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THE TRIANGLED COACH Being Effective in the Middle
If you have ever found yourself working harder than your client on her problem, you know viscerally what it is like to take on more than you should. Putting in more effort than the client, as Ben is doing with Tom, does little to build the client’s ability to face challenges. Executive coaches need a way to work successfully in the triangle of client-client’s challenge-coach.
The following contrasting models outline substantially different paths that coaches take while functioning within this triangle. I invite you to avoid the Rescue Model and use the Client Responsibility Model. The latter keeps you on track even while the client’s anxiety buffets you. When you start questioning your actions, this model can help you return to home base, where you can make better choices.
The Rescue Model and the Client Responsibility Model of Coaching
In the Rescue Model the coach takes on the client’s burden and becomes the pseudo leader of the situation. This can temporarily ease the anxiety of the executive. As a Rescue Model coach, you develop relationships not only with the client but also the client’s team, the issue itself, or the client’s boss that foster dependency on you for the solution. You can become so central that the client’s own relationship to her issue is weakened and takes a back seat (Figure 4.1). When you take ownership of the client’s problem and lead the process to solution, including facilitating, training, setting guidelines, advising, and making decisions (for example, Ben’s “supervising” of Tom), you also develop strong relationships with both the client and the team (if you are also working with them). The result is that the client and her team stop developing their relationships with each other and focus more on relating to you.
The juxtaposition and contrast of models for coaching in the business environment (named here the Rescue Model and the Client Responsibility Model) are the invention of Rob Schachter, a senior consultant and colleague. Schachter bases his approach on the seminal theory of Murray Bowen and the expansion of Bowen’s work by Edwin Friedman.
Figure 4.1 Rescue Model of Coaching
In contrast, as a Client Responsibility coach, you use your position in the triangle to uncover information about the system that the client can use to resolve her problem. Then the client and the rest of the system can regain use of their own resources and continue to relate more strongly to each other than they relate to you. You take a back seat and do not come between the client and her team, problem, or boss. Your actions ensure that the integrity of those relationships remains intact (Figure 4.2).
Figure 4.2 Client Responsibility Model of Coaching
As a coach you may still include activities of facilitating, training, and advising, but the client owns the process, the solution, and the decisions. The Client Responsibility Model respects the fact that the coach is secondary to the situation rather than a primary player. You work alongside and in partnership with your client.
In the Rescue Model, the same problems resurface when you leave. In the Client Responsibility Model, the client and the team strengthen their capacity to move through their work issues when you are not there. It may seem obvious that the Client Responsibility Model is more effective for the client. However, we consultants and coaches fall into the Rescue Model when we succumb to the system’s forces and to our own anxiety in the face of the client’s distress.
How do I know I am in one mode as opposed to the other? Two areas to watch out for are your attitude and your actions toward the client. Note in Table 4.1 the contrast in attitudes and behaviors between the two models.
Table 4.1 Contrasts Between Coaching Models
| Rescue Model | Client Responsibility Model | |
|---|---|---|
| Attitudes | You think the client cannot do it without you. | You believe that the client has to come up with approaches she is comfortable with rather than adopting yours. |
| You find yourself looking over your client’s shoulder because you are worried she will blow it. | You know that you are a “short-timer” here and the client is the one who has to live with her results. | |
| You know you would do a better job than the client. | You accept that a “good enough” action by a highly committed and motivated client is ten times better than an outstanding action on your part that creates passivity in your client. | |
| You focus on the client’s weaknesses. | You focus on the client’s strengths. | |
| Behaviors | You give answers rather than offer clarifying questions. | You stimulate your client’s thinking so that she learns more about her own position. |
| You make decisions for the client. | You seek opportunities to invite your client to be decisive and clearly articulate her decisions to others. | |
| You consistently take up more airtime than your client when you are with her and her team. They learn more about you instead of learning more about each other. | You invite your client to keep tuned in and relating to her team, so she creates more productive work relationships with them. |
The Client Responsibility Model can help you work within the triangle effectively. The goal is to use your signature presence to keep the client focused on her challenge in a productive way.
