CHAPTER 5

BUILDING YOUR BASIC COACHING SKILLS: THE ‘BIG FIVE’

So when the door closes, and coach and coachee are finally left alone together, what actually happens? In this chapter, we cover the five absolute basics. In the next, we talk about some bells and whistles you can add on – but if you did just this chapter’s five simple (but not easy!) things really well, you would be astonished by the results. The ‘Big Five’^* alone can be transformational.

^* Not the psychometricians’ ‘Big Five’, or the ‘Big Five’ safari animals – the coaching Big Five!

In fact, I would be so radical as to say the other things are sometimes added in to make the coach feel better. The Big Five are like a Picasso drawing: others would cram more onto the page, but only the master has the confidence to draw a single, perfect line. The coaching equivalent is:

1. 1contracting;
2. 2the GROW Model;
3. 3listening;
4. 4questioning, and
5. 5non-directive.

I say more about each below. In the real world they blend, and you might need to flip back and forth a little to get results, but I describe them here in their ‘pure’ state so you get the clearest picture.

1. Contracting

On the rare occasions that something goes wrong in coaching and people come to me for help, 99 per cent of the time it was a failure of contracting. Good contracting has three main elements: commercial, psychological and within the work itself.

The commercial aspects are the same as everything else in business: what is the service to be delivered here, by whom to whom, what are the end results/deliverables, and the details such as location, cancellation charges, etc. This takes some thought and work to hammer out, and research on best practice in your particular sector/context, but it is a straightforward business task. Nevertheless, many coaches in training still have to be reminded about this piece – they get so absorbed in the thrill of actual coaching, they need to be gently reconnected with the standard business ‘hygiene factors’ they had temporarily forgotten.

By contrast, the psychological contract is almost never spelled out in business, but it is there all the time, underlying – or undermining! – the overt work being done. In coaching, some of it though must be explicitly spelled out: for example, contracting around confidentiality. Is everything that is said between these walls utterly confidential, not to be revealed by you the coach, even unto your dying day? Or is there a requirement that some information, perhaps at key milestone points, will go back to the organisation that is, after all, paying? (If the latter, a simple trick that saves much grief is to ensure that all reporting goes through the coachee: so the organisation gets what it needs, but trust is maintained as the coachee sees everything.)

The psychological contract begins to be formed in the many – seemingly trivial – initial administrative exchanges between all the parties, and then particularly in the ‘chemistry’ session. The very existence of such a session – where the prospective individual client has the chance to meet the coach and decide if they feel comfortable working with them – goes a long way towards building a workable psychological contract. If forced into coaching, people remain wary. If they have real choice, they are more likely to engage.

The essence of the psychological contract is trust: the client has to trust the coach to the extent that they feel able to open up, disclose sensitive information, and try and explore new things. How do you build trust? For coaching, which is a relatively straightforward part of business life, I think you just need to be a more or less decent person, seem competent at the task and have an inner confidence in what you’re doing. The first of these – being basically decent – was already touched on in Chapter 3. As for the others, I observe it takes about 3–6 months of a coach training for people to build basic competence in coaching, but much longer for them to believe it: building that crucial inner confidence takes many practice sessions over, typically, 6–12 months. But it pays off: sensible business people have an acute ‘nose’ and can tell instantly if you’re authentic or not.

The third element of contracting is during the work itself. The coach constantly keeps an eye on whether the topic worked on is actually what the corporate client is paying for. And even within the session, minute by minute, whether what’s being discussed right now is actually relevant to the goal set at the beginning of the session (on which more below).

So far so good. But now we get to simple contracting v. complex contracting – i.e. the difference between ‘life’ and business coaching.

Simple contracting

Where there is just one coach contracting with one client – in personal coaching for example, or in business coaching where the client is a sole trader, or the proprietor of a small business where there isn’t anyone else involved – contracting is usually very straightforward. Coach and client can work out together what is involved, the price for the work, and the deliverables. And in addition to the commercial contracting, the ‘psychological contract’ is usually also clear: I as the client will trust you and be pretty open about even my most sensitive business issues, maybe even personal ones where relevant; you as the coach will respect that confidence absolutely, and create a really practical and effective environment for us to do good work together and deliver the outcomes I want.

Complex contracting: both the individual and the organisation

Contracting at the individual level is, of course, also necessary in complex organisational coaching. Typically the coach’s first contact is with the corporate ‘buyer’ or initiator of the coaching. When the coach is briefed by them, there are some questions about the prospective individual client so simple that it might seem naïve, even a bit embarrassing, to ask – usually these are of course the most important! Does the person actually want to be coached? Did anyone ask them? What is the purpose of the coaching? As coaching becomes ever more ‘sexy’, it is becoming increasingly common for it to be suggested rather than another intervention that would, in fact, be better for that particular task. If there is, for example, a simple skill deficit – Jo’s new role requires them to do X or Y and they don’t know how – then targeted training to plug the gap might be a better starting point.

Once the coach is briefed, and is onto the next stage of meeting the prospective coachee directly in the ‘chemistry’ session, they might get quite different answers to the individual-level questions. It sometimes turns out the prospective individual client didn’t feel they had a real choice about being coached – maybe they feigned acceptance but internally felt resentful. Or they might have really wanted coaching, but not had any choice as to the coach.^* Both of these can be a waste of money: coaching depends so much on the client being actively involved, that foisting anything on them, whether it’s being coached, or a coach of someone else’s choosing, is pointless. So as much as possible, the coach who finds themselves in this position has to name it, open the subject right up again, and give the client real choice, saying something like: ‘Well, we seem to be in a less than ideal situation. Let’s figure out what your real options might be here, and how you could manage each of them . . .’

