Showing that the coach’s perspective matters

Most people already have an idea of the value of perspective. You hear people say ‘I need to get some distance from this situation’ or ‘I have to rise above the problem’. Intuitively, they know that distance and perspective help them see solutions.

As coaches we don’t claim to have a god-like, all-seeing, all-knowing perspective of the business. We’re not the subject matter experts, nor do we claim to have all the answers. What we do claim is that we know the value of a third-party perspective and we purposefully bring that approach to work with us, cultivating and demonstrating an attitude of curiosity that challenges and provokes new ways of seeing the business.

A term often used in Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) is ‘looking for the elusive obvious’ – finding subtle, small changes that can make big differences to results. Coaches do that. And beyond the subtle stuff, coaches also spot the self-evident or, as we like to call it, ‘the bloody obvious’! Distance and objectivity enable us to see solutions, options and choices and then offer the appropriate interventions.

Being able to demonstrate this value of a third-party perspective to a client is worth more than being able to talk the theory. Wherever possible, a coach should be willing to roll up her sleeves and demonstrate a piece of coaching change work rather than explain it. If the opportunity presents itself to offer a new perspective for clients to consider, then we suggest you grab it with both hands.

Knowing how perspective feeds into change

An individual or business that needs coaching needs change – something isn’t working or stands to be improved. The third-party perspective enables the coach to highlight where the change can take place. In an organisation, for example, areas identified for change may include

• Culture
• How the work is done
• Mission and values
• Organisational identity
• Processes used
• Relationships between members of staff
• Relationships between the organisation and its staff, customers, suppliers
• Roles
• The kind of work done

Understanding construal level theory

Construal level theory explores the psychology of ‘can’t see the woods for the trees’. In simple terms, the theory is based on the idea that people think in more abstract ways about problems they have some distance from or about problems relating to distant people. Thinking at a more abstract level means it’s possible to be disconnected from the problem, to not be personally affected or associated to it. This detached perspective enables more creative solutions to be considered.

Two levels exist:

• High-level construal thinking is when people look at the bigger picture and don’t focus on limitations or details. By their thinking, they change the framework or context in which the coach views the situation and sees other solutions. In other words, because of distance the coach is more solutions-focused compared to those in the situation, who tend to be problem-focused.
• Low-level construal thinking is when clients think in more concrete terms – like concrete, the terms are often fixed and rigid, with little or no flexibility. This fixed perspective usually comes about because someone has been involved with a problem for a long period of time. The fixation prevents her from seeing or even exploring other perspectives and new possibilities.

The following anecdote demonstrates high-level construal thinking and shows how co-author Steve’s different perspective to the client’s allowed him to take a step back from the situation and come to the task from a detached point of view, which greatly benefitted the client.

Scott was the marketing manager for a software provider. Steve was coaching him in the subject of persuasion and influence, with the view to examine the company’s email marketing campaigns. The brief was to give the campaigns a persuasion and influence makeover to improve client enquiries and increase sales.

Scott’s primary strategy had been to send emails to selected target audiences, and automated replies were triggered by the email recipients’ actions. Scott called this strategy the ‘drip campaign’. The recipients’ actions determined which automated emails were triggered (or dripped out). The automated messages varied depending on whether the recipients opened the email, what landing pages they visited on the company’s website, what they viewed and what links they followed.

Scott announced he didn’t believe the drip campaign strategy was as effective as creating ad-hoc emails. He supported his assumption with statistics he had gathered that clearly showed that when he wrote and sent an independent one-off email, more people read it and took action. Scott was convinced that the drip campaign was a waste of time and ineffective.

Scott had also concluded that the drip campaign simply annoyed people, but he had no evidence to support this point of view. Steve challenged Scott’s point of view by asking him, ‘How do you know this to be true?’ Scott was unable to answer this other than by saying he had a hunch.

Steve asked to see examples of the email messages. What Scott wasn’t able to see because of his involvement over the course of a year was that his ability to write compelling and persuasive copy had improved over time. The earlier communications used in the drip campaigns were less compelling and persuasive than the ad-hoc emails sent out later. It was suspected that the quality of the copy – not the change in strategy – accounted for the improved results.

To test Steve’s theory, new email copy was written using persuasion and influence language. The email was sent to the same database of prospective clients who had previously received emails in the drip campaign. The results were measured, and the new persuasive drip campaign clearly outperformed both the original drip campaign and the ad-hoc campaign, leading to a 130 per cent increase in company sales. An annual £30,000 ($45,000) email marketing campaign generated leads that converted to sales figures in excess of £2.3 million ($3.5 million) compared to £1million ($1.5 million) previously. (See Chapter 15 on how to engage, inform and influence.)

