14

Coaching approaches

A person cannot teach another person directly; a person can only facilitate another’s learning.

Carl Rogers, psychologist

In this chapter we will introduce you to three of the most popular contemporary coaching approaches:

• Person-centred coaching
  
• Appreciative practice
  
• Solution-focused coaching
  

You will find that these approaches have some commonalities and most of them have been developed based on some of the fundamental principles of coaching that we discussed in the early part of this book. You will often find these concepts being referred to in coaching communities, and as leaders, or managers as coaches, you should be aware of the basic ideas and principles relating to each of them. In each case we will offer references where you can explore them more thoroughly.

Person-centred coaching

Person-centred coaching is largely attributed to Carl Rogers, who described its theory and background in detail in his book Client-Centred Therapy (1951). For the purposes of this book we will highlight some of the key aspects of person-centred coaching, which have been adapted from Rogers’s original theory, as it applies to you the leader or manager as a coach in today’s business world.

Rogers worked with five key assumptions when he developed his theories about person-centred learning:

• Individuals learn differently based on their own unique experience of the world.
  
• For learning to take place it must have relevance to the learner.
  
• Non-directive learning is most effective to gain commitment to change, and demands that the coach guides and encourages reflection rather than tells.
  
• People are more likely to learn in a trusting, open and friendly environment, and not when concepts and ideas are being forced upon them.
  
• During any learning session new ideas must be relevant to the individual and issue at hand to encourage open-mindedness and exploration of the new ideas.
  

Many current-day coaching, counselling, mentoring and psychotherapy practices have been developed based on Rogers’s work. The main reason for this is that there is now much evidence to suggest that by using person-centred approaches you are more likely to lead the coachee to implementation of ideas and thus lasting change. So what does person-centred coaching mean for you, in practice?

First of all and most importantly, it is about focusing on the needs of the individual you are coaching – listening, questioning, observing and responding to their needs. By using these approaches you will encourage them to explore and work with you on the issue, and help them to develop their own plans, ideas and conclusions.

Your role will then be to use the five assumptions together with tools from your coaching toolkit to encourage the coachee to find their own solutions and to set realistic goals for change. Some of the tools you can use are explained in Chapter 16.

Person-centred coaching requires you to have patience, to be creative and to focus exclusively on the individual you are working with and their issue. This type of coaching requires you to be at your most flexible and have the ability to adapt, adjust and use approaches that will work for the coachee and their situation.

Appreciative practice

Dreams are extremely important. You can’t do it unless you can imagine it.

George Lukas

Another way of coaching is to look at what we can learn from appreciative practice. Appreciative practice owes its origins to work by David Cooperrider and his supervisor Suresh Srivastva, when he was studying for his PhD at Case Western Reserve University in the United States. David and his supervisor Suresh then went on to create the practice called ‘appreciative inquiry’ which is described in detail in Cooperrider’s book Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Revolution in Change. Using different forms of appreciative inquiry has become an increasingly popular approach in coaching and the term ‘appreciative coaching’ is now quite widely used.

We first encountered appreciative inquiry (AI) in 2000 where we also had the pleasure of meeting and working with Frank Barret, one of the co-founders of AI. Since appreciative coaching is based on the work of AI, it’s worthwhile knowing a little bit more about it before we look at some of the things you can do in appreciative coaching.

There are a number of principles on which the concept of appreciative practice is based, and these are:

• Inquiry is inseparable from action. In other words asking good questions actually evokes change. So as a coach, rather than trying to solve someone’s problem, you would choose to ask good questions and that by itself could make a big difference.
  
• The stories we tell are important. Our lives and organisations are full of stories and these affect the ways we think and act. So how we tell the story is critical, and by changing the stories we tell we can change the way we act. As a coach, you would pay particular attention to the stories the coachee tells and how they tell them. Is it helpful or unhelpful, are they in control or do they see themselves as a victim? Is the story positive or negative? If the stories are unhelpful or negative you can then help coachees tell different stories, or tell their story differently by helping them to frame and reframe their stories to be more useful and positive.
  
