4

The Coaching Relationship

“To communicate is to enter the other, while watching ourselves carefully, to enter without usurping..To usurp the other is to annul him, to prevent him from returning the gift; it is the refusal to accept his discrete word; it is to violate his inner home without allowing him to enter ours; it is the arrogance of someone who believes himself to be an entirely fecundating force and refuses to receive. The univocal gift, without reciprocity.is not communication, but violation.”

—M. F. Sciacca

In a sense, the coaching relationship is a strange topic to bring up because, as Medard Boss said earlier, we already and always have a relationship with everyone and everything we encounter, whether we are aware of it or not. Consequently, it’s always the case that we do have a relationship with our potential client. The question remains, however, what is the nature of that relationship? Is it sturdy enough to sustain itself during the sometimes tumultuous events of coaching, and does it have the necessary qualities to allow the coaching to readily succeed?

I’m attempting in this chapter to bring into the foreground that which is usually in the background. I’ve indicated earlier my view that coaching is more a “be” than a “do,” but usually this distinction is not very useful. I intend in this chapter to give more substance to the distinction, and thus set up a way to observe, correct, and develop what you’re doing. When such a movement is made, a new background has to be put in place in order to frame the new foreground and give it meaning and a reference point.

The background for the kind of relationship that we will explicitly discuss is the shared commitment of the client and the coach. Both people have to, in some way, be committed to the same thing, however vague that may be in form. Otherwise there would be no impetus to explore, create, or maintain a relationship sufficient for coaching. As you read this, you may discover why some of your coaching efforts have failed. Could it be that you and your client did not share a commitment, or that you hoped that your commitment and enthusiasm would somehow bring your client along?

In my view, sometimes the commitment and enthusiasm of the coach do energize the coaching effort, especially in moments of uncertainty, but what makes such energizing possible is the already existent (although at the moment dormant) commitment of the client.

Of course, some people may now ask, “Well, what do you do if this shared commitment isn’t present? Does that mean coaching can’t happen?” My answer is yes. I do not mean that the coach is then powerless to take any action. What can occur is an inquiry into what the client is committed to, and sometimes a bridge can be built from that to the commitment of the coach, therefore leading to something genuinely shared. In any case, the shared commitment is the background for the coaching relationship.

The elements of the relationship are mutual trust, mutual respect, and mutual freedom of expression. Let’s discuss each in turn after some general comments. None of the elements is independent of the others. What would it mean if we trusted someone who we didn’t respect, for example, or if we felt free to express ourselves to someone who we didn’t trust? Additionally, working on one element will strengthen the others. I’ll address each element individually so that you can have a way of understanding what the dynamics are in any particular relationship. The modifier “mutual” indicates that the quality must go both ways, so that the client and coach trust each other, respect each other, and both feel free to express themselves.

Mutual Trust

What do you mean when you say that you trust someone? How does trust come about? How is trust repaired? Do we have a say about whom we trust and whom we don’t, or is it just a matter of instinctive, unconscious selection? Your answers to these questions are more important than anything I’ll have to say on the topic because it’s always going to be your experience that informs your coaching. And although I know that readers rarely do it, I invite you to take some time to consider your answers to the questions above before you continue with the text.

All of us enter into the world of coaching with our own personal history. For some of us, that means that we have met many people we have found to be trustworthy. We discovered that we could take action from what they said, rely on their sincerity, and feel secure that they would maintain confidences. Of course there are others of us who are on the other side of these examples. We have encountered people who we have found untrustworthy. We’ve felt let down, betrayed, not supported, or lied to. Either set of experiences can leave us in either a strong position to coach or in one fraught with difficulties.

