CHAPTER
7
Building Early Relationships with Clients
AS IN OTHER HELPING PROFESSIONS, THE QUALITY OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN YOU, AS COACH, AND YOUR CLIENT IS A MORE IMPORTANT DETERMINANT OF POSITIVE OUTCOMES THAN ANY OTHER VARIABLE UNDER YOUR control.1 Creating and sustaining a safe but engaging relationship with clients is the cornerstone of a successful coaching process. Coaches who rely on a formulaic process or favored instruments are under-leveraging the potential power of that relationship. Clients who feel that you are truly seeing them will be much more engaged and open. Your particular style of relating to clients is grounded in your Personal Model, but there are several general points to guide you, especially in early sessions.
Throughout the entire engagement, it is vital to maintain trust, honesty, caring, and credibility. These characteristics are even more critical in the early stages when anxiety may be high and progress is just beginning. Although contracting establishes the foundation for these characteristics, clients need to be reassured in early sessions about confidentiality and other process elements. Your behavior during sessions conveys that reassurance. Clients are very observant about your communication and interpersonal skills. You are a high-profile role model for clients, so how you handle yourself needs to be intentional. Being open and genuine without being unfocused and reactive is a tricky balance. You need to know your own strengths and vulnerabilities in achieving that balance even when the client’s and your own anxieties are pulling you in other directions.
Thorough preparation for sessions can help you manage your anxiety and present the credible image you want. Assuming that you check and organize your notes as soon as possible after a session, find a time to review them and plan an agenda for the next session (e.g., immediately after the last session, after your thoughts settle, or just before the next session). As you review your notes, reflect on themes that can be carried forward or that you want to explore with your client. Make note of your thoughts and build a flexible agenda for the next session. Identify session goals, both for you and for the client. Your goals may highlight ways you want to manage the interaction, whereas your client’s goals would focus on progress toward development insights and actions. For example, you may target a goal of staying more focused on key issues and not getting sidetracked, whereas for your client, the session should produce at least one possible development theme.
You can also record your reactions to the client’s characteristics and behaviors, both those that attract you and those that you find off-putting. When you encounter something that is off-putting, counterbalance a sense of distance with stronger empathy, to show you understand what the client might be experiencing. Those characteristics may be temporary nervous responses to the unknowns of a coaching relationship. If these tension points continue beyond early sessions or are echoed in others’ descriptions of your client, observing them may contribute to your ability to form hypotheses and provide feedback later.
Your hypotheses do not need to be used in early sessions, but without at least capturing them, you will not be able to use them later. For example, a client’s initial handshake and early demeanor seemed to convey lack of interest to his coach. In fact, it became apparent later that the client was deeply interested in his own development and was unaware of the mixed signals he was sending. How the client’s cues played out in his wider relationships became a key focus of his coaching.
Paradoxically, thorough preparation allows you to relax and tune into what the client is saying and feeling. Conscious preparation, encompassing session agendas, goals, and reactions to client characteristics, provides a foundation for you to be present and responsive to the client instead of struggling to remember what you wanted to cover. As in all interactions, preparation does not guarantee that important topics will be covered, but it certainly helps you be ready when issues emerge.
What happens during coaching sessions is the intersection of many factors, including your preferred coaching style, the process you have designed, the client’s personality, and the organization’s agenda. In early sessions the interplay of these elements is still fluid. Clients may be unsure of how to use coaching and bring their day-to-day challenges to you as they might to a consultant. Clarifying your coaching role and the process may be necessary. Hopefully, you can redirect what a client brings to early sessions toward discovery and development versus advice and recommendations. This is part of educating the client about how to get the most from coaching, but it can be challenging when the client has a pressing problem and wants help. Translating that urgency into a topic that fits under a coaching framework draws on your resourcefulness.