^* One small professional-services organisation I knew years ago offered coaching to all people promoted to partner level – but the only coach allowed was the wife of the senior partner. She had done a short training course and wanted clients. I am not making this up.

But assuming there wasn’t any such hitch, the client was keen to be coached, and ‘clicked’ with one of the prospective coaches they were offered, the next task is to contract on the actual work to be done within the coaching sessions – what are the goals for the coaching work overall, and for individual sessions therein. With a client in personal coaching, job done, and you launch into the work.

In the organisational context though you’re only part way there: the coach needs to be contracting in parallel with the many others involved. The paying client, the organisation, will have objectives for the coaching. Those objectives may be clear or unclear, and they may or may not be aligned with those of the individual person (or team) being coached. And there are usually several different stakeholders: the client, their line manager/chairman/CEO; the HR and/or L&D specialist or occasionally both; and perhaps a separate budget holder, to name just a few. This is one of the major differences between life and business coaching: in business coaching, with multiple stakeholders, there is far greater complexity. (And more again if, as is often the case, the players are in different cultures/time zones.)

There is also the sometimes tricky contractual matter that the real client is not the person sitting in front of you, it’s the organisation paying the bill. Some people, usually former therapists who in my view haven’t properly switched to operating under the rules of business, disagree, and maintain that the ‘client’ to whom they have primary and sole responsibility is the person sitting in front of them. I feel quite passionately that this is wrong: ethically, and indeed legally, if the coach is contracted with the organisation, then the organisation is the client. (While in theory it might be possible for a business coach to be hired directly by an individual in an organisation, in practice you would ask why this is happening: usually it’s because the individual wants to leave, or there has been a breakdown in trust with their employer. If the employer is an existing client firm, facilitating the departure of a valued employee would presumably be a breach of the contract with the firm. In which case the coach has to choose between taking on the individual and renouncing the corporate client, or keeping the corporate relationship and declining the individual.) Yes of course we do our level best for the person sitting in front of us, but our paymaster is the organisation. We coach the individual to the very best of our ability – but it would be wrong to coach them, even if they set that as the goal, on anything inimical to the interests of the organisation.

The usual situation – and it crops up all the time – is where they are tired, or exhausted, or stressed, or feel unappreciated, and consider leaving. Assuming they are a valued employee the firm wants to retain, it would of course be highly improper for a coach to assist them to move to a competitor, while being paid by their present employer – but while this sounds a nightmare in theory, in practice the problem seldom arises: good clients have a sense of propriety too and generally don’t stray beyond the limits, and experienced coaches know that giving them some space to vent is often all that is needed. The really tricky issues are usually more nuanced and complicated. Dealing with the challenges this throws up, when the objectives and even the well-being of organisation and individual client diverge, is one of the most common subjects coaches take to supervision (see Chapter 4). It really helps to have expert, dispassionate guidance to tease out where the ethical responsibilities lie and to plot the correct path, especially in ‘grey areas’.

In addition, working in organisations there is the need to understand the context and contract well in the shifting political sands of organisational life. The hazards of this are well known to people in business, so I won’t say much more, but have summarised some useful questions in the following box to jog your memory.

How to find answers to these questions may not be apparent, or easy. In practice there are often things that the coach is not told. One of the hallmarks of a very experienced business coach is the ways they have developed of finding out more. Practice (and sadly, a sorry lesson or two I’m afraid) will help your antennae get much more acute.

2. GROW Model

The GROW Model is by far the most widely used coaching tool in the world. It looks deceptively simple – but don’t be fooled. At one level it is simple: that’s part of its appeal. Even the busiest or most forgetful of us can manage to remember G-R-O-W. But on the other hand it has immense depth and power.

It’s also like an accordion: it can expand in or out as much as you want – GROW works to structure a long, formal coaching session of an hour or two, but you can use it just as well (well, pieces of it – or the whole thing if you’re dazzlingly good!) for a two-minute conversation by the coffee machine.

Let me outline it briefly first, then we’ll go through each section in more detail.

GROW: brief outline

• ●Topic: it actually starts with ‘topic’ – the client comes in and says what they want to talk about today. (Yes I know, so it’s really the ‘TGROW’ Model – but like so many movie stars, it had to change its name to be famous.)
• ●Goal: from that broad topic, the coach gets the client really clear on what they want from this session: for example ‘What is the specific outcome you want today, and how will we know we have succeeded?’
• ●Reality: in the ‘R’ stage, the coach asks the client to get the key facts out on the table. Military strategists would call this stage ‘reconnaissance’ (as in ‘time spent in reconnaissance is never wasted’).
• ●Options: this is familiar territory for businesspeople: what are the options, and what are the costs, benefits, upsides, downsides, risks, etc. of each.
• ●Will: and finally, what will you do, i.e. what is your action plan? But also crucially, the ‘W’ uses both meanings of ‘will’ – i.e. not just ‘will’ as in action but also what is your ‘will’ around this, i.e. your motivation.