Since we can’t change our background, the most important task becomes to understand where we are personally in our ability to authentically trust. A background full of trustful experiences may facilitate our trusting new people. But at the same time, a background of betrayed trust can leave us with an eagerness to leave the past behind us and find people worthy of our trust. The other side of the equation is equally symmetrical. People who have had many trustful experiences may miss the sometimes subtle cues that alert us to a betrayal of trust about to happen. A background of trust can lead us blindly to certain circumstances. It is probably obvious for someone who brings a background of untrusting relationships to coaching that there may be an additional vigilance required for the coach to be present in the current relationship and not reenacting one from the past. As I said in the beginning, and perhaps as these examples have made more clear, the essential step is that a coach become aware of her own background and how that could shape the current relationship with the client.

Whatever background we bring, at bottom it seems to me that trust is a gift that we can give to people. I say it this way because I’ve often heard that trust must be earned, but I’ve never heard a listing of the criteria for earning it. Yes, it makes sense to prudently observe someone in a variety of circumstances over a period of time before we determine that we are going to trust them. In the end, however, it’s my contention that we trust people because we make up our mind to do it and not because the circumstances compel us to do so.

Trust is not a matter of accounting—adding up positives and negatives about a person, keeping a scrupulous log of virtues and vices, applying a formula that extends the calculation into the future, and then allowing the dynamics of the formula to determine whether we trust or not. To the contrary, usually we just find ourselves in the middle of trusting someone, or not, and we don’t quite know why. We continue trusting until the person betrays us with sufficient severity that we withdraw our trust or we wait until he does something to “redeem himself.” Coaching by its nature is less serendipitous than that. I’m proposing a middle ground between the accounting method of building trust and the mystery-shrouded method of somehow finding ourselves in the middle of trusting.

The first step in this middle ground is to determine what, in fact, we trust about the person. In what domain of life or activity do we trust this person? In coaching, it’s rare that we have to trust the person in all aspects of life and through unbounded time. Once we have chosen what the pertinent domain is, then we can begin to assess two aspects of the person’s behavior.

The first is asking if this person is sincere in what they say. Do they go into action to fulfill promises made? Do they tell the same version of events to different groups, or is the story recrafted to fit particular audiences? In sum on this point, I am saying we can assess a person as sincere when words and actions are consistent and when the person maintains consistency in speaking to different people.

The second element in assessing trust is a matter of evaluating competence. Has the person demonstrated a capacity for fulfilling what he said? Have you observed over a period of time that the person has successfully shown the competence in question? Thus we would not trust a seven-year-old child of whatever level of sincerity when he promised that he could perform a tonsillectomy on us when we complained of a sore throat. It’s in the same sense that both these elements of assessment, sincerity and competence, come together when we are working to determine whether or not we trust.

What I’ve said here may sound like it’s a sophisticated version of the accounting method of determining trust, and I can understand how it could appear that way. However, I’m attempting to make a distinction that trust does not have to be a universal judgment about a person. It’s not whether we trust him or not; it’s whether we trust him or not in a particular domain based upon our personal judgment of him given the above criteria. In other words, we’re keeping the power of determination with us as the observer and assessor, and not in an automatic, rigid accounting procedure.

Mutual Respect

Like trust, many people say that respect has to be earned, but they never quite tell you what actions a person is required to take in order to earn this respect. It’s probably also true that in most people’s thinking, respect is not very distinct from agreeing with or liking. For example, when people say, “I respect her opinion,” what are they really saying—that they agree with it, that they like it? And what do people mean when they say, “I respect him”?

The essence of respect is accepting a person for what they are and what they present themselves to be. Respect exists in a range from mild acceptance to total admiration. On the acceptance end of the spectrum, we decide that the values and the behavior of someone are within the wide range of what we find to be tolerable. We may not fully understand the person or her motivation, but we’ve found a way to accommodate her that minimizes conflict. On the admiration side, we fully endorse the values and behavior of the person and hold them up as a model for ourselves and others.

