Although these steps seem to flow in a logical order, in practice they do not necessarily happen in this sequence. Sometimes a next action makes perfect sense until you and your client work through the implications of the roles of the key players. Then it becomes clear that some other action needs to happen first to help align everyone’s roles before the planned next step can happen. Or the next step is clear until the client realizes that it would merely replay an old pattern, and some new action needs to be planned that will break through to a more effective pattern. Actually, each decision made during this planning phase needs to be doublechecked against the other steps to ensure that they are fulfilling an action plan that addresses all the issues embedded in these four steps of planning.

Here is another thing to keep foremost in mind: the planning phase is essentially about helping the client get emotionally prepared to face her challenge. Remember the motto for this phase: “Keep the ownership with the client.” The client needs to come out of this planning phase not only knowing what she plans to do, but how she needs to remain persistent and determined while she is acting in new ways. Ironically, if you are not careful, the planning steps themselves can distract you and your client from this essential goal, especially if they are done in a mechanistic or wholly rational way without the client facing her anxiety about how she needs to work differently in her job. During every step of this phase, help your client prepare to face her challenge by mobilizing her stamina for the plan she decides to put into play.

Some clients feel so relieved to get their problems off their chest that they do not move to the next step. Their stress may be temporarily alleviated just through conversations about the situation. Since they feel better (if only temporarily), they act as though the situation has improved. It has not. A coach does the client no favors to ignore his lack of directed action. Without a plan, the client will revisit the situation and repeat the same responses.

For example, I was in coaching conversations with Rich, a CEO who had a tendency to “stay in the talk,” meaning that he liked talking about his situation but not doing anything about it. As he spoke about his issue, it became clear that he had a handle on it. He knew the key issues, and he knew how he contributed to it. He grasped the root causes of the difficulty and even had good ideas for solutions. But he was unwilling to focus on the uphill climb it took to change the circumstances. He never created a plan, and the problem was never solved.

To avoid this lack of action, you need to encourage the client to identify a specific next step. Sometimes a client can do this immediately. Other times, a client’s next step will emerge from first reviewing the other three tasks of the planning road map from the beginning of this chapter.

Any step the client chooses probably has an element of risk to it. Otherwise he would have taken that step already and would not have needed your help to figure out what to do. Often clients try to choose a path that is devoid of risk, a very human response. Wouldn’t we all rather take the easier road? But executives seldom have risk-free choices. Usually all paths have risks embedded in them. Even when the outcome is highly prized, the risks associated with the desired result can be daunting. Schnarch (1997) aptly describes this dilemma by stating, “We rarely accept we’re choosing the anxiety we’ll have to deal with. We want choices without prices and solutions without anxiety.... Anxiety per se isn’t the problem. Anxiety is inherent in growth.... The real problem is our intolerance and fear of anxiety” (p. 302).¹

One way to help a client view risk productively is to help him use two complementary ways to view the anxiety-provoking consequences of his decisions. The first is to look at outcomes and whether the risks taken are going to be worth the results. The second is to see the actions as an expression of who the client is, and he accepts the accompanying risks. An example of this second perspective could be a client who decides, “I know it’s risky, but I can no longer go along with the group on this one. I want to become the kind of person who can tell the boss all the pros and cons and not protect her from bad news. I may be the only one, but it’s more of who I want to be to do it this way.” When clients make a decision based on both of these ways of weighing risks—by outcomes and by defining who they are becoming—they can more readily stand behind their actions, tolerate the sting of their own anxiety, and accept the consequences of those actions, whether the outcomes are in their favor or not. It is when clients try to avoid all negative consequences that they are left with indecisiveness and underoptimized results. A client’s plan therefore needs to use the most challenging level of action that the system, and the client, can tolerate.

You can help your client by asking basic questions: Is she dealing with the right issue? Is she going to talk to the right person? In order to get answers to these questions, you can delve into areas that help organize the client’s action plan with questions that get at some of the most typically ambiguous or misaligned variables in an organization. A client needs to clarify these areas before she can act effectively:

These questions bring rigor to the planning process. By inviting your client to address issues of change management and role clarity thoroughly, you can help her leverage her plan to greater success.