Wherever possible, measure and monetise to demonstrate to the client and to new prospective clients the value of coaching. (For more on this, see the later ‘Measuring and monetising’ section.)

Here are four simple ways to practise getting a new perspective and accessing high-level construal thinking for any situation or problem. (In Chapter 11, we explore additional creative thinking techniques for the coach and the client to practise high-level construal thinking.)

• Temporal distance: Change the perception and look through different timeframes (for example, looking ahead of time, or with hindsight, over the short, medium or longer term period). Getting temporal distance often reveals information that’s not available to the client.
• Spatial distance: Seeing perspectives from a different physical space vantage point (see the Real World Example earlier in this section). Practise looking at a situation from multiple points of view by imagining the problem in front of you and literally standing up, walking around it, standing on a chair, lying on the ground. Ask yourself, ‘From this perspective, what is another way of seeing this?’
• Social distance: The difference between the coaches and the groups they’re coaching affects how any situation is perceived. It is said that ‘a baker will want to bake and a surgeon will want to operate’. Our social identities have an impact on how we perceive the world. Value the difference between you and your clients and practise seeing a situation through the eyes of other people’s perspectives. For example, ask how a child would see this situation? What would a Richard Branson, Donald Trump or other creative entrepreneur think and do here?
• Hypothetical distance: We all have beliefs about what we think is possible or not possible. As a coach, you bring blue-sky, out-of-the-box thinking to the client’s situation. practise dreaming big and offering creative, totally unrealistic solutions.

Leading a client to the light-bulb moment

Many years ago, while being interviewed by a large multinational bank for some executive training programmes it wanted delivered, Steve was casually asked by the managing director, Alex, if and how coaching might help him to make an important and difficult decision. Did Steve have any techniques that would help? Although this exchange wasn’t part of the interview, it was an opportunity to demonstrate the value of a third-party perspective. Manna from heaven for any coach!

Steve started by asking a few questions to get more specific information about what Alex meant by important and difficult. From the replies, Steve understood that Alex needed to get a bit of distance from the decision and a new perspective. He’d come up with two possible decisions and was in a dilemma over which to choose because the difference between each wasn’t distinct.

Steve led Alex through a ten-minute coaching intervention where Alex visualised the choices and rose above the imagined future, looking off in time to see the futures unfolding to their inevitable outcomes. This intervention enabled him to see the choices over time and then review them with hindsight. Hindsight ahead of time is useful!

At no point did Steve need to know what the subject matter was. All he needed to do was guide Alex in exploring different perspectives.

This simple coaching exercise enabled Alex to experience high-level construal thinking in relation to time and space. As a result, Alex reached a point where the light bulb went on. From the new perspective, he had seen a new choice and another possible outcome. He then tested the choice in his mind, using the same visualisation technique, and was able to see that it was the best decision he could make at that moment in time with the information available to him.

Steve asked Alex the value to the business of this new choice. It turned out that the idea could save the bank £100 million ($150 million) over the next two years. ‘Great’, Steve said, ‘that makes my fee seem very reasonable by comparison’.

The point of the story is as follows: to make a compelling business case for coaching, don’t just tell clients the benefits; show them. Be willing to give someone the experience of discovering a number of alternative perspectives. The experience clients have of coaching with you will convince them of the value of coaching with you.

Not every new perspective you offer will work or resonate with clients, but many will, and a coach’s responsibility is to help clients see the alternatives and then work through the choices.

Selling the benefits

In business, everyone is a salesperson. All people have to sell something, whether selling a CV so they get a job, selling themselves for a promotion or selling a creative idea to a team. Whether you like it or not, business people are part of one of the oldest professions on earth. Professional coaches who embrace this idea and become experts in selling the idea of their coaching have full diaries and can choose whom they coach.

We’ve seen many a good coach fall by the wayside and return to a paid job because although they were good at coaching, they were poor at selling their coaching skills. They didn’t have enough clients and ended going back to their day job. That doesn’t have to be you!

Sales people commonly recognise that customers and clients buy the benefits and not the features of a product or service. Yet many ineffective sales people still talk about what their product or service looks or sounds like, and not what it’s going to do for the customer, or give her or get her. Customers are only interested in what’s in it for them. The case is the same for many coaches when it comes to explaining what they do and making a compelling business case for coaching.