When I hear people say that they do not respect anyone, my guess is that they are saying that there is no one that they admire in all aspects of life. Very few people hold up to this high standard for respect, especially in these days when the private lives of public figures are put under the close scrutiny of the media. In coaching people, it’s not necessary that you maintain this high-end standard of respect. What is required is that we respect clients in the domain of activity in which we will be coaching them, and within the day-to-day relationship that we personally have with them. It may be the case, for example, that we do not respect a client’s political views, or how she spends her money or her time. This doesn’t mean that we can’t coach her in an area of life that doesn’t include these topics.

Like trust, respect is not an accountant’s printout of deposits someone has made into our private bank of acceptable behavior. When we are attempting to decide whether we respect someone or not, we can reflect on their past behavior and make up our mind whether we find it at least tolerable for us. If we don’t, then it is the case that we don’t respect them and they are not a candidate for our coaching. In such an instance, it’s sometimes possible to speak with the potential client to find out more about what he or she was up to in the circumstances that we have been assessing. Such an investigation sometimes sheds a different light on what happened so that we can find a way to tolerate it.

In a way similar to our discussion about trust, the stance that a coach takes regarding respect necessitates close, fair examination of what has really happened. To do this the coach must be able to separate what happened from what he thought about or felt about what happened, that is to say, make distinct what occurred from his reaction to what occurred. Without the competence to make this separation, we will continually find ourselves coaching people who we “like” or “feel comfortable with,” and we will find many reasons, stories, excuses, or justifications for not coaching the people we don’t react to positively.

Our culture has some strange notions about first impressions and these can get us into trouble as coaches. For example, I often hear in the executive ranks that a potential executive has been ruled out for promotion because “We don’t feel comfortable with her.” Upon closer examination, the statement turns out to be a euphemistic way of saying, “I don’t like her,” which probably really means, “She is not enough like me.”

It is obviously very difficult for a woman to be sufficiently like a man for him not to notice the difference. The glass ceiling has been held in place for decades through this mechanism, and to their detriment, some coaches have attempted to show women how they can be “just like one of the guys” and thus get ahead. But doesn’t that stop anybody who has a genuinely fresh perspective from ever entering a leadership position? Doesn’t it condemn organizations to making the same mistakes over and over again because the leaders share the same prejudices and blindness? How can we learn if we are not willing to listen to someone with whom we don’t agree?

In the same way, coaches can put unnecessary distance between themselves and their clients when they don’t pass the “sufficiently like me” test. As an alternative to disrespecting people like ourselves, I suggest we enter the relationship with curiosity and a willingness to have our way of seeing things undone. Otherwise, we will as coaches keep coaching people who are just like us, and work to make them more and more just like us. More on this in a later chapter when we take on the temptations that a new coach falls into.

Consequently, our respecting someone comes down to a judgment we make, and like any judgment, it’s a choice. In order to make a prudent choice, we weigh the observed evidence and do our best to screen out our own prejudice in the light of the consequences that will follow from the choice. That is to say, ask yourself what your relationship will be like if you determine you respect this person compared to what your relationship will be like if you decide not to respect him. Which choice will further your shared commitment with this potential client?

I’m not arguing here that it’s best to always come down on the side of respecting someone, but I’m trying to point out that our choice has consequences that ought to be part of our choice-making process. It’s not a mistake or wrong when we make up our minds not to respect someone if we have taken the time to go through a procedure like the one described here. In fact, we can do so with a clear conscience as long as we stay open to the possibility that we can change our minds in the future based upon the different behavior of the potential client and/or our different understanding of it.

Our malleable ability to tolerate can be the leverage point for increasing our capacity to respect. Perhaps in reading this discussion, you’ve seen that many times the limitation on our respect for someone is not so much in what they’re doing as it is in the imposition of our values on what they’re doing. Our doing this is perhaps no more apparent than when we study other cultures or historical periods. In such a study, we often find that we feel repulsed by what we learn. A deeper reflection on our reaction, though, will often reveal to us that it is possible for us to accept what people did given the circumstances within which they lived, even though our immediate, automatic reaction is one of distaste or dislike.