How do you take a client through it? Simply by asking them the questions appropriate to each stage (then stopping and listening properly to their answer – see below!). Some good questions to ask in each stage are in the following box – coaches in training often find it useful to compile their own unique set, noting good questions wherever they spot them, trying different ones out, and settling on the ones that work best for them.

Figure 5.1 The GROW Model

^* For more, see Sir John Whitmore (2017) Coaching for Performance: The Principles and Practice of Coaching and Leadership, revised 25th anniversary edition, London: Nicholas Brealey.

More on GROW

Now you have a preliminary sense of how it works, let’s dig a little deeper.

Topic

As Alison Hardingham so helpfully reminds us,¹ the client doesn’t walk in the door as a blank slate: they turn up amid a very busy life, their head buzzing with all that’s going on. Some of it is noise – they got frustrated in bad traffic, the cat was sick this morning, a key employee is leaving – but somewhere in there is this session’s topic. How to tell the difference? Ask the client! This is a core underlying assumption of business coaching: the client is presumed to be well, and perfectly capable of disentangling things for themselves, if we just create the right conditions.

So even the simple starting question, ‘What would you like to talk about today?’ can open a can of worms. Myles Downey then makes it even tougher: he suggests we ask it again.² I saw him once doing a live coaching demonstration. The first topic was very sensible and would clearly have made a difference to the client sitting there. Myles noted it respectfully, then asked again. After a moment’s pause, a second topic emerged. Again, respect – but then Myles asked, ‘Anything else?’ – and out blurted a third topic that was clearly ‘the one’. The coaching session was set alight. Asked afterwards by the audience if he had suspected the ‘real’ topic was underneath, Myles said courteously not at all, it is simply his practice to ask, several times, in order to check. A discipline.

Goal

By now, with perhaps several big meaty topics on the table, a consultant would be in mental overdrive, following all the threads, hothousing solutions, worrying how to get through the load in such a short time. But Myles just calmly asks a simple question: ‘Which of these do you want to work on today?’ This is the essence of coaching: it seems innocuous, but it throws the responsibility for the content of the coaching onto the client. Only they know the vast complexity of all the factors, history, data, hopes, fears, contradictions, of the matter in hand. Putting the question to them causes them to drop their thinking from surface brain functioning down into deeper processing: often they fall silent briefly while their brain crunches it all. Then they look up, into your eyes, and firmly state the topic. In a normal conversation, both sides would regard that as that. But GROW differs massively from normal conversations, at two points: the beginning, and the end, the ‘G’ and the ‘W’.

In a normal business conversation, or indeed over a glass of wine with friends, ‘topics’ come up all the time, but you wouldn’t then require them to distil that down into a single, pinpoint goal for the conversation. In coaching, you must. If you did nothing else from this book other than just go around your organisation requiring a far higher standard of clear goalsetting, that alone would be transformational. There is powerful scientific evidence for this (see Chapter 12) and it is cross-culturally valid: the more specific the goal set at the beginning, the higher the performance outcome at the end. Of all the vast amount of research from organisational psychology, this is one of the few pieces that has jumped over the wall into mainstream business, in the acronym ‘SMART’. SMART goals are variously defined, but the acronym is usually something like specific, measurable, achievable, realistic (ah! we’ll come back to that!) and timed.

But no one applies this as determinedly as coaches must in the ‘G’ of GROW. Getting it right is often uncomfortable. Clients who aren’t used to it generally need to experience it in several sessions before they get the hang of it. It often feels awkward for coaches in training too – so much so that initially they almost always duck out too early, and fail to get a proper ‘G’. Experienced coaches are supportive, patient – but tough. My own preferred method is to make it as tangible as possible. Gesturing at the door, I ask, ‘What do you want to have when you walk out that door, that you don’t have now?’ Clients thereby get what I mean by a goal – it might be clarity, or a plan, or three bullet points, but it’s inside their head. I’m not offering a magic wand to change the world outside; but what is on offer is sharpening up the only tool they really have to make that change, i.e. themselves.

The goal is utterly key. It does all the heavy lifting of the session – so if you don’t have a good clear goal, you don’t have a coaching session. I once watched a colleague do a coaching demonstration, in a large hall in a hard-edged industrial town, in front of a cynical audience of 200 people. He had only 30 minutes for the demonstration. The minutes ticked by. Ten minutes, fifteen, and he’s still working patiently to get the goal. Twenty minutes, and his colleagues in the audience are beginning to sweat. Finally at minute 25, he got it – and in the remaining 5 minutes, the rest of the session fell into place like dominoes: reality, options, will, click click click, and a great result. With a great goal, the rest of the session falls into place.

Why is it so powerful? It’s like light. When the light waves are all over the place, as normal, it’s light. When with great effort, all the waves are brought into focus, it’s a laser and can cut through steel. That’s what we are doing with ‘G’: it’s as if we’re picking up the entire content of the client’s brain, and turning it to focus laser-like with the same searing power on a single topic.

Because this demanding precision of goalsetting is unfamiliar, there is a big difference between clients who are ‘trained’ and ‘untrained’. A client who has never experienced coaching before will have no idea what they’re meant to do, and the coach needs to guide them through. By contrast, coaching someone who has been coached many times before, and/or where this is their third or fourth session with you, is much easier. They know the rules: they tell you briefly what the key things are they want to work on (‘topic’) and know they then need to focus this or part of it into a crisp ‘goal’. Often they come with a pre-prepared G. If so you have ‘transferred the technology’ and they have a tool for life.