Session agendas need to allow for responsiveness to the client but also instill a feeling of progress. At the start, ask clients how they feel, inquire about their actions and thoughts since the last coaching session, and ask them to tell you what they would like to cover. This sets a pattern that clients can depend on, as well as confirming that the agenda is a shared responsibility. You might ask any one of several questions: What have you been thinking about or tried since we last met? What hasn’t worked out as well as you would have liked? What topic would you like to go back to? What would be a useful place to start today? Or you may choose a question that reflects a focus within your Personal Model. For instance: “What has gone well this week?” or “What insights have emerged?”
Steps to guide you through the initial coaching session are shown in Figure 7-1.
Figure 7-1. Guidelines for the first coaching session
As the client responds to your interest, your comments and nonverbal cues convey what you feel is productive to discuss. Your facilitation of what the client presents, assuming it is within the boundaries of executive coaching, enhances the relationship and builds a bond that is both motivating and reassuring. By uncovering insights, making linkages between points, and expressing ideas that might be pivotal, you are assuring your clients that they are being truly heard. This is the basis for moving the agenda forward, toward the articulation of important development themes.
Another important step in building a productive relationship is thinking about a client from several different perspectives. Some coaches may be attuned to career issues, others to leadership issues, and still others to emotional variables in a client’s life. Your preferred perspective—whether it is cognitive, career, behavioral, emotional, or something else—is reflected in your Personal Model. Even though you have a preferred lens, it is useful to expand your focus and learn to use multiple lenses in viewing the client. Refining your understanding of the client involves familiarizing yourself with a range of theories about adult change and growth (summarized in Chapter 3) that have been applied to coaching. Generating alternative hypotheses can expand your understanding of specific clients and make you a more versatile coach in general.
Clients are very observant about your adherence to the confidentiality commitments you have made. Pay special attention to the transparency of your contacts with sponsors and others in the organization. Even casual or unexpected interactions, such as bumping into your client’s manager in the building lobby or being observed talking to a colleague of your client, should be noted and described to your client to prevent any misunderstanding should it be mentioned to the client.
Making sure that coaching appointments have the highest priority on your calendar models what you expect from clients and will reduce postponement or rescheduling. Not moving a scheduled appointment with a client, except in an emergency, demonstrates that commitment. You must align your behavior with what you have told the client about the coaching process in order to foster trust, which in turn encourages openness. (For additional suggestions about structuring sessions, see Figure 7-2.)
When you encounter client behaviors that are negative, demanding, critical, defeatist, or defensive, it is possible that the client is acting out of fear of change or loss of what is familiar. Although these behaviors are sometimes labeled resistance to change, it is more helpful to reframe them and refer to them as reluctance to change. This semantic distinction makes a big difference in your coaching posture. Explaining client behavior as reluctance is more likely to prompt your curiosity about the reason for the hesitation. As you convey acceptance instead of judgment of your client’s feelings, you are providing your client with needed support for any fears the client may have.
It is key for you to be patient in appreciating and understanding your client’s reactions to the organization’s felt needs. Changes that may appear obviously appropriate to you, or to the organization, may not be clear to the client in the early stages of coaching. Even clients who are creating negative work environments through their behavior may reject the need for change. They need time to consider their impact and explore other approaches to their work. Coaching can facilitate that by providing a safe environment for exploring how change might feel to them.
Your patience in responding to a client’s reluctance also conveys positivity and hope. Clients who are wary and hesitant often feel locked into behavior patterns that they know are not ideal, but they are unaware of other options. Organizations can be politicized and conflicted, adding to a client’s hesitant reactions to coaching. Exploring the client’s hesitations and the organizational constraints while reinforcing your own trustworthiness can begin to move difficult clients in productive directions. (Additional material on reluctance is presented in Chapter 14.)