Consider a networking event. Over the course of the event, people come over to meet you, and one of their first questions is, ‘So what do you do?’ If you answer ‘I’m a business coach’, you may well see people’s eyes glaze over as they back away and head towards the nearest exit. You may as well say, ‘I’m a lice infestation consultant’ if you want to end the conversation quickly. If you’re lucky enough to be given a second chance and the networker (who may be a prospective client) asks, ‘So what exactly does that entail?’, you now have an opportunity to redeem yourself.

You have two options:

• List your job title or the features of your services. For example:
  • ‘I’m a stress management coach, and I run a stress management programme for overworked executives’.
  • ‘I coach people in time management’.
  • ‘I’m a business coach, and I coach and mentor executives in leadership and team building’.
• Highlight the benefits for anyone choosing to coach with you. For example:
  • ‘It costs a lot to replace a burned-out executive, so I help businesses to better manage stress and create conditions for people to be happier with reduced levels of illness and absenteeism and raised productivity’.
  • ‘I coach people to be more effective and efficient, which translates into greater output and increased profits’.
  • ‘I coach executives to create and lead cohesive teams, which means that they reach project deadlines on time and on budget with minimal overruns and project slippage’.

The difference is clear. The first set of responses is uninspiring. The second set sells the benefits of coaching.

Doing a cost-benefits analysis

You can come at ROI from the angle of assessing:

• The costs of not having coaching
• The benefits of having coaching

This exercise can be carried out with a client, or you can conduct a third-party assessment before holding a meeting. You can do it formally with pen and paper or just conversationally. We prefer to do the exercise formally with the client and with pen and paper because then the client gets to visibly see the business case for coaching unfold before her.

1. Make a cost-benefits chart.

   Take a piece of paper and draw a straight vertical line down the middle. Head up one side ‘Costs of not coaching and staying the same’ and the other, ‘Benefits and value of coaching’.

2. Investigate the costs of staying the same (not coaching).

   Ask good questions that root out hidden costs that may not be obvious to the client. For example:

   • If coaching a sales team, what’s the cost of not making appointments because they can’t handle pricing objections?
   • If coaching for stress management, what’s the cost of sick leave due to stress?
   • If coaching on customer service, what’s the cost to replace a lost customer because they were dissatisfied?
   • How do these costs add up over time – say a month, a year, three years?
   • What are the other additional costs perhaps not fully considered, that is, staff morale, brand damage. How do these costs translate into downtime, project slippage, cost overruns and replacing staff? Given emerging market conditions, how does that picture of costs get even higher?

3. Examine the benefits of coaching.

   Here are a few questions you can include:

   • If coaching a sales team to handle pricing objections leads to on average 10 per cent more monthly sales, what’s the value?
   • If coaching stress management leads to on average a 10 per cent reduction in sick leave, what’s the value?
   • If coaching a customer service team to provide a better service leads to 20 per cent of customers renewing a service for a further two years, what’s the value?
   • How do these savings add up over time – say a month, a year, three years?
   • What are the other additional benefits and values that may not have been fully considered or are difficult to monetise – that is, a happy work place, improved performance, better communication?

With your client, work to show the distinction between the cost of inaction and the potential benefits and values of coaching. When a client can see the comparative analysis between where she is now and where she can be after coaching, she’s more likely to say, ‘Yes, let’s coach’. The bigger the gap between the two, the more value there is.

Measuring and monetising

In the cost-benefits analysis described in the preceding section, you can see an emphasis on measuring and monetising. Facts and figures are what matter most to clients.

In the earlier section ‘Selling the benefits’, we present two approaches to explaining what coaching is all about to a prospective client. But a third, even better approach exists: highlight the benefits and give examples of measurables. For example:

• ‘It costs thousands to replace a burned-out, stressed executive. Did you know that work-related stress costs UK businesses more than £6.5 billion ($9.9 billion) a year, which equates to approximately 10.4 million productive days lost? So I coach businesses to better manage stress and create conditions for people to be happier, with reduced levels of illness and absenteeism and raised productivity. My clients report that, on average, illness and absenteeism is down by 30 per cent’.
• ‘I coach people to be more effective and efficient, which translates into greater output and increased profits. Some of my clients have achieved savings of 15 per cent on average. That’s thousands of pounds’.
• ‘I coach executives to create and lead cohesive teams. It costs a company on average £20,000 ($30,000) in recruitment fees alone to replace a senior team member, let alone the cost of training to get new team members up to speed. So retaining talent is priceless. Plus experienced staff reach project deadlines on time and on budget with minimal overruns and project slippage. The savings made run into the thousands’.