• Positive images of the future lead to positive action. By imagining and creating a positive vision of the future we can actually help create that future. So it is important to ask the coachee to imagine a better future and get them to actually create that better future in their mind. This is often done by asking the ‘miracle’ question, that is, where you ask the coachee to imagine they go to bed tonight and overnight a miracle happens and in the morning when they wake up, their problem has disappeared. You then ask the coachee what they are now experiencing with the problem gone. What are they doing? What are they seeing? What are they saying? What are the other people involved doing? What are the other people saying, and so on.
  

  Although this can be difficult for the coachee – many people automatically react by saying there is no such thing as a miracle – it is important to be persistent and ask them just to suspend their disbelief and try to create this new picture and scenario in their mind. In our coaching practice we have observed and experienced just how powerful the miracle question can be.
  

• Positive questioning creates more long-lasting and effective change. It is much more important to ask positive and appreciative questions than deficit-focused ones. Deficit-focused questions are ones like, ‘What’s the problem?’, ‘Who’s the weak link?’, ‘What went wrong?’, ‘Whose fault is it?’ Positive and appreciative questions will be ones like, ‘What progress have you made?’, ‘What has gone well?’, ‘What do you do well?’, ‘What are your strengths?’, ‘When have you done that successfully before?’, ‘How did you manage to cope so well?’
  

The four D’s of appreciative inquiry

Appreciative inquiry is used in many fields and often when dealing with change. There are four stages in AI, known as the four D’s. The four D’s are used to help participants create a different perspective of the change and then to work with others to co-create the change.

The four stages are:

• Discovery
  
• Dream
  
• Design
  
• Destiny
  

When used in coaching, the Discovery stage would focus on finding out more about the issue, and the person’s involvement, relationships and emotions around the issue. You would want to know what is going on, not to try to solve the issue but to help the coachee become more aware of, and clarify, their thoughts and feelings.

In the Dream phase you would want to explore potential and vision. What does the coachee want to achieve? What is their vision or their dream? What is their potential? What are their strengths and resources?

In the Design phase you would concentrate on creating actions, and look at specific actions and behaviours. What will the coachee do differently? How will they behave? What new practices and behaviours can they choose? How can they embed these different routines and behaviours? What small steps can they take that moves them in the desired direction?

In the Destiny phase you would look at how to maintain the changes and ensure that they are sustainable.

A nice way of summing up what appreciative inquiry is all about is given by Professor Gervase Bushe of Simon Fraser University in Canada. According to Professor Bushe: ‘Appreciative Inquiry advocates collective inquiry into the best of what is, in order to imagine what could be, followed by collective design of a desired future state that is compelling and thus, does not require the use of incentives, coercion or persuasion for planned change to occur.’

Building on this definition and linking it to coaching practice you could build the following model of appreciative coaching:

• You would inquire not into the coachee’s failings, but into their strengths and resources, perhaps helping them to integrate positive experiences and feedback they may already have.
  
• You would help them imagine a better future or desired state.
  
• You would then help them work through the design – that is, the actions and behaviours they need to put in place, in order to achieve the desired outcomes.
  
• You would ensure that you review how they are progressing in their goals and objectives.
  

To summarise, appreciative coaching is one more tool at your disposal to help you become a more effective coach. You probably won’t use all the techniques, but you can borrow some of the methodologies described above in your everyday coaching.

Solution-focused coaching

The solution focus (SF) approach to coaching is an adaptation of a therapeutic model that came from the Milwaukee Institute of Solution Focused Brief Therapy where Steve de Shazer, Insoo Kim Berg and their colleagues practised what was then a radical approach to therapy. Paul Z. Jackson and Mark McKergow’s book Solutions Focus: Making Coaching and Change SIMPLE gives a clear account of how you can use SF in business and coaching.

There are some basic assumptions and principles underlying the SF approach to coaching:

• The coachee has all the necessary resources to change.
  