Mutual Freedom of Expression

Usually when people hear this phrase, they understand it to mean that people have the freedom to say whatever they want to say, in whatever way they want to say it, whenever they want to say it, to whomever they want to say it. Perhaps such an understanding is basic to the American psyche. Everyone, after all, has a right to his or her opinion. Reporters stop citizens in the street and ask them their views on complex economic and world issues because everyone ought to be given a voice. In talking to executives and managers, I’ve never met one who has said he is not open to everything anyone has to say to him at any time. Simultaneously, I’ve spoken to others in the same organization who say that they cannot talk about certain subjects with these executives, or that if they decide to, they have to work hard to find a special language to use so as not to upset them. How can we reconcile these contradictions?

As many management consultants and philosophers alike have reported, communication within organizations is shaped by many forces that seem beyond the power of the individual. Argyris (1990) and Habermas (Morgan, 1983), speaking from widely different domains, both address what is undiscussable. Argyris, working as a consultant in business, has devised a famous exercise for uncovering the undiscussable, for example, any speaking that would embarrass someone or that would reveal that such face-saving is occurring. He directs participants to draw a line down the middle of a page. In the right column they write what they said aloud. In the left column they write what they said privately to themselves. Over time, Argyris invites people to reveal their left columns and discuss what made the statements undiscussable. Eventually, it becomes possible for others to ask the same questions. At that point, the real basis of assessment and actions can be revealed. Usually, tremendous progress in group effectiveness follows. Habermas takes on the constraints to open communication in an astoundingly rigorous way. His books often are a daunting challenge for professional philosophers. The book cited above gives access to some of his more germane distinctions. In some, he proposes that true freedom of expression exists only when anyone in a conversation can challenge (without fear or negative repercussions) the truth, sincerity, intention, and appropriateness of any utterance. That’s a high standard. How many of us have conversations in which all the listed criteria are met? How many of us conduct relationships in which all parties are willing to question and be questioned? How many of us are even willing to attempt such conversations and relationships? Coaching is a place to begin and a place to practice.

The forces shaping communication remain invisible to participants within a given culture or organization. Participants are unaware that they are, in fact, not speaking about certain topics and not bringing up certain ideas, or that they are inhibiting others from speaking to them. When an outsider attempts to broach these subjects, many excuses are immediately presented to justify the continuation of the moratorium on them. On other occasions people claim that, given how much complaining happens, it must be true that people are able to say everything they want to say. The assumption in such a conclusion is that complaining must be the most difficult kind of communicating to do, and if it occurs, then all the rest of the necessary conversations must also be happening. It doesn’t take much observation of any relationship to see that that’s not the case, but rather, in many instances, that complaining is the easiest, most habituated, most automatic way of talking. Because after all, among other things, it deflects responsibility away from the speaker who is complaining.

What can a coach do to ensure that freedom of expression exists in a coaching relationship, even when the dynamics described are in place? First, the coach can recognize that freedom of expression has to be constructed within an individual coaching relationship. It’s not a given. The construction begins when the coach invites the client to speak openly, and simultaneously opens himself to receiving what the client has to say without argument or defense, responding instead with clarifying questions and assurances that the client has been heard. The construction continues as the coach reveals his own views, knowing that the degree of honesty and completeness in the communication will be determined by how much he embodies and models these qualities. It’s not so much that the coach has to reveal his difficulties to the client; such an event may reverse the client/coach relationship, making the client into the coach and vice versa. It’s more that the coach makes it abundantly clear that there is nothing that he is hiding or withholding, and he is available to speak on any subject that the client wishes to bring up that is relevant to the topic of the coaching.

Second, besides constructing a relationship within which a person can freely speak, for true freedom of expression to exist it’s also necessary that the coach actually listen to what the client has to say. Listening in this sense is not merely the engagement of the ear and the auditory nerve, it’s a full engagement of the attention, thought, and intention of the coach in the conversation. Given that there are hundreds of books and dozens of courses on listening, I’m not going to attempt to provide a program for improving listening skills here.

