9

Challenge

Having the ability to challenge others in a professional yet empathetic way is a difficult skill to master. It is very easy for a challenge to sound like disapproval and to be perceived negatively. It is a good idea to talk about challenge as part of the contracting phase so that your coachee is forewarned about this aspect of your coaching approach. A good challenge will tend to move your coachee out of their comfort zone and help them explore assumptions, raise awareness and develop new ideas. The skill is not to make your coachee feel intimidated or vulnerable.

Why challenge is important

The purpose of challenge is to force the coachee to go beyond any self-imposed limits. As a coach your role is not to give advice and solutions to your coachee, but rather to explore their issues with them, and help them discover their own solutions.

Although you can’t usually give advice, what you can do as well as supporting and encouraging the coachee is to challenge their thinking and assumptions. It’s quite difficult to do both as most of us have a preference for one or other of these, but mastering the balance between support and challenge is one of the critical roles of the coach. Writer David Firth in his book The Corporate Fool (1998) tells us that if organisations are to survive they need to develop two core competencies: first, seeing things as they really are, and second, coming up with innovative solutions. The point of coaching is to ensure that employees do both of these. Your job as a coach is to support the coachee to help them develop new ways of thinking and behaving and challenge them to see things as they really are and as they could be.

If there is no challenge at all from the coach then the coachee can remain complacent and in denial about some of the issues they are facing. But this challenge needs to be done in a positive and sophisticated way. Crude and unskilful challenge would only lead to defensiveness by the coachee. It can be difficult to know how and when to challenge the coachee, and if you are not used to challenging in the coaching context, you can easily fall back on either not challenging at all, or over-challenging. So add challenge to your toolkit as one of your key coaching skills.

How to challenge

Challenge requires you to consider both timing and balance. Timing in the sense that you pave the way to ensure your coachee is in the right frame of mind. For instance, sometimes coachees have to let off steam and if you jump in too early during this phase you will block the emotional release and your challenge will fall on deaf ears. Balance is needed because it is important to make sure you neither over-challenge nor under-challenge.

Coaches can often fall into the trap of over-challenging. This means a clumsy challenge that only leads to the coachee either closing down and saying nothing, or becoming defensive. There are obviously clumsy challenges like saying, ‘That’s a rubbish idea.’ Which of course would be unhelpful. But what is less obvious is when you say something like, ‘Do you think that’s a good idea?’ At first glance this might appear to be quite a reasonable challenge, but it has only two possible answers. Either the coachee says no it’s not, or yes it is. The first option is unlikely as the coachee has just put the idea forward so it would be strange if they suddenly changed their mind! So the challenge is not really useful. The second option is more likely – the coachee having just proposed the idea clearly thinks it’s a good one (even if you don’t). So as a coach you are left with nowhere to go, unless you fall into the trap of then giving the coachee your own opinion that you don’t actually think their idea is good. But now you are not coaching any more, just giving your coachee the benefit of your personal perspective.

So how can you make it more sophisticated? You can make it more open by asking something like, ‘Can you explain to me how you would see that working?’ This challenge doesn’t limit the coachee to a yes or no answer, but forces them to reflect more deeply on their idea, without any judgement by the coach. Another way of challenging skilfully is just to signal or flag your intent to challenge by saying something like, ‘Can I just challenge your thinking here?’ followed by the challenge which might be, ‘How sure are you about this?’, or ‘What assumptions are you making?’ Signalling or flagging has the effect of forewarning your coachee that a challenge is coming and therefore softening the effect.

Something that you do need to challenge is when your coachee uses words like ‘always’ or ‘never’, as in, ‘She’s always criticising me’, or, ‘He never praises me’. In general there is rarely an instance of something always or never happening, so it is your job to politely inquire and ask, for example, ‘Always? Do you mean that every time she sees you or talks to you she criticises you?’

Similarly people often say things like, ‘Nobody helps me!’ Again you need to challenge the word ‘nobody’. A variation that we often hear is, ‘Nobody ever helps me!’ And then you can say, ‘Nobody …? Ever …?’

Something else to look out for is the use of self-limiting words such as, ‘can’t’ and ‘couldn’t’, as in, ‘I can’t do that’, or ‘I could never do that’. Again, it is rare that the coachee really cannot do the thing they are talking about. It’s more a case of they don’t think or believe they can do it. So your job as a coach is to explore with the coachee why they think they can’t do something, and help them understand where their fears and self-limiting beliefs come from. Then identify what they can do about reducing these beliefs and start to think about what they can actually do.

Tips for success

• Discuss challenge as a critical aspect of your coaching relationship so that your coachee expects some tough questions.
  
• A good-quality challenge will help your coachee to develop new ideas.
  
• Make sure your coachee is in the right frame of mind to be challenged.
  
• Formulate your challenge to encourage your coachee to think beyond their comfort zone.
  
• Don’t challenge just for the sake of it.
  
• Don’t over-challenge – balance is important.