CHAPTER
12
Encouraging Dialogue and Stories
COACHES ACHIEVE RESULTS BY FACILITATING CLIENT DISCOVERY. RATHER THAN PROVIDING SOLUTIONS, COACHES HELP CLIENTS USE CHALLENGES AS A PLATFORM FOR GROWTH. THIS PROCESS RELIES HEAVILY ON A COACH’S listening and communication skills. Although every coach has preferred ways of encouraging clients to self-reflect, all coaches use skills aimed at facilitating the client’s story and stimulating dialogue around it.
There are many facilitation skills you can apply to your coaching:
Open-ended questions, such as those that ask what and how, or ask the client to explain, elaborate, or describe
Supportive/positive comments, such as That’s interesting; I understand; Tell me more; or That’s a real achievement.
Restatements of information, such as You believe that your biggest strength is … and, What I hear you saying is …
Summary statements at transition points, such as Before we close today, let’s summarize what we have covered … and, The theme that I am taking away is …
Reflection of feelings, such as You sound disappointed about what’s happened … and, I can hear the energy in your voice.
Nonverbal signals of attention and interest, such as making eye contact, leaning in toward the client, and using positive, encouraging facial expressions
Experienced coaches employ these and other facilitation skills the way an artist selects from a wide-ranging palette of colors to best reflect a particular subject. It takes practice and self-awareness to apply these skills naturally and effectively. In early sessions, you can use facilitation skills to explore events in the client’s education and work history, formative experiences, achievements, setbacks, transitions, and milestones. These events are used as a basis for highlighting your client’s skills, personal characteristics, strengths, gaps, interests, and values. With your help, patterns will emerge, triggering both follow-up questions and insights. This process strengthens the coach-client bond as the client experiences your help and interest.
Broad questions, such as Describe your leadership experiences, or Which organizational values are most important to you? tend to prompt answers that often lead to client stories. Here is an example of how a story can begin to reveal a client’s personality:
At the first meeting in Fredericka’s office, Ethan, the coach, looked around and noticed windows on three sides of her office, which overlooked a river and the city beyond. It was bright and airy, not what he had imagined. On her large dark mahogany desk sat dozens of playful trinkets and family photographs. These surprised him because they appeared out of character from what he had heard about Fredericka.
Ethan introduced himself and provided a brief overview of his coaching experience. He told her that every time he meets a new client, he feels as if he is walking into a movie late, well after it had begun. This made him want to catch up on what he had missed. So, he suggested that she might bring him up to date on her movie.
Ethan listened as Fredericka began her story. She described her family first and the history of the whimsical trinkets on her desk. She told him that each one came from a satisfied client or from one of her four children. She mentioned that she knew she was a bit “rough on the outside” and she expected that they would focus on that in their coaching.
“But,” she offered, “I’m more bark than bite.” Then she smiled. She went on to suggest that maybe her upbringing had something to do with her demeanor. This admission surprised Ethan, but he remained attentive, aware that he was sensing both serious and playful currents from listening to her and seeing her office. She continued, “I grew up as an adopted child in a household that expected boys to achieve while the girls were to stay at home. The only problem was that I was always raising my hand in school, getting top grades, went to college on scholarship, and finished with honors. I wasn’t supposed to do all that.”
As Fredericka talked, she toyed with a trinket and looked out the window. Ethan was attentive and leaned toward her to encourage her to continue telling the story. She said that she had learned to break out of the stereotype where girls were not expected to achieve by moving into roles that her upbringing had told her were “reserved for boys.” “I always felt that I shouldn’t be so smart because that wasn’t what was expected in my family; but I couldn’t help myself.” At that point she paused reflectively as if hearing herself in a different way. Then she said, “I don’t try to be mean. I just want to get things done.”
Ethan sensed that even this brief piece of Fredericka’s story was an important start to their work together.