Here is how change management and role clarity issues played out in a situation with one of my clients, Miriam. (The major players in the story and their roles are set out in Figure 6.1.)

As you can see, while Miriam prepared for the next step in her planning stage, she discovered that her first action could not be with Sam. She needed to talk with Jim first. And Jim had to talk with Ross. Assessing change management role alignment issues has the potential of leveraging a client’s plan to greater effectiveness. This is why you encourage your client to study the context surrounding her action plan for role and change management variables; they could have an impact on the plan itself.

Once the right action plan is identified, it is critical that coach and client discover which behaviors reinforce the patterns that have kept her plans from working. Here are some approaches to working with a client around the patterns she co-creates with others at work.

The following example shows Miriam’s discovery of her pattern of interaction.

Here was a classic cycle of a two-sided, self-reinforcing pattern. Miriam’s reaction fostered Sam’s under functioning response, and her behavior undermined the very thing she wanted. Sam’s action seemed to jump-start not him to action but Miriam to over action—and more of the same in an unending, subconscious cycle.

Miriam was so locked into this style that she lost sight of her goals in the discussions. Since she often sold ideas to others successfully, this lost sale knocked her off balance. Their conversations usually ended with Sam minimally promising compliance and Miriam feeling uneasy about any real prospect for change.

It can be very useful to the client to help her identify these patterns for herself. Invite the client to notice her internal reaction when she gets into a repetitive pattern. If she is open to reflect on her experience and take responsibility for it, she may then discover the pattern and what triggers it.

Any number of internal states can signal an automatic pattern:

In Miriam’s case, the internal signal was her high level of frustration and her negative judgments about Sam’s “passivity” and “unprofessionalism.”

When a client is so frustrated that she can focus only on what the other person is doing wrong, it is a sign that she is truly stymied in her own side of the pattern. This is an example of internal homeostasis that will keep the client from doing anything different. She needs to develop the ability to step back and gain enough distance to see both sides in a more neutral way, including her own contribution to a pattern that no longer works. Only then will she gain some freedom to think creatively about how she might change her side.

One way to get used to thinking of patterns as truly co-created by both contributors is to start charting it out in a simple picture. Once you become adept at seeing patterns and charting them in this way, you can transfer this skill to your clients and help them visualize the patterns they co-create at work.

To begin, draw two arrows like those in Figure 6.2. This is a picture of a self-reinforcing dance that two people, or a leader with her team, create together. Whatever the person (represented by the top arrow) does elicits the reciprocating “dance steps” of the other person (represented by the bottom arrow). And those steps reinforce and draw out your client’s response. By the time you meet your client, he and his team have probably been within the same pattern for so long that it has become invisible to them—both what the pattern is and who contributes to it. At best, clients can sometimes see the other person’s contribution, but often not how they feed into it.

Now label each side to represent the key players. I will use the people from the story, Miriam and Sam, for the example in Figure 6.3.

Labeling the two sides of the pattern is a process of generating hypotheses from both you and your client. The titles are less important than getting at the essence of the pattern. I have found it most useful to think of a single verb that would describe your client’s contribution and a single verb to describe the other party’s contribution. Thus, you have a two-verb description of the self-reinforcing pattern. Remember Miriam and Sam’s pattern: Miriam was the overenthusiastic seller and Sam the indifferent prospective buyer. Their two-verb pattern is charted in Figure 6.4.

Here is an example of how to structure the conversation to identify both sides of the pattern when the client does not see it at first:

Notice the coach’s questions to Miriam that are in bold type. They are repetitive questions. The coach keeps up the same litany: “What do you do? Then what does he do? Then what do you do?” These repetitive questions help you and the client see the circularity of the pattern and how each side reinforces the other. The client begins to see that she is part of it and what she does that keeps the pattern going. What is important is the client’s ownership of the pattern and seeing that she contributes as much to the pattern as the other person does. It is up to her to change her side, rather than expecting the other person to be the only one who changes.

