levels of mental complexity, as a leader, the client can develop more complex thinking – a self-transforming mind. At this level, the client could develop a capacity for multiframe thinking and reflection of his leadership experience (Wildflower & Brennan, 2011, p.44).
A professional coach uses probing for client’s self-reflection – a good coaching strategy to manage progress and accountability. This approach is supported by Jackson’s concept of structured reflection in coaching (Jackson, 2004). Reflection is an effective way to put the client at the centre of the coaching process and create self-responsibility for client to own his/her improvement. Through reflection, the client balances own learning style from the experience to generate new learning opportunities. It helps the client to objectively select actions from the perspective of his goal and develop capability to deal with future challenges.
From Integral perspective, a professional coach should take an inside-out client-centred learning, which is more effective than outside-in teacher-centred preaching. At the closing of the coaching dialogue, the coach asks questions and offers support to the client to take responsibility for his actions. With the coach’s positive encouragement, the client creates an action plan and will receive continuous coaching on his path of leadership development (Note # 9 -11).
References
Jackson, P. (2004). Understanding the experience of experience: A practical model of reflective practice for coaching. International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring, 2(1), 57-67.
Rogers, J. (2016). Coaching skills: The definitive guide to being a coach. England: Open University Press.
Seashore, C., Shawver, M., Thompson, G., & Mattare, M. (2004). Doing good by knowing who you are. OD practitioner, 36(3), 42-6.
Tannen, D. (1995). The power of talk: Who gets heard and why. Harvard Business Review, 73(5), 138-148.
Wildflower, L., & Brennan, D. (Eds.). (2011). The handbook of knowledge-based coaching: From theory to practice. John Wiley & Sons.