Let’s check back with Ben and backtrack to the moment before he lost his balance and fell into the Rescue Model of coaching. It happened when Tom asked him to keep a secret, which triggered Ben’s anxiety. If Ben had stayed grounded in the Client Responsibility Model, he could have helped Tom get back to or develop his own problem-solving skills. Ben’s use of the Client Responsibility Model with Tom could look something like this:
Tom and Ben, continued
Ben says to Tom, “Tom, you are in trouble. But spending your time and my time hiding from this fact isn’t going to do you any good. What I could do is help you think through a number of serious questions you need to answer for yourself, like, have you decided to stay and meet this challenge, or are you thinking of leaving because of it? Are you up for this big of a change in how you do things? If you decide to stay, how does this challenge fit into your goals? What does successfully fulfilling those goals look like?”
These questions accomplish two things: they keep Ben from taking Tom’s challenge out of Tom’s hands where it belongs. And the questions help Tom squarely face what he is up against. If Tom opens himself to the challenge embedded in these questions, he has a chance to choose his response rather than avoiding his dilemma and looking for Ben to give him the answers. If Tom chooses to face this challenge, and given more coaching sessions, Ben can ask Tom more questions to stimulate his thinking and creativity:
• How can you talk to your team so they understand that you stand behind this challenge?
• What parameters can you give your team for a new organization? What information can you share with them?
• What information do you require from them?
• What other resources do you need from Susan, your peers, and me as your coach to get the results you want?
• What changes in your management style do you need to make so this change will work well?
• What strengths in your management style and in your team do you want to preserve?
These are the beginning conversations that would put Tom on the path to becoming more self-directed. When you remain in the Client Responsibility Model, you strengthen the client’s ability to use the four approaches to presence I covered in Chapter Two: staying focused on specific goals for each meeting, managing ambiguity, dealing with reactivity, and becoming more immediate with the staff.
One of the occupational hazards of coaching from the middle of the triangle between a client and his challenge is to get into the kind of difficulty that Ben did with his Rescue Model coaching of Tom when he stepped in and managed his client. I have been in Ben’s shoes more times than I care to admit. In order to counter the pull to pseudo manage your client, you must remain focused on your goal with the client. Stay grounded in your goal, even given the system’s pull on you, so that you can withstand your client’s anxiety rather than catch it from him. You should not abandon him in his anxiety or be thrown off course when your approach may not appear to be help to him at the moment. This kind of calm presence in the middle of a triangle with an anxious client and his challenge can help clients find answers to their organizational dilemmas.
Sometimes, however, a coach’s anxiety can cause her to use the Client Responsibility Model in a way that is not helpful to her client. Not pacing with your client because of your own anxiety can be jarring to a highly anxious client, even when you are using the Client Responsibility Model. This happened to me with one of my clients (for an organization chart to the story, see Figure 4.3). I almost used it as a hit-and-run tool before I went fleeing from the scene.
Figure 4.3 Organizational Roles in the Case of Jill
Jill
Jill, the director of human resources, came into our meeting quite harried about an emerging situation with Alan, the purchaser for the production plant, and his boss, Bob, the accounting director. Bob had set some stringent guidelines for Alan that Alan did not like. Alan went to Bob’s boss, Carl, the plant manager, and complained bitterly about Bob. Carl had his own doubts about Bob’s ability to manage his people. Then Carl came to Jill, hoping she could be a mediator between Alan and Alan’s boss, Bob. Jill breathlessly came to me to ask whether I would be willing to mediate a conversation between the two.