But sometimes even the most ‘trained’ client comes in absolutely steaming: something big or bad, or good, has happened, and they have to get it off their chest. You need to let them vent. Sometimes the chance to vent, with the coach not interrupting, is itself the value of that session, and the whole session can be eaten up by it. Practice helps here: experienced coaches have the confidence to judge when it’s time to move the client onto the task for today, and very experienced coaches can do it deftly and surprisingly fast, even where the subject of the venting would seem overwhelming.

Note there is a difference between the overall goal(s) your client brings to coaching, and the individual goal for each session (different writers use different terms for each). So for example, Client A comes for six months’ coaching, with the brief to prepare them for, say, their first board-level position. That’s the overall (sometimes ‘programme’) goal. Within that, individual goals are set for each session. Over time, the series of achievements session by session (including the work that is done by the client between sessions) adds up to delivering the overall goal. In the GROW Model, we are referring to the individual goal for this session. (And in the first one or maybe even two sessions of a six-month programme, the G goal for that individual session might be to define, refine and crisp up to SMART standards, the overall programme goals for the six months. If you see what I mean.)

How do you know if you have a sharp enough goal? If you haven’t, the session feels out of control – to both people. The discussion goes round and round. It is often low-energy, uninspiring, flat. The reward of hanging out for a really defined goal, is a turbo-charged remainder of the session: it’s shorter, because everything is tightly focused, energising, even fun – maybe exhausting, but still exhilarating.

Reality

Now you have the goal, the task in reality is to get the facts out on the table. Again, this piece on its own can make a dramatic difference: in this busy world, we very rarely stop and give the important parts of our lives a good hard think.

If we try it on our own, we might not spot that our thinking has got stuck in a rut – or we do sense that, but can’t find a way out. But working with a coach, who methodically encourages us to consider all the key domains – finance, people, technology, operations, etc. – there are often ‘Ah-hah!’ moments: ‘I hadn’t thought of this before, but actually . . .’ The coach is on the lookout for habitual patterns of thinking, that might unknowingly blinker the client. ‘People people’, for example, are often on full alert to the ramifications for others, but might not have considered properly the operational or financial constraints. Technocrats, on the other hand, might have a brilliant plan that fails to take sufficient account of human risks or needs.

There are three traps to avoid here. First, this is not, as some people think, about being ‘realistic’. The coach may privately think an aspect of the goal is unattainable, but who are they to know – they may be blithely unaware that the client’s cousin is a Russian oligarch. Unless there is a clear breach of the law, moral or ethical codes, or the coaching contract, this is not the place for the coach to impose their own limiting beliefs on the client; evaluation of options comes in the next stage (and even then, it’s done largely by the client – if you want to be paid for your opinions, become a mentor!).

(If you do have serious concerns about an option – or indeed a goal – being feasible, there are two possible things you can do. Ideally, jot it down in your notes in a corner where you put ‘things to come back to later’. When you check that towards the end of the session, you’ll often find the concern has already been dealt with. Or, if you are really worried, say it, but own it as yours: ‘Myrtle, this may just be me, but what concerns me about X is Y.’ They can then either explain more background, which satisfies your concern, or agree you have a point. The trick is to state your view neutrally, so it remains a proper challenge to their thinking, rather than telling them what to think.)

Second, some beginners think this fact-gathering is for the coach. But in purist GROW coaching, the coach needs to know very little of the background and present situation – all this digging is for the sake of the client. As the main facts are pulled out, the client often gains insight. That insight, the higher quality perspective, is the objective, not feeding an analysis process of the coach. (The latter is consulting.)

And third, note that in reality, good questions begin ‘what’, ‘who’, ‘when’, etc. – but not ‘why’. If you ask ‘why’, people will leap happily into self-justification, digging themselves deeper into the hole they’re currently in. (This is one of the differences between coaching and therapy; the subject of some schools of therapy is often or even exclusively ‘why’.) ‘What’ type questions are more likely to keep the client objective, and able to look dispassionately at the facts. (OK, I accept there are occasions when ‘why’ can be valid, if asked neutrally simply as part of the fact-gathering. But it is a healthy discipline for novices to avoid it – and thereby to notice how habituated we are to ask it!)

Options

Having clarified their goal and considered the facts, only now does the client consider their options. The coach has two tasks here: first, to broaden the options, and second, to narrow them down.

Broadening options can add great value to the client’s thinking. Often people will say (metaphorically, or even literally with their head in their hands), ‘There’s nothing I can do.’ But as Viktor Frankl has so soberingly pointed out,³ in even the grimmest situations, there is always something one can do; in the concentration camps, he noted some people, when able to control nothing else, could still choose their inner reaction to events. Or they will say, ‘there’s only one option’ that the coach must challenge – what other alternatives are there? Or clients often say, ‘I’ve really only got two choices’ – you get the picture.

The ‘O’ is where coaches who love technique can have a field day. There are dozens of great questions to help clients break out of their mental constraints. The ‘miracle question’ often works. I was coaching a client once and both of us were stuck, going round and round on a seemingly intractable problem. Then I asked, for no particular reason, ‘If you had a completely free hand, what would you do?’ and the client almost spat straight back, ‘I’d fire the bitch!’ She clapped her hand to her mouth, giggled shamefacedly, and said she had no idea until that moment she felt so strongly about this particular individual. The topic had suddenly became a lot clearer! There are dozens of variants on the ‘miracle question’: ‘if you had unlimited time/unlimited budget what would you do; if you could wave a magic wand; if you woke up in the morning and the problem was solved . . .’ – each has unblocked many a log-jammed client.