Suffice it to say that freedom of expression means that each member in the conversation is listening and considering what the other member is saying. How often have you been in a meeting where people talk one after another without taking into account what earlier speakers have said—where it seems as if what is said is triggering what is going to be said next, rather than triggering consideration of what’s being said (some deeper reflection on the topic or an invitation to a more comprehensive dialogue)? Such speaking without listening quickly undermines or destroys freedom of expression, because people soon learn that what they’re saying doesn’t matter anyway—no one is really listening and no one is thinking about what they are saying. In such circumstances, speaking becomes a kind of release of internal pressure and is not a genuine connection or conversation with someone else. The coach can readily remedy this condition by actually considering what the client is saying. I’m not proposing that you try to make it look as if you are considering what the client is saying. Really do consider what they are saying. If you’re not going to be open to what’s being said, you can be assured that your partner in the conversation will not be open to what you are saying, even though they, like you, may have become expert in the appearance of communication. For coaching to work, the relationship must be genuine and not just look genuine. At the heart of this genuineness is communication as I am describing it here.

The final component in constructing freedom of expression is maintaining absolute confidentiality. Yes, this is difficult at times within organizations, but as you know, it doesn’t take very much leaking of a particular conversation for it to get back to someone. When the client discovers that the conversation has been shared, great damage is done to the coaching relationship. Even though the client may continue in the program while pretending that nothing’s really changed, the depth of the partnership that exists afterwards is usually not sufficient to bring about the products of coaching. To remedy this, be certain that you inform your client about whom you will share the coaching program with and in what detail. Keep your promise even if you feel that your client could never find out that you haven’t, or if it seems expedient not to. If you don’t, you will not only damage your current coaching program but also alter your public identity as a coach, which may negatively affect future programs with different clients.

By skillfully combining these three elements—openness, listening, and confidentiality—you will ensure freedom of expression in your coaching relationship.

As you’ve read through this chapter on the coaching relationship, you may have discovered that everything is in place with your potential clients. That’s great news, because then you can move into the next stage of coaching. If, on the other hand, you’ve discovered otherwise, make sure that you attend to what’s missing or inadequately present before you continue. Relationship is the foundation for coaching, and a solid one will see you through many mistakes you may make later in the program, while a shallow or shaky relationship will ensure the demise of your coaching efforts at the first hint of any misstep on your part.

Some readers may already be in a relationship with someone in which they now want to coach. If you are such a person, you may find that as you read the description of the coaching relationship, you discovered what’s lacking and became discouraged. Here is some practical advice about what to do:

1. Begin by strengthening trust. You can strengthen the trust the client has for you by saying what you are going to do, doing exactly that, and then pointing back to the fact that you did what you said you would. For example, you can say, “I will enforce this policy with everyone in our department, the new hires and the experienced, the high performers and the low performers, no one will be left out.” Then do what you said. After a period in which it has become obvious to everyone that you have done what you said, announce to your client that that is what happened. Over time and if you give no chance for counterexamples, your client will begin to trust you more.

   If your trust for the client is missing and you still want to find a way to coach, begin to find a small area in which you can trust them. Look, for example, to validate your primary conclusion of your client’s trustworthiness in this arena.

2. In order to strengthen the respect clients have for us, we can begin to invite them into our decision-making process, showing them the degree of care,openness, and analysis that goes into the major decisions we make. We can reveal to them that we can see different sides to the question, that we understand that no decision is perfect, and that often someone will be disappointed. As we do this, our clients will begin to appreciate more and more the steadiness and groundedness of our intention to do what is best.

   Building respect for a client is a process similar to strengthening our trust in her. It is a matter of finding those topics and occasions when we do respect them, and then alerting ourselves to any circumstance that can corroborate what we have found.