We recommend that wherever possible you offer clients measurable benefits – from your own experiences of coaching and from studies that show the change after coaching. And always look to monetise. So if a study shows percentages, translate the percentages into monetary terms, which are of more interest to the client.

Measuring the hidden benefits clients can’t see

You can gain real value in being able to help a client see the often hidden benefits of coaching in these areas:

• Communication
• Culture and social change
• Happiness and well-being

While doing the costs-benefits analysis (see the earlier section ‘Doing a costs-benefits analysis’), you notice the client start to talk about these areas. Monetisation isn’t always possible or easy, and yet you can get real value in measuring to help the client see the value of coaching not just at the consultation stage but throughout the coaching process.

You need to define and agree with the client:

• What she needs to see, hear or experience to know that a desired outcome has been achieved
• What she needs to see, hear or experience to know that the programme is moving in a positive direction, which includes discussing:
  • How the programme is to be measured
  • How the programme is to be reported back

The following is a three-step process called the Hidden Value Process that enables you to measure and highlight the benefits resulting from coaching that can’t be monetised:

1. Calculate the inputs: the resources needed to implement a coaching programme.

   They’re measured as a cost. For example, the fees for running the programme include venue and equipment costs and staffing costs for the time spent. Assess the costs realistically because they give an accurate measure of investment.

2. Estimate the outputs: the direct result of the programme’s goal.

   So, for example, if five members of staff are coached on improving customer service communication skills, how many customer service issues are you aiming to get resolved in one call compared to multiple calls? The outputs can be best estimates or a pilot study, or the results of the coaching programme can provide the feedback for future programmes and more accurate output assessments. If previous coaching programmes have been run with similar outputs, you can use the results to set the output goals.

3. Measure the outcomes: the changes that have occurred over the longer term.

   So, for example, the five members of staff resolved 10 per cent more issues in one call than before the coaching programme.

After you measure outcomes, you may often then find it easier to look for ways to monetise the results. In the example of customer service calls, this outcome may translate into improved customer satisfaction and improved customer retention. If so, what’s the value to the business of the extended lifecycle of the customer? This information is the basis of a valuable case for further training or as a convincing argument for a new client.

What gets measured gets valued. When you show the value of benefits like happier staff and a more positive organisational culture, you validate ROI.

Investing now for a future return

Effective coaching brings about change. Sometimes the change isn’t apparent or evident while the coaching is happening. For example, the process of learning a new skill and then practising it until it becomes behavioural takes time. Insights and creative ideas sometimes appear after coaching sessions in moments of quiet reflection. Many developments from coaching take time to settle and create results.

Amazing coaches remember to make clients aware of the value of change both in the coaching conversation and afterwards, in the near or distant future. A common mistake among coaches is to underestimate this value and fail to have future changes associated with the work they’ve done.

When change can’t be easily measured or monetised, it’s often useful to explain to a client that not all change work achieves immediate results. Explain that coaching has four component parts that have to be present for coaching to be effective:

• An awareness that something has to or can change
• A willingness to make the change
• The skills and ability to make the change
• The understanding that change takes time and can show up later or in other ways than those originally expected or anticipated

Giving a client this explanation is an effective way of influencing them to notice and associate future positive changes with the work they did with you.

Co-author Marie was coaching a seminar on designing a project for the future and testing the steps along the way when suddenly a member of the group stopped and shivered with delight. The businessman, Paul, explained:

‘You probably won’t remember, but we met at a seminar about six years ago and you did a self-confidence exercise with me. I felt amazing, and you told me to imagine what other amazing things would change in my life. You said that I may look back and remember that moment as being the catalyst. Well, I imagined my business being successful and being able to travel the world. And I just realised in the middle of this exercise that here I am! It’s all come about because of working with you all those years ago’.

Marie’s reply was as follows:

‘That’s amazing! I’m pleased you remembered that moment and experienced your success, which came about because of the actions you took. Now imagine what else can improve and change in your future. Perhaps one day you’ll look back again and acknowledge the work we did here today’.

Don’t employ false humility to disregard this phenomena and not associate with your coaching work. However, you need to strike a balance between bragging and making sure the client associates the positive changes with your work. This example shows how to make the association conversationally. Of course Paul did all the work; Marie had nothing to do with that. However, if a change happens for a client in a coaching conversation or afterwards, don’t be shy about claiming it. Paul became a coaching client after the seminar – a deposit in the karmic bank paying dividends.