Here is another example of cascading, interlocking triangles that multiply because of people’s anxiety about their relationships with each other (see Figure 4.4). Alan is upset with his working relationship with his boss, Bob. Alan triangles Bob’s boss, Carl, into Alan’s relationship with Bob. Carl has his own issues with Bob, which he has not directly addressed with Bob. Carl triangles Jill into his relationship to Bob and Bob’s relationship with Alan. Jill is nervous about the way Carl uses her in these situations, and so she triangles me (as her coach) into her relationship to Carl, which could ricochet me into the middle of the originating triangle among Alan, Bob, and Carl. Talk about the slippery slope—you can find yourself sliding into other people’s triangles in no time!
Figure 4.4 The Multiplying Triangles Entangling Jill
Spreading triangles often throw a smokescreen over issues of accountability and authority. Carl needs to deal with Bob directly about Carl’s issues with Bob’s leadership. Bob has to act on the legitimate expectations he has of Alan. Instinctively I knew that the last thing this system needed was for me to join the long chain of triangles.
Jill, continued
With the best of intentions but with a tight, anxious tone, I said (matching Jill’s breathlessness), “Getting someone from the outside doesn’t make any sense. Let’s look at how you could be a resource.”
It sounds logical and helpful and comes out of the Client Responsibility Model of coaching. However, my own anxiety about getting caught in the middle caused me to drop Jill’s request without staying connected to her. I was in fact fleeing from her. She probably felt abandoned by my response.
Jill must have smelled my skittishness. She said that she was irritated with me because it seemed as though I was dropping her like a hot potato. My own anxiety was rebuffing her anxious request too quickly. If she were in touch with her own resourcefulness at the time she asked me, she would not have needed to turn to me in the first place. Actually, this would have been the perfect time to decisively give her what she wants and in the process hand her own leadership back to her. That would look something like this: “Jill, I would be happy to be a mediator if that is what you most need. But first let’s take a look at the whole picture and talk through the best course of action.”
Jill was able to tell me that she was not feeling confident or resourceful about being the mediator. We slowed down and took a look at the situation more neutrally, talking through the triangles (see Figure 4.5). As her coach, I was able to direct her focus to how she could first work on her approach to Carl (action 1: Jill coaches Carl) to help realign his relationship with Bob (action 2: Carl talks to Bob about Carl’s expectations of Bob), which had implications for how Carl would more immediately respond to Alan (action 3: Carl is not the one to talk to Alan about expectations, Carl coaches Bob on how to talk to Alan). By the end of the session, Jill did not feel a need for an outside mediator. And neither was she going to mediate as her first course of action. She was going to work with Carl to help him address the performance issues he had been avoiding.
Jill calmed down enough in our conversation to regain her clarity regarding the situation. She felt much more grounded, found her backbone, and saw what her position should be with Carl (that a mediator was not necessary for Alan and Bob if Carl communicated his expectations to Bob about Bob’s leadership, and Carl communicated to Alan that he needed to go back to Bob and work out their conflict). As a result of using the Client Responsibility Model, finally in a way that paced with my client, I helped her calm down and get clear about her position and action plan.
Figure 4.5 Client Responsibility Approach: Actions to Take in Sequence
In summary, here are the actions you can take as a coach to remain most effective with your clients when you are brought into the middle of the triangle of their troubled relationships to others:
• Identify and avoid Rescue Model attitudes and behaviors.
• Use the attitudes and behaviors of the Client Responsibility Model—sustain a belief in your client’s resourcefulness.
• Support the primary relationship between the executive and her challenge, whatever or whoever that challenge may be. With heart and backbone (being both compassionate and firm), keep turning your client back to face her own challenge.
Support the primary relationship between the executive and her challenge, whatever or whoever that challenge may be. With heart and backbone (being both compassionate and firm), keep turning your client back to face her own challenge.
Coaching from the Middle
Once you enter into the executive’s triangle of anxiety, there are some systems lenses you can use to help you adhere to the Client Responsibility Model. The more you understand patterns, homeostasis, boundaries, and the distinct change management roles in a system, the more you can leverage them as you work from your middle position in the triangle. Then you will help a client make real choices in the system rather than act solely from avoidance of his anxiety. You can also watch out for his tendency to call on you to be his replacement in his work relationships rather than meeting his work relationship challenges himself.