3. We can strengthen freedom of expression in two ways: first, by demonstrating that we have changed our mind, our point of view, or our actions because of what someone has said to us; and second, by practicing saying things that are not readily spoken about in our environment. This will take a high degree of skill if we are going to avoid upsetting people, but at the same time, if we don’t speak out, we are in a way colluding with what is happening. As coaches, we must be examples of what we are asking of our clients when our courage to speak up is lacking. We can only expect the same from our clients.

   We can encourage freedom of expression in our clients by withholding our judgments, by looking for what’s true or interesting in what they are saying, and by demonstrating willingness to learn from them.

My assumption in all this is that we are, as far as we can tell, working with the best of intentions to enhance the competence and fulfillment of our client. Also I am assuming that our potential client is not a criminal and is doing the best she can to bring about these same outcomes. I am not promoting naïveté, but I am proposing that there is a lot more we can do to repair and enhance relationships, and that we give up way too easily in many circumstances (see Figure 4.1).

FIGURE 4.1 Elements in a Coaching Relationship

With Bob, the relationship was pretty easy to form. From the strong recommendation of Nancy, he was predisposed to trusting and respecting me and what I brought to coaching. Besides that, we had an easy rapport and were comfortable in speaking about a wide range of topics.

That being said, there still was work to do in the relationship. Bob was in a habit of being in “performance mode.” He would shape his reports to me according to what he imagined I wanted to hear. Like many of us, he had learned through his family and educational history how to please people and the benefits of doing that. For our coaching to have any genuine impact, Bob and I had to find a way of communicating that was beyond this habitual mode.

I’ll tell you in a moment how Bob and I moved to more candid conversations, but I want to make a larger point about coaching first. We coaches are not immune to being flattered and although some of us don’t like to admit it, many of us are still seeking the approval of others as a validation for ourselves. Consequently, when we meet clients who figure out what we want to hear and then tell us that, our desire for validation can readily lead us to a blindness concerning the real state of the coaching program. As coaches we must do our best to find places of support and appreciation outside of our client work. Otherwise, we are like dehydrated sponges seeking the water of approval when we are with our clients.

I caught on to Bob’s communication style early on. I then began to ask the following questions to reveal more of what he had been observing and experiencing:

• Besides what you said, what else did you observe?
• What unexpressed concerns are you experiencing so far in our coaching?
• How would you make the same report you just gave me in your own diary where you wouldn’t worry about what other people thought?
• Remember, Bob, that this coaching is for you, not for me. So is there something else that you might want to explore beyond what you already said?

By working through these and similar questions, Bob became more fully disclosing of his experience. It was important for me to be vigilant in all of our conversations and keep speaking with Bob until I felt that I had heard both the positive and negative sides of his experience. Over time I learned what Bob was most uncomfortable revealing and I would delicately ask him about these areas. After two or three sessions of doing this, Bob began with uncomfortable areas since he knew that I would be asking about them. Given that I didn’t criticize Bob for anything he said, these uncomfortable areas over time became easy for him to talk about. At this point we had accomplished establishing freedom of expressing in our coaching relationship.

Suggested Reading

You won’t find these books at your bookstore underneath the “relationships” sign; nonetheless, each reveals a unique understanding of relationship that is valuable in coaching.

Fiumara, Gemma Corradi. The Other Side of Language. Translated by Charles Lambert. New York: Routledge, 1990.

It’s listening. The book is a detailed ontological exploration of the importance of this topic which is often neglected even in philosophical texts about language. Definitely not a self-help book.

McCarthy, Thomas. The Critical Theory of Jurgen Habermas. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1978.

Among other topics, Habermas writes about the societal forces that shape the way we communicate and what can happen in our relationships.

Unger, Roberto Mangabeira. Passion. New York: Macmillan, Inc., 1984.

A long essay that argues for the central role that created context plays in a life of meaning.

Winnicott, D. W. Holding and Interpretation. London: Hogarth Press, 1986; reprint, New York: Grove Press, 1986.

A classic text from an important therapist and theoretician. By closely following a course of therapy, the author demonstrates relating with dignity and respect.