Here’s another favourite of mine. The client says, and they mean it: ‘I don’t know.’ You flip back quickly with, ‘If you did know, what it would be?’ – but you have to keep a perfectly straight face. Astonishingly, 50 per cent of the time they will come straight back with the answer – because the question has got in under their radar, and triggered a hitherto buried thought. The other 50 per cent of the time, when they spot the question is absurd, they gaze at you in astonishment, or laugh, and it doesn’t work. But a 50 per cent strike rate is not to be sneezed at – try it! But keep a straight face.

Once the client has been freed up to consider a full range of options, the task is then to narrow down the field, by evaluating the pros and cons of each. Again, the criteria against which the various options are judged are for the client to determine – these may also need to be coached out of them. For some clients/topics/contexts, safety first is absolutely paramount. For others, the best option is the most innovative. Each to their own.

Will

As noted above, this has two parts: what will you do, and what is your will or motivation on this.

First, the action plan part of ‘W’. This again is where coaching is different from a normal conversation. The coach wants to know, having talked the matter through properly, what action the client is now going to take, and by when, etc. This may not need to be as tough as you were on ‘G’ because if everything has gone well the client is by now energised, clear and determined. But you do need to push harder than you would in normal conversation for the client to articulate the action to which they are now committed.

Then, we need to check the level of that commitment – the will, or motivation part of ‘W’. Sir John Whitmore’s scale of motivation⁴ really does work here. You ask the client on a scale of 1–10 how likely they are to do it. If the number is 8/10 or above, they probably will; if it’s 7 or below, they probably won’t. I have asked this question hundreds, perhaps into the thousands, of times, and Sir John was absolutely right. If it’s 7 or below, I tell them his wise words, they look sheepish, and it emerges that back in G, or R, we missed something, and we need to cycle through again. (And high-achiever coaches or clients, even if it’s 8 or above, usually then ask, ‘So what do we need to do to make it a 10?’!)

3. Listening and hearing

In the 1960s, Carl Rogers pointed out that just being deeply listened to is enough for many people to resolve their problems – without any other intervention.

This is so utterly crucial . . .

. . . let me pause for you to take it in. Just being deeply listened to is enough to bring about change.

And 50 years on it’s even more true, and more rare. Everyone and everything – our phones, emails, texts, Twitter, blogs, podcasts, YouTube, TED etc., etc. – is on transmit mode, and each of us inhabits our own personal cacophony.

By contrast, when I was first deeply listened to as an adult, by an expert trained to listen acutely, the experience felt such a privilege, and was so productive, I was moved almost to tears. I suspect neuroscientists will soon find cells in the brain that fire under conditions of real listening, explaining why it is so liberating and creative. For whatever reason, it works: problems that were stuck work loose, unexpected new ideas pop up, you think more deeply and see further.

So it is an absolutely central coaching tool.

The coach’s ability to listen and, beyond that, to hear – that is, to listen such that they really understand the client, can imagine being in their world – creates trust and authenticity. Listening is key to non-directive coaching, which we consider below: real listening switches the focus so the session is guided by what the client says and what the coach hears, rather than by any prior agenda of the coach.

How do you listen better?

Step one: stop talking!

Step two: just listen. There is the term ‘active listening’, but the phrase annoys me: it’s a contradiction in terms. True listening isn’t a ‘doing’ state, it’s a ‘being’ state where everything else is shut down, and you are just utterly absorbed in what the other person is saying. One hears about things like paraphrasing, or straight parroting back what the person has just said to show you have heard.^* If you’re really listening, the clients don’t need that signalled, they already know.

^* Nothing wrong with these techniques per se: used discriminatingly, they can be very effective, for example to check we have heard correctly. But done mindlessly and repetitively, ‘because that’s what I should do in active listening’, they drive clients crazy.

As with everything else in coaching, it gets better with practice. If it feels really difficult at the beginning, then it might help to ‘fake it till you make it’ – in other words, just do the behaviours (fall silent; attend closely to the client) and over time the inner chatter will die down, and the ability to develop a genuinely listening state will build. If you have ever learned meditation, it’s the same technique: if a distracting thought comes into your mind, then don’t fight it, just note it and allow it to pass away, coming back to, in this case, the listening.

There’s a distinction you may find helpful. Listening as we do it in normal life and business is ‘listening to respond’. They say something; we say something back. Like tennis – back, forth, back, forth, always on edge, always looking to hit the great return. Sometimes this is relevant in coaching, but you can doubtless do it already. The skill to deepen instead is the ability to listen to understand.

To contrast the two in coaching:

• ●Listening to respond. The coach’s focus is on their own next step rather than on the client. Typically, novice coaches might hear the client’s words but are, to some extent, distracted by their own needs and concerns (e.g. what am I going to say or ask next?; how does what he’s telling me fit with what I know about the organisation?; what on earth does that acronym mean?; does she expect me to have the answers?; I don’t approve of what he’s telling me). At worst – as someone said in a famous investment bank – ‘around here we don’t listen – we reload’!
• ●Listening to understand. Here the coach and client are in conversation, with the client doing most of the talking, and the coach simply absorbed in what the client is saying. The coach is not distracted by worrying about the process, so they have more channels open to receive information, and are more likely to pick up, without trying, what is said, and also what is not said, and ‘body language’. The coach will probably also pick up any emotional aspects associated with the content of the discussion. And they are more able to notice patterns, perhaps in the client’s language (e.g. a frequent use of negatives) or across sessions. Coach and client are probably in ‘the zone’ or ‘Flow’ (see Chapter 6).