Patterns in the Client’s System
For the most part we have been using pattern thinking to identify the dance between you and your client. You can also use it to help your client to see and address the patterns within her organization that she co-creates. You can detect established patterns of interaction within groups that create and reinforce their results, whether the group performs at a high level or flounders. You are an invaluable resource to your clients when you teach them to identify the patterns in which they are immersed.
Following is an example of a powerful pattern that one of my clients and her team co-created.
Barbara
Barbara was a driving, excellence-oriented executive. However, her team seemed to be drifting into mediocrity, unable to find a way out. She spent quite a bit of time worrying about their performance, both silently and aloud at team meetings, and wondered why they couldn’t increase their plateau of performance. I talked with Barbara and asked about the kinds of interactions she had with her direct reports, both one-on-one and together as a group. I also spoke with each team member and sat in on a meeting. Although there was a lot of discussion—each person talking both privately and publicly about his or her desire to excel—there was a central pattern impeding their progress, best described as “avoid-avoid.” Although Barbara talked about excellence, she did not insist on behaviors that would get them there or challenge the actions (or inactions) of team members that were leading to their mediocrity. That was her side of the avoiding. For their part, the team members avoided challenging each other to higher performance and neglected to tell Barbara what they needed from her to break through to a higher level. The avoid-avoid pattern was choking off performance from a talented and well-intentioned team.
Dysfunctional patterns can be the side effect of a triangle at work. When anyone avoids the challenge in a relationship and does something else, that something else can become a pattern. The pattern is reinforced every time the person actively avoids her challenge. The other person in the relationship responds in a way that enables the first person to avoid whatever challenge she had with that other person in the first place. Thus, everyone plays out the pattern they co-created rather than facing the challenge to relate more directly to each other. Barbara and her team were playing out such a triangle using the avoid-avoid pattern, which meant that they talked about everything but the needs they had of each other and the consequences of not getting those needs met.
Addressing a pattern when coaching a client can get tricky, particularly if, as the coach, you see it before the executive or the team does. It is usually easier for the third person in the triangle to see a pattern than for the two primary players to see it. The third person in the middle (in this case, the coach) can have just enough distance to gain a clearer perspective.
To help the client identify patterns without getting resistance from her when she cannot see them, asking the following questions can be useful:1
• What does Person A do that seems to trigger Person B’s response? What does B do or not do that starts A down that path in the first place?
• Does this interaction have a familiar ring to it? If you were a betting person, could you count on these two people or this group to react in these predictable ways?
• Does this recur so often that you could even give a title to the pattern? How would this be identified as a news headline? For example, it might be “Attack/Counterattack,” or “Bully Finds Placater,” or “Rescuer Saves the Day,” or “Avoid/Avoid,” or “Pursuer Chases a Distancer.” In the case of the last example, the pursuer does something to help people retreat. At the same time, those who keep their distance continue to draw out the pursuer to chase them. No one is innocent.
Pattern identification needs to be offered respectfully and provisionally. The more tightly you hang on to your way of seeing your client’s pattern, the more resistance you are likely to get. An occupational hazard of the middle position in a triangle is that your point of view may receive a lackluster or even a hostile reception from the primary parties.
There is no objective truth to the name you give to a pattern. It is only important that the primary players see their circular self-reinforcing dance. Once they acknowledge that there is a repetitive, predictably familiar tone to their interaction, you can invite them to name the pattern for themselves.
Since patterns are self-reinforcing, they are hard to break. Once we realize this, we can proceed to help clients break through some of the patterns they perpetuate.
Homeostasis
Homeostasis refers to the forces that keep a system at its current level of functioning, thereby preserving the established patterns. Members of the group may find the current level to be highly unstable or chaotic, but there is a sameness to this instability. The group consistently fails to reach a more stable plateau. Homeostasis is like a well-functioning thermostat on a specific setting that resists change. It naturally has a low tolerance for any change in the temperature.