Stories are the descriptions of our life events that define who we are. They contain factual information but, more important, they include explanations and rationales for our experiences, both positive experiences and those that are disappointing. As such, they are subjective interpretations of past events. After multiple tellings, they may take on aspects of myth. They illustrate organizing principles for how we live, and often are used to justify the choices that we make.
Some stories may be short yet pivotal anecdotes about past events; others are longer, involving plot elements, challenges, and characters. Each story has the potential to tell you how your client sees life inside and outside the organizational context. While most stories show clients in a positive light, they can also illustrate difficult lessons, setbacks, and disappointments. Your questions about stories can help clients identify the meaning that they take from them and perhaps even rewrite lessons that have outlived their usefulness.
Usually clients are heroes of their own stories, but not always. As protagonists in their own stories, clients depict themselves as actively shaping life events. If a client tells passive stories in which things happen to him or his stories lack a hero, he may feel like a victim. Such a posture needs to be addressed, explored, and hopefully changed because no progress can happen when the client is a passive recipient of the world’s actions. Think about what this client is saying in telling his story:
Wherever I have been, I’ve had managers who don’t appreciate my special talents. I’m a great technology person and have demonstrated that I understand systems and how to imagine, design, and get new projects completed on time. I keep having bosses whose job I can do better than they can. My current manager is no different. I find myself going around him to get what I need. Also, I deserve a promotion and it’s clear he won’t help me. Why is this always happening to me?
Clients’ roles in their stories and interpretations of meaning can act as springboards toward deeper and richer understanding. Stories can reveal alignment or conflict across a client’s positions as well as indicate life priorities. Keep your focus on what the story is saying about a client and try not to get unnecessarily involved with factual content.
As you listen to a client’s story, you may see an opportunity to highlight an area for development. These opportunities often are revealed through an unresolved question, a dilemma, a frustration, a challenge, or an aspiration. Deciding whether to use a story to suggest a development goal requires understanding the client’s interests and context. For example, hearing a story about a leadership lesson or a career mentor may provide fruitful material with a newly promoted manager that you are coaching (e.g., What parallels do you hear between that story and your new challenges?). In contrast, you may choose not to seek further meaning from a story about that manager’s technical skills. Stories also may reveal life lessons that are limiting or counterproductive. These stories can be questioned to explore the possibility of alternative interpretations (e.g., What are the opportunities in your current context to explore a different resolution to that story?).
Here’s another client story to consider:
I was always a good student and my parents put a lot of value on education, even though we moved around a lot. I came to see that my good grades were the way I got recognition. I always wanted to be at the top of the class even though my social interactions suffered. I am singularly focused on doing my best, whatever it takes. To this day I maintain the highest standards and apply the same to others. I don’t understand when some of my staff members try to just get by. It gets frustrating because I won’t accept that in myself.
As you facilitate client stories, reexamination often takes place without much prompting. In the context of a coaching relationship, clients hear their stories with greater self-awareness and open-mindedness. Your act of listening can foster new insights as the client hears, occasionally for the first time, elements of the story that are negative, passive, positive, or empowered. These can be very revealing aha! moments as your client recognizes that a familiar story contains insights applicable to current challenges.
Some stories, even from work experiences, can be deeply felt and upsetting to revisit. They may include disappointing career outcomes, unfairness, rejection, blame, stress, and other painful on-the-job events. The extent to which a client can disclose such troubling stories is a positive indicator of the bond between you. In telling such a story, your client is sharing a very trying time and is therefore less alone with it. Difficult feelings can be experienced and eased. Trust is strengthened when those stories are shared with you, whether or not they have direct relevance to the developmental agenda. The coaching challenge is to find the middle ground between tapping deeply emotional experiences that you are not trained to deal with versus avoidance of difficult subjects. Examine your own reactions to painful stories to be sure that you appropriately support their telling.
Listen to a client’s leadership story:
Leadership is about having a big picture and getting others to do what you want. It’s important to surround yourself with bright, talented managers who will execute on your vision. I hire smart people who want to succeed and play by my rules and whom I can trust. That way I can assure good results. It’s what has gotten me to the executive suite. [Long pause.] Wow, you know, that sounds kind of arrogant. I don’t know if I would want to work for me! Where does that leave me as a leader?