There are many typical co-created patterns that frustrate people at work. They also decrease effectiveness and productivity. Figure 6.5 lists some of the ones I have encountered with clients. One way of thinking of pattern work is that each side of the pattern is lacking either backbone or heart. Clients usually have to develop the side of them that is weak on either delivering backbone or weak on showing heart. The same is true for these typical nonproductive patterns: each side is missing at least one element of backbone and heart.

Miriam finally realized that she knew very little about what Sam thought of any of these initiatives. At first that made her angry. On further reflection during our conversations, she realized that she did not create much of a space for him to air his opinions.

Once Miriam saw that her contribution to the pattern did not allow Sam to give her the very thing she wanted (Sam’s opinion), she was ready to set a different goal, both for a different outcome in the meeting and a different way to act in the meeting.

This step (best-case scenario) challenges the client to get behaviorally specific about her expectations of the other person (for example, “He would initiate meetings with me, coming to me with ideas about how to streamline labor costs in the department”). This opens a crack in the door, often relaxing her commitment to her old way of thinking about the other person. It provides her with some breathing space to explore her own side of the dance creatively. It also requires the client to begin to focus on the next step of planning: considering what resistance she can expect to her new way of acting in meetings.

Remember that resistance means there are forces in place that operate to keep things the same. In earlier chapters, I covered how strong the interactional field is and therefore how homeostasis will pull all players back into their habitual ways of doing things within the system. Since it is a natural response, you and your client can count on it. It is the savvy coach who focuses the client on the resistance to her plans. It is the prepared client who girds herself for the inevitable push-back.

Clients need to plan for the inevitable resistance they will experience in executing their plan. Sometimes clients enter into a coaching process enthusiastic about their plan but unprepared for the resistance. Afterward they might say, “Well, that was a lousy idea; it didn’t work out.” Instead of allowing them unrealistic illusions, you can invite them to think about what they are going to do when their plan does not work. After all, the real challenge is to bring clients fully to the moment in a different way than they ever experienced before.

Planning for resistance can help clients develop a realistic persistence rather than pursuing a plan based on ungrounded optimism. It can build their capacity to remain in sticky situations that activate anxiety. They may not be so easily thrown off course when they experience the inevitable static in the system.

There is power in imagining a successful situation beforehand and rehearsing for its outcome. There is also power in imagining what to do about the resistance that might derail an action step. Both preparations pave the way for success. It can be highly productive to encourage your clients to imagine the resistance that could sink their initiatives. This includes their internal resistance as well. Sometimes it is not a pleasant experience, but by pinpointing their individual vulnerabilities to the forces that keep things in place, you can improve a client’s chance for pushing through the resistance.

For example, a client may know that he never fails to back off from his plan when three specific people in the department come up with objections to it. He can then choose to keep moving ahead even if those three people predictably play their part in the dance. It also helps to identify the judgments he thinks people will have when he persists: “Well, they’ll think I’m being unreasonable or unreliable. They may even complain to my boss.”

You can encourage the client to imagine beyond the impasse. Ask him what he will do to stay on course. You may go through many repetitions of, “Then what will you do?” In that way, you are helping him build tolerance for his own discomfort at facing the resistance to his new pattern. When he fully explores these scenarios, it can be liberating, sometimes even funny. He can see how transparent everyone’s resistance can be when he has pictured himself withstanding it, making it possible to last long enough to get to the other side. In Miriam’s case, planning for resistance helped her prepare for the change she wanted.

As you can see in this conversation, the coach offers a couple of different actions the client could take, anticipating the push-back response from the other person. The client imagines both falling back into her old pattern and then moving beyond it to a distinctly different response that keeps her on track with her plan.

You can use another tool to help your client plan her actions to counter push-back resistance by drawing on a worksheet the contrast between the old and new patterns like those illustrated in Figure 6.6.

Once that is clear, the client lists the likely push-back and new responses she could use. Figure 6.7 shows how Miriam and her coach used the worksheet.

Because patterns are so ingrained and often unconsciously reinforced, your client may not shift the pattern on her own without help while she is implementing it. This is the main reason to do live-action coaching with your client. It is an art in and of itself. The next chapter explores this particular kind of coaching. It also continues Miriam’s story so you can see what happened with her plan with Sam.