Theories of intentional change are also helpful in dealing with reluctant clients.2 According to these theories, there are several natural, preliminary steps that must be accomplished before people commit to plans for making changes in their lives. Pre-contemplation, contemplation, and determination must precede action that makes change happen. Helping clients move from each step to the next can be quite challenging. Some clients may have already had feedback and are contemplating the changes that coaching will support. For other clients, lack of feedback and their own hesitation may put them in a pre-contemplation stage where any suggestion of change is a new and unsettling idea. Applying these stages to your clients’ state of mind can help you anticipate what you need to do to help them make progress.
With those clients, moving them from pre-contemplation to action uses a process known as motivational interviewing.3 It relies on broad, open questions to explore with the client both current conditions and what change might bring. Motivational interviewing embodies a patient, client-centered process of movement toward change. The questions that motivational interviewing employs are useful in a range of coaching situations: What does change mean to you? What are the pros and cons of change in your situation? What would you need to give up to make a change? What are the upsides and downsides of the status quo? What past attempts at change have worked and why? For hesitant and reluctant clients, these types of questions can make change less threatening so that they can take a step toward considering it.
Early in coaching relationships, clients may challenge coaches in various ways: to give them direct advice, to intervene on their behalf, to feel sorry for them, to join them in their victim status, and the like. They may not be consciously aware that these are challenges to the coaching relationship and may believe that the coach is supposed to help them in whatever way would be useful or supportive. Coaches, however, need to gently but firmly establish a helping relationship consistent with the coaching role that is focused on facilitating discovery. This is especially important in the early stages of coaching. Newer coaches may feel the pressure of the client’s expectations and give in to providing answers and advice, since they may not be as secure in their roles as they will become later. They need to be able to risk the client’s frustration and anger at not being given the help that is asked for.
Sarah was able to tolerate that risk and partner with the client to help her in a different way, by becoming Brenda’s facilitator rather than consultant. Faced with this kind of difficult decision, there is the potential for the coach to be fraught with fears about the client’s anger or even rejection. As helping professionals, coaches sometimes overlearn their mission and fail to differentiate what clients actually need from what they ask for. Sarah was able to stay on course with Brenda at this early stage of coaching. She also found a way to tie the specific challenge back into the client’s likely development need, further cementing her position of supporting Brenda’s growth but not reducing Brenda’s responsibility for progress.
Furthermore, coaches often assume that clients see the development potential in the challenges that present themselves, but it is always useful to point them out. Most of the time, clients won’t notice the developmental value that could be obtained from a new challenge because they are immersed in just getting the work done. An important part of the coach’s role in helping the client develop is to look past the actual work pressures and demands and see opportunities for learning and growth.
Finally, at a later session, Sarah could further affirm her coaching role by referring back to this very exchange as an example of the push and pull that is inherent in coaching. It is a tangible example of the coach-client partnership, and making it overt may help the client understand how to work with the coach to get the help that is needed. While she might have done all that in the session when it happened, time doesn’t always allow for a complete discussion. Nothing is sacrificed, and a time lag may even be beneficial, allowing the coach to go back to reflect on a lesson and, in a subsequent session, to highlight that learning with the client.
Takeaways
A productive coaching relationship is based on contracting that sets the ground rules and eases client concerns about the process and confidentiality.
How you prepare for sessions and behave during them are important elements of establishing the trust, reliability, and authenticity necessary for an effective coaching relationship.
A safe place where conversation can flow is created when you demonstrate your full interest. Use focused listening skills and show support for the client with open questions and reflective responses.
It is important throughout coaching, but especially in the early stages of relationship building, to focus on facilitation and discovery instead of providing answers or advice. How you manage yourself models the type of relationship you want to have with clients.
Some tension with your client is typical, but as you stay on track in your coaching role, it benefits the client in the longer term.
Redefining client opposition or lack of cooperation as reluctance (as opposed to outright resistance) will stimulate your curiosity about what is important to your clients and what they need to protect; trying to understand works better than applying pressure.
Some clients will not have even contemplated the need for changes in their behavior; consider using the techniques of motivational interviewing to help move them toward change.