Neither good nor bad, homeostasis is a natural part of the self-preservation of any system. Organizations, ecological niches, even single-cell amoebas rely on homeostasis for survival. Homeostasis preserves inner stability so that a system can remain at its current level of functioning, which may be highly effective. However, it may cause a system to resist a change that may actually prove advantageous. Sometimes a system can be too slow to adapt to a change required for its survival.
People within groups can resist even changes that they intellectually know will benefit them. These “don’t-change” or “push-back” impulses in a system have undone many executives. Homeostatic resistance has undone many coaches too, because coaches are vulnerable to such resistance by being in the middle of the triangle of the client and his challenge.
The coach needs to attend to this natural, unintentional resistance in order to help a client significantly alter a system’s way of operating. Otherwise a client’s best intentions unravel. Understanding the power of homeostasis helps both the coach and the client take the situation less personally and avoid thinking, “They’re doing this to me.”
Understanding the power of homeostasis helps both the coach and the client take the situation less personally and avoid thinking, “They’re doing this to me.”
At first, it is easy to feel gloomy about systems and think, “This thing is bigger than all of us!” However, there is a common proverb of systemic thinking: “The focus for change is the system, but the agent of change is the individual.” Systems change when individuals have the courage to do something different and the stamina to withstand the resistance to the change they are creating.
The coach’s reaction to a client system’s homeostasis can get tricky too, and the weakness of the Rescue Model comes into full play. Coaches get distracted by a system’s push-back response and start to believe it is up to them to break through the system’s resistance. If, in your middle position in the triangle between your client and his challenge, you take on your client’s job of dealing with his system’s homeostasis, you will undertake the mythical job of Sisyphus. He had to roll the rock up the hill, only to see it fall back down, only to roll it back up, then have it slide back down again—repeatedly and forever. In fact, this is one of the chief reasons coaches and consultants burn out. They take too much responsibility for fighting the push-back responses in a system.
You serve your clients better when you help them face the homeostasis of the system instead of taking on the burden yourself. It is essential to educate clients about the natural occurrence of homeostatic resistance to their changes. Once they see it, this understanding can free them up when they learn to anticipate a team’s push back. They are less likely to take the resistance personally. Clients must be willing, however, to withstand this predictable reaction.
Barbara, continued
Barbara and her team took quite readily to seeing themselves in the avoid-avoid pattern. They were relieved when they could finally name the dynamic. Then Barbara went after it with a vengeance when the team were in meetings. She recognized the moments when members retreated into their silos, and she challenged them to do more interdisciplinary work together to reach a higher level of interaction. Members of the team said that they liked it. They had been neglected as a working group, so any attention in that area seemed right to them.
Although the meetings were much more stimulating than they had been, the results did not improve. Actually Barbara was still dealing with her own internal thermostat because she talked big at the meetings but did not follow through with the challenge when she managed her direct reports on a one-on-one basis. The staff lapsed into their old ways of working when they perceived that Barbara’s pressure to change was intermittent.
When we discussed the natural slide back into the old pattern, Barbara was faced with a decision: Was she going to keep the pressure on herself and her team so they could break through to higher results? Yes, she decided. She pulled it off only because she was vigilant in looking out for the recurrence of the old pattern in herself and in others. She learned that it wasn’t so much that they were conspiring to resist the change, but that the old pattern came so naturally.
Raising their internal tolerance for homeostatic resistance serves clients well. You can help your clients anticipate this resistance to change, which prepares them for the reactions they are likely to encounter when they challenge a long-standing pattern.