Being able to flex from listening to respond, to listening to understand, is necessary for proper Big Five coaching. Listening to understand is most likely when the coach:

• ●has a belief in the client’s ability to help themselves;
• ●follows the client’s agenda rather than their own;
• ●does not judge the client;
• ●is comfortable with structuring the session (with a light touch);
• ●asks open questions;
• ●moves beyond needing to have an answer or to be right.

If you would like to explore this further, some good references for further reading are listed at the end of the chapter. Standing head and shoulders above the others, in fact on its very own mountain, is Nancy Kline’s wonderful and eminently practical book, Time to Think.⁵ Her coaching method engenders a quality and length of listening that is so generative it can be all that is needed. The subtitle of her book is ‘Listening to ignite the human mind’, and it does.

4. Questioning

Questioning – at last! You probably think you’ve got to the most important section of the chapter – but au contraire.

A small story, if I may. I had a coaching client once who was a public servant, relatively young, but exceptionally gifted. He had been ‘fast tracked’ to very great responsibility, and was working in a policy field he cared deeply about, but his work was stressful almost beyond endurance: the subject matter was inherently distressing, and his particular office was also notoriously toxic, with a bullying leader and seething political crosscurrents. Coaching was a rare place he could open up. He refused to let me come to his office, preferring to walk across the park to ours and thereby get some fresh air and distance from work. He always arrived with several clear topics, worked incredibly hard in the sessions, and would stride back across the park, recharged to go back into battle. I learned how crucial it was for him when on one occasion he turned down a summons to a meeting with his Cabinet Minister, in order to come to coaching.

Then one day when we were scheduled to meet, I got a bad migraine – but knowing how much he gave up to attend our sessions, I hauled myself to the office. Once there, I explained: ‘Fred’ (not his name, of course), ‘I’m so very sorry, I have a bad migraine. I would have cancelled anyone else, but I know how important these sessions are to you, and that you can do it on your own. Go.’ Then sat for the rest of the session, with my head in my hands, in a blur. Through the fog, I could hear him, initially disconcerted, then saying ‘OK, you usually ask me what my goal is. I have been thinking about that and . . .’ and off he went. After about 20 minutes, I heard a voice through the fog saying, ‘Anne, I’m stuck, what do I do?’ I muttered I had no idea and he had to get on with it. So, he did. At the end of an hour and a half, the voice through the fog said: ‘Thanks, that was great! I’ve got a lot out of that!’ And indeed he had – the next session, when I was back to normal, he showed me his notes, and reported on the results. I wouldn’t have done it with any other client – it was late on in our coaching programme, he knew and had internalised the process well, and needed the thinking space desperately. Perhaps I shouldn’t own up to it! But it does illustrate that an awful lot can be done with contracting, GROW, and listening (or in this case, huddled in a heap) – you need those frightfully clever questions a lot less than you think.

They do add something. But, at their best, if the contracting is thorough, the GROW clear and tough, and the listening profound, they needn’t be more than a light touch on the rudder.

Open and closed questions

Often the most powerful questions are very simple, short and open. They begin with what, where, when and who; they elicit information and take the conversation forward. Closed questions by contrast may be a statement disguised as a question and can often be answered yes or no; this doesn’t usually take the client’s insight forward, though there are exceptions to every rule.

Different questions for different tasks

No matter how light the touch on the rudder, questions do control the direction of a conversation, and different types of questions have different results. To know which type to deploy, ask yourself what would help the client most in this particular moment. Is it to:

• ●focus attention;
• ●follow interest;
• ●raise awareness; or
• ●generate responsibility?

May we consider each in turn.

Focus attention

There are two tasks here, the obvious one and the deeper one. Clearly the coach will use some questions to bring the client back to the task in hand if they have strayed, to keep them on the point. (Or to ‘recontract’ verbally in the moment so they’re focused on a new point . . . ‘We seem to be in a different domain here. Your original goal was X, but am I hearing that Y has now emerged? Which is more important?’) But there is also a deeper purpose.

Focus can get the client’s mind into its most highly productive state, that of relaxed concentration. Tim Gallwey calls it ‘focused attention’.⁶ Norman Doidge’s gripping book The Brain That Changes Itself, reports neuroscience research showing that focused attention is ‘essential to long-term plastic change’ in the brain.⁷ Sustained intensely focused attention is one of the radical new methods used by leading clinicians around the world with results including some ‘blind people restored to sight; learning disorders cured; IQs raised; ageing brains rejuvenated; lifelong anxiety and repression relieved; and stroke patients written off as beyond help recovering their faculties’.⁸ (For more, see Chapter 12 – and I can’t recommend the Doidge book highly enough: it blows wide open the boundaries of what is possible.)

