Coach, Client, and Organizational Issues

As the Boyce and Hernez-Broome framework suggests, the coach, client, and organization come together to shape the resulting coaching dynamic that results in learning, behavioral change, and productive and psychologically meaningful outcomes. Collectively, the authors in the first section of the book (Chapters One through Six) covering coach, client, and organizational issues contribute to a picture of leadership coaching as a multilevel phenomenon, spanning individual, dyadic, group, and organizational levels. Beginning at the individual level, the coach, of course, plays a significant role in the nature of the coach-client relationship, the coaching methods and techniques that are used, the content of the interactions and discussions between the coach, client, and other relevant parties (such as the client’s peers and superiors), and how the coaching engagement is evaluated in terms of progress and defining success.

As Davis and McKenna highlight (Chapter One), given that coaching is ultimately about enabling individual change in developing leaders, coaches’ theories about individual change are important for coaches to have positive influences on their clients’ abilities to successfully change how they think, act, and perform. Building from established findings in the psychotherapy literature that identify the “active ingredients” of executive coaching which include the clients (their readiness to change, ability to learn, coping styles, skill needs, personality, and developmental goals), the coach-client relationship (establishing and maintaining rapport, building and maintaining trust), positive expectancies, and theory and techniques, they point out how various psychological theories such as cognitive, behavioral, psychodynamic, adult-learning and person-centered theories provide different, but also potentially complementary, contributions to triggering these active ingredients for coaching success.

From their work some intriguing questions can be posed, for example: What psychological theories are most helpful to trigger client factors, such as readiness to change, that are associated with more successful coaching outcomes like increased self-awareness, behavioral change, and performance? Are coaches who utilize a broad repertoire of psychological approaches more successful than those who are perhaps more experienced in a more limited range of approaches? and What enables successful coaches to shift approaches when needed? Building from these questions, it would be very helpful to extend Davis and McKenna’s discussion of the different unique advantages of alternative psychological theories to develop a working taxonomy of psychological theories with active ingredients of coaching that can both guide future research on leadership coaching techniques and give direction to coaches on strategies to consider when working with clients in different situations. Likewise, we need research to better understand how highly effective coaches build and master skills that enable them to apply various techniques to their full potential and how to flexibly adapt during the course of a coaching engagement and across clients (see Peterson, Chapter Four; McKenna & Davis, 2009).

Expanding to the relationship level, Davis and McKenna also point to the importance of alignment between the coach and client on the psychological approach(es) that serve as the basis of the coaching relationship. As such, building a strong relationship with the client, asking probing questions to identify a client’s underlying “theory in use,” and carefully calibrating one’s approach as coach with the client’s expectations and evolving thinking to form a strong coach-client alliance points to a potentially important meta-coaching skill. This, consistent with Boyce and Hernez-Broome’s framework, suggests that not only is coach-client fit important for facilitating how coach factors such as coaching technique influence coaching processes and outcomes, but that coaches play an active and important role in shaping fit with their clients.

Another element of the Boyce and Hernez-Broome framework that has implications for coach-client fit deals with the way in which organizational support factors—in this case, sourcing and matching systems used by organizations—come together to shape the coach-client fit. Underhill (Chapter Two) focuses squarely on this topic by articulating how organizations with significant coaching efforts go about sourcing and screening for coaches, describing how coach-client matching and fit is also significantly shaped by organizational processes such as sourcing and screening methods and discussing the underlying decision rules on questions such as whether to rely on external, internal, or some combination for coaches. For instance, a carefully developed and intensive coaching recruiting and selection process that takes into account coaches’ knowledge of the organizational context and fit with the level, function, experience, and personality of the executive is likely to facilitate fit between an individual client’s leadership coaching needs and the coach’s capabilities. Understanding this dynamic between organizational practices on coach sourcing and selection and the quality of the resulting coaching dynamic on dimensions such as coach-client fit is important for advancing both the practice and science of coaching itself as well as building organizational coaching capabilities. This is a topic that we return to at the conclusion of this chapter with specific recommendations.

In addition to sourcing and selection, the training and development of leadership coaches has unique requirements compared to other forms of coaching. As Lee and Frisch point out in Chapter Three, coaching leaders is different from other forms of coaching that, for instance, emphasize the coach’s providing advice or guidance based on his or her business content expertise or experience. Leadership coaching involves helping executives build self-awareness, understanding, and sets of skills and competencies in areas that are inherently difficult to master. Thus, effective leadership coaches must not only understand leadership theories and how adults learn and develop, but they also have to understand and incorporate knowledge about the organizational context in which executives function and the unique challenges and issues they face. With this in mind, Lee and Frisch propose what they see as two essential elements in training coaches to develop leaders through one-on-one coaching engagements. The first is the personal model of coaching, which captures how the coach thinks about his or her own personal characteristics that he or she brings to the coaching situation (such as education, experiences, strengths), the coach’s understanding and beliefs about leadership and organizational dynamics, and the coach’s preferences and beliefs about various coaching approaches and practices. Coaches’ personal models shape how they approach their coaching practice, how they actually deliver their coaching through engagements with clients, and how they manage their own professional development as coaches. The second important component to training effective coaches, argue Lee and Frisch, is case experience with structured supervision following an apprenticeship, a learning-by-doing model. Lee and Frisch’s components and set of topics that compose the heart of a leadership coaching training program provide an effective framework and summarize much of what is known in the practice community about developing leadership coaches.