Boundaries
Systems maintain health when they have strong yet permeable boundaries around them. Boundaries that help create a group’s identity are sometimes established through rules: who is in and who is out or the expectations of members’ behavior. Subgroups clarify their roles and find ways to be open to receive communication and feedback from other parts of the system. Boundaries hold a group together so they do not lose their identity in the crowd (the larger organization). They need to be loose enough, however, to allow information and visitors from other subgroups to flow in and out, enhancing rather than disrupting the group as it pursues its goals.
Boundaries become invisible to those within the system. You can help clients see which organizational activities contribute to building healthy boundaries. These issues are relevant for looking at boundaries both within organizations and between an organization and other systems.2 Some examples of clarifying boundaries within organizations include the following:
• Developing job expectations
• Enrolling new employees in orientation processes
• Defining what information is confidential and who can know it
• Deciding when to say yes to certain projects and no to others
• Clarifying territories of customers and prospects
• Defining protocols
When a coach enters into the middle of the triangle between her client and that client’s challenge, the client often hopes the coach will step over established role boundaries and act on the client’s behalf so he will not have to. It is critical for coaches to respect and honor the role boundaries of the client and coach relationship so that the client maintains responsibility for the duties of his role.
Many ineffective patterns result from the violation of appropriate boundaries. For example, when people are not clear about who has legitimate authority in a system, the pattern of unproductive arguments can derail a major project. Constantly revisiting the same decisions can significantly slow the manufacture of a product or the delivery of a service. If members of a system know who plays what roles and who possesses what information, they can operate much more effectively.
Coaches can help clients review the boundaries of their system. One way is asking their clients questions to increase their clarity about appropriate roles and boundaries. Here are a few:
• Do people know what is expected of them?
• What are the boundaries of this system?
• Are they frequently compromised so that work is difficult to do?
• Are they so rigid that people do not get essential information from other parts of the organization?
Barbara, continued
One of the discoveries Barbara made was that the boundaries in her organization could not support the change she wanted. In many places they were too rigid, shutting out information from those who needed it. For example, team members did not habitually share information with other team members or ask for help across the disciplines. This created too many barriers between them; it was hard to overcome the distance when a need arose for them to put their heads together to solve a productivity problem. Barbara also realized that she was protecting the team too much from the mandates of her boss. In trying to save them anxiety about the state of the business, she was lulling them into too low a sense of urgency.
Know the Roles That You and Others Play
The concepts of triangles, patterns, homeostasis, and boundaries have their roots in family systems theory. To link this approach more deeply to the organizational world, I have used the work of Daryl Conner (1993), who applies systems thinking to organizations as they undergo change initiatives.3 Assume that you will deal with clients who are either on the brink of or in the middle of these initiatives. Barbara’s case is but one example of such a change.
Conner’s research identified four key roles necessary for successful and sustained change efforts in organizations: sponsor (and sustaining sponsor), target, advocate, and agent. Although individuals can play more than one role, it is critical that they are clear about which role they are in at any one time and that they work within the appropriate boundaries of that role. Often change fails because these roles are not aligned with each other and the boundaries of each role are not respected. In those cases, the team is not likely to break through natural homeostasis to change the status quo in the direction that the executive is working to steer the organization.
These roles are central for executives leading changes in their organization, and so coaches must encourage clients to think through these roles carefully. They are simple and obvious in their definition, yet they are hard to enact with integrity because of the ingrained patterns present in any organization. (According to Conner’s perspective, the coaching role itself is synonymous with the position of change agent.)
Another reason these roles often are not successfully cast is due, again, to the dynamic of triangles. It takes backbone and heart (clear positions and staying tuned in to others) to fulfill each of Conner’s roles effectively. When people are under stress, they avoid the job of these roles and triangle with someone else (sometimes a coach!) through a variety of actions: gossiping about others and their roles, trying to off-load their role duties onto someone else (sometimes the coach!), or sloughing off the responsibilities by verbally complying but not following through with action.
One of your greatest contributions in coaching a client can be to help him look at the roles everyone is playing (including him), weigh whether they are fulfilling these roles productively, and decide on an action plan to correct any misalignments in these roles. Here is a definition of each of the roles crucial for successful change to occur.