To me this could be the first hard evidence of why coaching using the same techniques^* also achieves astonishing change and transformation in business clients. A hitherto diffident lawyer newly promoted to partner in her firm has her innate talent unlocked and soars; a team which has been fighting for years pulls together to grapple with existential threat, just in the nick of time – we see it all every day in coaching, it’s one of the reasons why it is so profoundly satisfying. Neuroscience may be beginning to explain the underlying reasons why it works, and focused attention is certainly one of them.

^* Although not as intensively as Doidge describes – I wonder what would happen if we did?

Examples of questions that help to focus are:

• ●All the ‘G’ questions, including:
  • –What would be a useful outcome for this meeting?
  • –What would you like to have at the end of this meeting that you don’t have right now?
  • –What would success look like?
  • –What would the benefit be of achieving today’s goal?
  • –Where are you now on a scale of 1–10? – . . . and what number do you want to get to by the end of this session?
• ●Where are we? (It’s allowed! If you have got confused, it’s likely the client has too, so just name it.)
• ●Could you draw the threads of that together for me?
• ●Can you summarise the key insights from today, and your action points?

Following interest

The coach needs to be wary of following their own interest rather than that of the client. This can occur at quite subtle levels – as people go through coaching training, they are often embarrassed to realise they do it more than they first thought. One called it ‘stealth coaching’ – i.e. asking questions that nudge the client to where the coach thinks they ‘should’ be, but without them spotting they’re being led. It doesn’t work. For coaching conversations to ‘fly’ they have to follow the client’s interest. Good questions are clean, moving the process along, but in the direction chosen by the client. Using their language and keeping questions simple achieves this.

Examples of questions that follow interest are:

• ●[If several possible topics have been raised] Which of these interests you most?
• ●What did you notice?
• ●You said . . . – tell me more. (Or more simply: Say more.)
• ●Where do we go from here?

You might think questions like ‘Which is most “relevant”?’ might be better, but I would counsel you to explore what happens when you stick with the word ‘interest’. In the question, ‘. . . which of these interests you?’, it is a very precise and clever little word. ‘Relevant’ can knock the client sideways into judgement, or what they ‘should’ do. ‘Interest’ is more innocent. It sends the client down into their own storehouse of experience, data and preferences. They come back up with something of intrinsic value and importance to them – and we shall see in Chapter 11 that intrinsic interest is one of the core requirements for real motivation. So following interest sets them up to succeed.

Raising awareness

One aim of the coach is to help the client discover something new, from a simple insight to life-changing thoughts. The most powerful, as we saw above, are those that lie within, but are currently buried. The task is to bring them back into awareness.

The most powerful questions to do this are those that build on the client’s own words, simply reflecting (or repeating) back words or statements, e.g. ‘You said you found the meeting difficult?’ Or ‘What do you mean by difficult?’ Or even – and less is definitely more – ‘Difficult?’^* This encourages the client to go deeper into their own thinking. Examples of questions that raise awareness are:

^* I know, I was critical earlier of ‘parroting back’ – the difference is the intent. Mindless parroting is fit only for parrots, but repeating a word sensitively to get the client to think about it more deeply is sometimes right for humans.

• ●When you said . . . what does that mean to you?
• ●What did you mean by . . . ?
• ●When you said/did . . . how did others react?
• ●What have you observed (seen/heard) that tells you that . . . ?
• ●What did you feel about . . . ?
• ●How is this connected to . . . ?
• ●If you did know the answer, what would it be?

Generating responsibility

Although the issue is the client’s, a common pitfall is for the coach to take on responsibility for solving it. This is hard to avoid initially, until you develop ways of deflecting clients’ requests. It can be so tempting to help, when a client is asking for your advice, and/or genuinely does not seem able to come up with an answer or solution of their own. But the client is going to have to walk out the door and carry out their plans on their own, without you, and even if it seems tough, the thoughts and plans that stick are the ones that come from them.

Questions that generate responsibility include:

• ●What could you do?
• ●What would you encourage your boss/colleague/team member to do?
• ●What will you do?
• ●When?
• ●What needs to happen so that . . . ?
• ●What support do you need?
• ●What would prevent you from doing this, and what’s your fall-back plan to deal with it?
• ●If you did know the answer what would it be?
• ●How committed are you to this, on a scale of 1–10?

(And if clients are pressing:)

• ●I’m happy to share what I think, but first . . .
• ●Let’s discuss your ideas first: what will you do?

5. Non-directive coaching

By now you might be protesting – even exploding! Am I allowed to say nothing?! What’s the point of my 30 years of experience, wouldn’t it be useful for them to hear some of that? I could save them so much time/protect them from mistakes/it would just be so much faster if I . . .

Indeed. And of course, in practice, senior coaches do mix up asking and telling. Particularly at leadership coaching level, clients prefer, even require, their coaches to ‘bring something to the party’. It varies the pace, makes things interesting. But giving advice in coaching is like sugar: a sprinkling livens things up, but too much over too long is unhealthy. The task is not to abandon directive coaching, but to add in the full power of non-directive: to learn it so thoroughly that you can do it just as fast and well as you can directive – in a split second, without thinking. Then you have the full range at your fingertips.

So at last we have arrived at the biggest of them all. Contracting, GROW, listening, questioning are all techniques, but non-directive is a principle.

The distinction is between directive and non-directive coaching. As we said in Chapter 1, at its crudest, this is the difference between tell and ask. In directive coaching, the coach in some way tells the client what to do: puts in advice, guidance, content. In non-directive coaching, by contrast, the coach pulls out the thoughts, capabilities, potential, plans, inspirations from the client.