• Change is happening all the time: the coach’s job is to identify and amplify useful change. So the coach needs to inquire where useful change has already taken place.
  
• There is no one ‘right’ way of looking at things: different views may fit the facts just as well. The coach’s role here is to challenge assumptions and perceptions.
  
• Detailed understanding of the ‘problem’ is usually little help in arriving at the solution. The coach does not have to spend huge amounts of time trying to understand the coachee’s issue in great detail. Rather his or her job is to ask good open questions in order to help the coachee reflect on and become more aware of the issues.
  
• No ‘problem’ happens all the time. There are always times when the problem is NOT happening, so a useful way forward lies in identifying what is going on when the problem does not happen. Again the coach’s role is to probe into when things are going well rather than when they are going badly. This can be unexpectedly difficult as coachees are often focused on the problem.
  
• Small changes in the right direction can be amplified to great effect. There seems to be a desire within organisations to effect big changes. But big changes are hard to achieve in reality. The SF approach stresses the importance of recognising and encouraging small steps that are going in the right direction.
  
• It is important to stay solution focused, not solution forced.
  
• It is useful to have the coachee imagine what a preferred future might look like. This takes the form of the so-called miracle question (in the same way as with AI) where the coach asks the coachee to imagine they have gone to bed and woken up the next day and a miracle has happened. Then the coach asks them to describe what is now happening. This is also quite a difficult technique, as often the coachee can resist the question and say that it is too difficult to answer, or become defensive and say that a miracle can’t possibly happen! Nevertheless, it is worth persisting and getting the coachee to use their imagination and visualise their preferred future. Once they have done this it becomes more possible for the coachee to start describing the specific behaviours they will display in that future.
  

In the solution-focused approach it isn’t necessary to delve into the roots of the problem or analyse the problem in detail. The focus, as its name suggests, is towards developing solutions, and in particular the coachee’s own solutions. This is achieved through a variety of steps and processes which involve, first, finding the Platform – that is, what are we here to do today? Then you can move to Counters, which means asking about the coachee’s strengths and resources. What do they have that will help them overcome their issue? Then you would ask Scaling questions – in other words where are they on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being high? If for example the coachee says they are a 3 then you can ask where they would like to be? What would it be like if they were at 5? What would they be doing? Saying? Feeling? Then you would move on to asking about what small steps could the coachee take in the right direction and then give some positive affirmations to the coachee, before perhaps asking them to try out a different way of doing things before your next session.

Problem-focused questions versus solution-focused questions

Imagine you are in a coaching situation and you were asking the following problem-focused questions. How do you think the coachee would react?

• What’s wrong with what you’re currently doing?
  
• Why are you doing so badly?
  
• What’s the main reason for your difficulty?
  
• Whose fault is that?
  
• What other things make it so hard to improve?
  
• Why will it be difficult for you to get any better?
  

Compare that with the following solution-focused questions:

• What is it that you’d like to be better at?
  
• What are you aiming to achieve?
  
• How will you know you’ve achieved it?
  
• What was the best you have ever been at this?
  
• What went well on that occasion?
  
• What will be the first signs that you’re getting better?
  
• How will other people notice this improvement?
  

These are much more positive, will give much more energy to the coachee and enable them to think positively about the strengths and resources they already have.

In summary, the SF approach focuses on exploring possible solutions rather than delving too deeply into the ‘problem’. It tries to build on success and look at what works and then encourage people to do more of what works. It looks to discover skills and competencies that the coach already has, and which they might not even be aware of. And it stresses the importance of taking small steps in the right direction rather than huge leaps that might not actually happen.

Tips for success

• Using any of these coaching approaches will require practice.
  
• In any coaching session you may draw upon one or all of these approaches.
  
• Adapt and build on the approaches discussed to find your own natural approach and style – this is the most genuine.
  
• DO NOT slavishly follow rules – this will tend to come across as formulaic and will lessen your effectiveness as a coach.