The sponsor has the authority to make a change happen. She legitimizes and sanctions the change (for example, Susan, the CEO from the vignette, and Barbara, my client from the story). A sponsor is a sponsor only if she has line authority over the people who will implement the change. She also has control over necessary resources, for example, money, time, and people. Good sponsors have a clear vision for the path of change, including goals and measurable outcomes for the initiative.
Sustaining sponsors (for example, Tom, the vice president from the vignette) are those responsible for facilitating the change in their own area, a change that may have started with an executive initiating sponsor higher up in the organization.
Conner (1993) defines the targets (I prefer the term implementers ) as the people “who must actually change” (p. 106). I think of them as the people who must implement the change (for example, a member in Tom’s finance department or a member of Barbara’s team). They have direct report accountabilities to their sponsor and are most effective when they listen, inquire, and clarify their questions and concerns with their sponsor at the beginning of a transition. This way, they can commit to the effort rather than falsely complying and later sabotaging the change. Their job is to continue to provide information about their experience of the implementation, thus providing an essential feedback loop in the system.
Excellent implementers can save sponsors from tunnel vision or from being surprised by obstacles that those closest to the change may notice first. Every sustaining sponsor needs first to be an excellent target with his own sponsor. The sustaining sponsor should make sure he knows what is expected and commit himself to the change. That way, he gets on board with the change goals rather than telegraphing a lack of ownership to the team (as Tom did to his department).
An advocate develops an idea about how a change can happen but needs a sponsor for her idea to be implemented. An advocate could have any number of reasons for promoting her idea. She may have noticed something in the system that inherently blocks the effectiveness of the implementers, may be passionate about the change idea itself, or may want something different for herself and her work in the organization. Any of these motivations is legitimate.
Advocates often become frustrated and demoralized when they cannot seem to get anyone to implement their idea. They are missing the key requirement: a sponsor to own their idea. Savvy advocates promote ideas by showing their compatibility with issues near and dear to a sponsor’s change projects and goals.
Conner says that a change agent actually makes the change. That description can be misleading and lure would-be change agents into the trap of the Rescue Model. I believe a change agent is the facilitator of the change (as Ben was) by helping the sponsor and the implementers stay aligned with each other.
To increase your effectiveness as a coach, you have to understand the change agent role and its crucial interplay with the other three roles. The change agent can work with both the sponsor and the implementers and can be internal or external to an organization. He can play a number of roles: data gatherer, educator, adviser, meeting facilitator, or coach. He most often has no direct line authority over the implementers and is therefore situated in a naturally occurring triangle of sponsor-implementer- agent. Conner believes that this triangle (when the implementers do not report to the agents or the implementers and agents do not have the same boss) is most often doomed to fail. In my experience, organizations change more successfully if the sponsor retains the role of sponsor and does not abandon the agent to work with the implementers as a substitute for the sponsor.
To increase your effectiveness as a coach, you have to understand the change agent role and its crucial interplay with the other three roles.
The goal for a change agent is to use the role in the triangle to help all parties function effectively. That means the sponsor focuses on the tasks of sponsoring, and the implementers perform the tasks necessary for change. The change agent facilitates, without taking on the roles of either of the other two parties.
The natural triangle of sponsor-implementer-agent can easily get out of alignment. Since executive coaches are change agents in the middle of this triangle, they must look out for possible role malfunctions. Sponsors often drop the ball, and implementers can get disconnected from the sponsor and the change effort. When this happens, a change agent can often overfunction, filling in gaps left by the sponsor. This is pseudo sponsoring, akin to the Rescue Model, and perpetuates a pattern in the triangle that can keep the system ineffective.
The coach can work overtime trying to infuse her client, the sponsor, with a sense of urgency. And she can overfunction by begging, pleading, threatening, managing, or cajoling the implementers. From what you now know about systems, this should sound a warning for you that the coach has misaligned her own role in the triangle and the change effort is in danger of unraveling.