Why is non-directive so important? Because it works better! If only for the simple reason that people, particularly intelligent high-achieving people, don’t like being told what to do. They may ask your advice – but have you ever noticed they then ignore it?! People are far more energised by plans they’ve developed themselves.

It’s also a critical time-management technique for busy managers. If an employee comes to your door and asks for a quick bit of advice, and you give it, then next time they’re right back at your door. But if instead you consistently flip it back to them (as in, perhaps, ‘What have you thought of already?’), then eventually they develop their own capability and stay at their desks. Their morale and productivity are higher, because people appreciate having a bigger stake in what they do – and you have more time. What’s not to like?!

I can teach the GROW model in workshops to people who’ve never heard of it before, in 15 minutes. Coaching, on paper, is extremely simple. Yet it takes between six months to a year for capable businesspeople to learn to do it tolerably well. Yes, there are more techniques than the basics in this chapter to be grappled with (including those in later chapters), but what takes a year is not the learning, it’s the unlearning. And 90 per cent of the unlearning is needed to master non-directive coaching.

Almost every experienced person who enters coach training, whatever their job – lawyer, leader, consultant, manager, HR specialist, psychologist, professor – has earned their living to date by telling. It’s a habit of 20 or 30 years, which would take some time to break in any event, but it goes beyond that. When I ask a world-class management consultant of 35 years’ success to stop transmitting, I am asking him to cease using the weapon that has been the whole basis of his success to date, and he is likely to feel naked, exposed and uncomfortable without it. For many of us, it goes even further, as telling, guiding, advising others has become a part of our very ‘ego identity’ – it’s just part of who we are. So it takes great effort to stop doing it, in order to try out the new approach.

But despite all this, those training people to coach know all we have to do – and it can take quite a bit of effort! – is to get students to try it, and stick at it, until they experience the client having one of those magical ‘ah-hah’ moments. It’s like a shark tasting blood: they have the thrill of seeing light spill across a client’s face, and they’re hooked. Pontificating has its own charms, I know, but it’s not a patch on seeing your clients becoming fully alive again, reconnected and energised by their renewed purpose, fresh clarity, even joy.

How do you do it? You’ve already learned – it’s the principle underlying the basics above – contracting, GROW, listening, questioning. Those things are what you do, non-directive is the spirit in which you do it: believing the healthy capable businessperson sitting in front of you has the resources they need, and all you are there to do is unleash them. Curious to try it?!

Further reading

Contracting

Some interesting case studies of contracting in complex organisations include:

Frisch, M.H. (2001) ‘The Emerging Role of the Internal Coach’, Consulting Psychology Journal, Vol. 53, No. 4, Fall, pp. 240–50. It has good advice on confidentiality: it is, ‘impossible . . . the issue therefore is to clearly identify what is confidential and what will be shared’ (p. 246).

Wasylyshyn, K.M. (2005) ‘The Reluctant President’, Consulting Psychology Journal, Vol. 57, No. 1, Winter, pp. 57–70 is also interesting, as it shows the coach carefully assessing the corporate culture.

Winum, P.C. (2005) ‘Effectiveness of a High-Potential African American Executive: The Anatomy of a Coaching Engagement’, Consulting Psychology Journal, Vol. 57, No. 1, Winter, pp. 71–89 – officially and valuably a case study on coaching and diversity, but it also has good content (pp. 76–7) on the contracting process.

GROW

Goldsmith, M. (2008) What Got You Here Won’t Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful. London: Profile Books.

Goldsmith, M. (2015) Triggers: Creating Behaviour That Lasts; Becoming The Person You Want To Be. New York: Profile Books. A hallmark of Goldsmith’s coaching approach is extensive up-front feedback gathering to inform the goalsetting and coaching.

Locke, E.A., Latham, G.P. and Yukl, G.A. (2002) ‘Building a Practically Useful Theory of Goal Setting and Task Motivation: a 35-year Odyssey’, American Psychologist, September 2002, Vol. 57, No. 9, pp. 705–17. (Available free online.) The authoritative, now classic, summary of the research on goalsetting.

Listening

Kline, N. (1999) Time to Think: Listening to Ignite the Human Mind. London: Cassell, Chapter 3: ‘Attention’, The original: for more, see www.timetothink.com.

Two great TED talks are: McChrystal, S., ‘Listen, Learn . . . Then Lead’ and Sirolli, E., ‘Want To Help Someone? Shut Up And Listen!’.

Questioning

Goldsmith, M. (2015) Triggers: Creating Behaviour That Lasts; Becoming The Person You Want To Be. New York: Profile Books, Chapters 9–13, on the use of questions to promote lasting change.

Kline, N. (1999) Time to Think: Listening to Ignite the Human Mind. London: Cassell, Chapter 4: ‘Incisive Questions’ – and they are!

Scott, S. (2002) Fierce Conversations. London: Hachette Digital, pp. 109–18, on common mistakes.

Walker, C., TED talk, ‘Clean Questions and Metaphor Models’: www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVvcU5gG4KU.

Whitmore, J. (2017) Coaching for Performance. 5th Ed. London: Nicholas Brealey, Chapter 7: ‘Powerful Questions’.

Non-directive

No one describes this better than Nancy Kline, see her books, and www.timetothink.com.