Moving from being a good to a great leadership coach is tremendously difficult, argues Peterson (Chapter Four). Great coaches have developed a high level of expertise about the nature of human learning and are able to successfully coach developing leaders even in situations that are quite complex, urgent, or unfavorable, such as working with clients who are perhaps inaccurately labeled as being “uncoachable.” Drawing from the expertise literature (for example, Colvin, 2008; Ericsson, 2006), Peterson articulates the challenges that leadership coaches face as they attempt to move from being good to becoming great. These include engaging in required deliberative practice and sustained, focused effort, sorting through the complexity of coaching engagements to understand relationships between coaching actions and client outcomes, mastering a broad knowledge base and diverse set of skills, and persevering through the tedious and frustrating aspects of the difficult areas of executive coaching (such as helping clients translate insights into action). Again, drawing from expertise research, Peterson’s recommendations to leadership coaches on how to overcome these challenges include specific methods of engaging in deliberative practice, adopting specific learning goals, seeking client feedback, and practicing active self-awareness and self-reflection. These recommendations can offer the structure of a development plan, if you will, for leadership coaches to improve their own coaching competencies (and personal model of coaching, to use Lee and Frisch’s terminology) and have implications for leadership coaching training, continuous development, and certification.

Great leadership coaching, however, also necessitates careful consideration of the client/coachee. As Valerio and Deal (Chapter Five) articulate, leadership coaching requires carefully observing and understanding characteristics of the client and knowing how to take coachee/client characteristics into account in the coaching engagement. Specifically, they stress the need for leadership coaches to pay close attention to two important sets of considerations when it comes to understanding clients in ways that can enable more effective leadership coaching. First, coaches need to systematically assess clients in terms of “categorizations that matter” such as life stage and goals, level in the organization, and the client’s culture of origin; Valerio and Deal provide suggestions on the types of questions to ask to develop an understanding of these factors and how they may play out during the coaching engagement. Second, they highlight key transitions that clients often experience, such as transitioning to a new organization, moving into a global responsibility, or taking on an expatriate assignment, and the unique coaching approaches that are required once a leadership coach understands the challenges these transitions present to their client. Consistent with the Hernez-Broome and Boyce framework, this points to the importance of understanding the unique situation of the coachee/client in facilitating coach-client fit.

Valerio and Deal’s contribution also highlights an important feature of the increasingly global environment that leaders experience and how it relates to leadership coaching. First, as cultural and racial diversity increases and use of leadership coaching expands internationally (see Riddle and Pothier, Chapter Fifteen), increasingly coaches will find that they will be working with clients from different cultural backgrounds. At a minimum, leadership coaches need to be aware of these differences and seek to understand how cultural values (their client’s and their own) may affect the coaching engagement. Given that recent research has shown the significance of cultural differences in views of leadership (see House, Hanges, Javidan, Drofman, & Gupta, 2004), research taking cross-cultural concepts and applying them to the study of leadership coaching will be very helpful. Second, as many leadership coaches will work with clients taking on international assignments, helping their clients prepare for and learn from these developmental experiences will be greatly aided by understanding the cultural adjustment challenges faced by expatriates and how to help their clients manage and learn from those challenges.

The ingredients to successful coaching extend beyond the individual level of the coach and client and the dyadic level of fit and the coaching relationship. The role of the organizational system supporting coaching and, in particular, the resulting partnerships between coaches and the sponsoring organization, are critical as well. Although coaching is often considered in isolation as a stand-alone leadership development practice (see the Introduction), leadership coaching almost always occurs in a context defined by the coachee’s role and position as well as the larger organizational context and its integration within a larger leadership development system.

As Desrosiers and Oliver point out (Chapter Six), the effectiveness of leadership coaching is often contingent on the extent to which coaching is connected within a larger leadership development system and how well coaches and the coaching engagement process are integrated within that system (see also the Boyce and Hernez-Broome framework). They go on to offer a useful framework for how organizations can enhance coaching by developing strong partnerships between the organization and coach. This begins with alignment at the engagement and organization levels on the purpose, goals, and philosophy of coaching, then shift to ensuring ongoing support for coaches working in the organization, and then move to further reinforcing strong coach-organization partnerships through evaluation at the engagement and system levels. Practices such as (1) the two-day Executive Coach Certification Program at PepsiCo that facilitates alignment through coach selection, education regarding the organizational culture and its approach to coaching, and development and clarifying issues of confidentiality and boundaries; (2) Microsoft’s Coaching Forum that provides coaches with valuable support in the form of development opportunities and sharing of coaching trends between coaches and the organization; and (3) Lockheed Martin’s pairing of external coaches with internal coaches who provide ongoing support and assist in evaluating engagements of external coaches all provide best practice examples of how organizations can create strong partnerships between coaches and organizations through systematic alignment, support, and evaluation.

In summary, for leadership coaching to realize its promise, we have to begin by carefully considering how the traveling companions—the coach, client, and organization—come together to shape the coaching dynamic. By considering leadership coaching in both its individual parts (coaches, clients, the organization) and how these important players can work in unison as part of a multilevel system at the individual, dyadic, group, organizational, and environmental (or cultural) levels, we can better understand the coaching process and outcomes.