It is critical for a coach to work with her client from the perspective of a change agent and work for alignment of these roles within a change initiative. Although your clients are leaders, the change management role they play needs assessment for each situation they face, and possible alteration. If your client has an issue with her boss, your client is an implementer for that moment. Or she may be advocating for a change with a peer in another department. Or her boss may expect her to act as a change agent, which means she has multiple roles and needs to maintain the clarity of each role.
Barbara, continued
Barbara and I reviewed her roles and those of her team. It did not take her long to see that their roles were misaligned. Because she was at a high level in the organization, all of Barbara’s direct reports were executives themselves and therefore sustaining sponsors of her change initiatives. However, they did not act like sustaining sponsors because they did not foster the change initiatives vigorously in their own areas. They seemed to leave that up to Barbara. No wonder she was burning herself out.
Barbara discovered another misalignment once she understood these roles better: two of her direct reports were going to her human resource director to find out what Barbara meant in the team meetings. Previously she would have figured their actions saved her time explaining things to them (of course, it also perpetuated the avoid-avoid pattern). Now Barbara saw that her direct reports were asking the HR director (Barbara’s change agent) to fill in for Barbara (which perpetuated an ineffective triangle and a boundary violation). Only Barbara could convey the urgency and clarity of her message to her direct reports. She told the human resource director to stop speaking on her behalf, a habit that was well intentioned but in fact diluted the effort.
You can help a client dramatically increase her effectiveness by helping her enact her specific change role fully and assisting her in keeping the boundaries of that role clear. You can help the client clarify what she can expect from others, based on their roles. Just as important, you need to stay within the boundaries of the change agent’s role as a coach. Aiding clients in defining role boundaries and responsibilities and keeping them clear, strong, and flexible are some of the most rewarding contributions you can provide as a coach. And it creates a big payoff in organizational change efforts that executives lead all the time.
Understanding the systems concepts of patterns, boundaries, and change roles helps you diagnose your clients’ issues in their organization as well as work relationship challenges. Everything does not always boil down to personality traits or solely interpersonal conflicts. Executives need to learn to see the signs of traits and conflicts as potentially the symptoms of an ingrained pattern that is not working, or boundaries that are not well maintained, or change roles that are being neglected. Developing your ability to help them see this broader world in their work is one of your essential jobs as their coach.
The systems perspective of coaching from the middle of the triangle between a client and her challenge fuels the four phases of coaching outlined in Part Two of this book. Carry the Client Responsibility Model forward with you as you explore the phases outlined in the following chapters. It underlies the reasoning behind the specific actions suggested in each step of the coaching process.
Chapter Four Highlights
The Client Responsibility Model Versus the Rescue Model of Coaching
1. Identify and avoid Rescue Model attitudes and behaviors.
2. Use the attitudes and behaviors of the Client Responsibility Model. Sustain a belief in your client’s resourcefulness.
3. Support the primary relationship between the client and her challenge, whatever or whoever that challenge may be. With heart and backbone (being compassionate and firm), keep turning your client back to face her own challenge.
Patterns in the Client’s System
1. Help the client identify the patterns in which he is immersed.
2. Ask the client questions to reveal the central “dance.”
3. Offer your identification of the pattern respectfully and provisionally.
4. Invite the client to name the pattern himself.
Homeostasis
1. Help the client anticipate and prepare for inevitable resistance.
2. Help the client learn not to take resistance personally.
Boundaries
1. Learn to see organizational activities that promote healthy boundaries.
2. Inquire about the boundary-making activities in the client’s system.
Know the Roles You and Others Play
1. Understand the roles of sponsor, implementer, advocate, and agent.
2. Learn how the triangle of sponsor-implementer-agent can function well or create problems.
3. Help the client define the boundaries and responsibilities of her role and the roles of those around her for improved alignment.
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