Clients often have repeated stories that are almost automatic in response to specific questions. The emergence of less rehearsed, more ambiguous stories is an indication of a client’s growing trust in you and the coaching relationship. Accepting the earlier stories is fine as long as the subsequent stories get more of your coaching time and attention. For example, if your client tells an early story about being at the losing end of various endeavors, you may choose not to explore it. Later in the coaching, the client may reveal a story about an unresolved quandary or disappointment that may get your full facilitative attention. You have considerable latitude in deciding what to do with a story based on what will help your client move toward productive self-reflection and insight.
As you listen to stories, meaning can be conveyed through description of events as well as your client’s nonverbal signs. When those appear to be incongruent, there is an opening to better understand your client (e.g., You don’t sound very pleased about that promotion.). Supportive comments and restatements can sharpen gaps between content and behavioral cues (e.g., Help me understand your mixed feelings about that.). Summary questions bring a pause that may prompt the client to reconsider interpretations (e.g., What new meaning did you hear in that story?).
Coaching a client in a more senior leadership role brings a stronger emphasis on storytelling. Stories with a clear message told well are essential tools for leaders at the top of organizational units. As a coach, you may want to listen for the qualities of those stories that convey leadership style, values, vision, and motivational ideas. Aspects of leadership stories can provide insight into your client as well as illustrate opportunities for leadership development. In some cases, telling more impactful and inspiring stories becomes part of a client’s developmental objectives. (More information on this point is provided in Chapter 15, Coaching for Leadership.)
While emphasizing client stories, coaches may occasionally tell a story from their own lives to illustrate a point, pique curiosity, or ease a particularly difficult moment. If they are done with the right intention at the right moment, coach-generated stories can help a client see a point differently or feel less alone. Also, stories tend to beget stories. When a client listens to you telling a story, associations, memories, and other ideas are triggered that otherwise might not have occurred. Those stories, however, should be told very selectively and only in the service of client needs, never your own enjoyment of an audience. Here’s an example of how a coach might interject a personal story to make a point with a client:
That reminds me of a story. Years ago before I was a coach, I was appointed as director of a large group. I believed I was up to the task, but I was concerned about being the boss of people with whom I had worked as a colleague for a long time and who were much more expert in their areas than I was. I thought of myself as a collaborative person and saw the new position as needing me to be more overtly in charge of the work of others. Through discussions with my mentor, I realized that I didn’t have to radically change my preferred leadership style, but I did need to add some pieces to it. There was a lot I had to learn about working at a higher organizational level, but my leadership values still applied. That was both reassuring and challenging.
As you continue your development as a coach, regularly evaluate your effectiveness in fostering dialogue and client stories. Self-assessment can be aided by asking for feedback and suggestions from case supervisors and colleagues. Both verbal and nonverbal facilitation skills need to be scrutinized. Some coaches regularly record sessions for their own reflection and learning (with the client’s permission, of course). These recordings are valuable in highlighting opportunities for better facilitation of client stories. Part of your ongoing development as a coach is striving to improve listening and story exploration skills.
There are all kinds of stories that clients will share. One of your jobs as a coach is to use facilitation skills to convey sincere interest so that clients feel safe going beneath the surface facts. It is possible that Rick’s stories have an underlying purpose that is more self-protective than exploratory. In such situations, coaches have to be careful not to let their own frustration and negative judgment color their reactions. It is important for them to recognize when this is happening, as Rachel did when she began thinking about the poor me label she was using for her client.
Once that challenge is identified, you have choices about how to use your awareness. Given the sessions that had passed, Rachel believed that Rick’s approach to coaching was not going to change based on time, no matter how attentive she was to him. So creating more trust and safety didn’t appear to be the best approach at this point. Instead, she decided to try something different—first, by facilitating the underlying feelings, and second, by making use of her own natural reactions. This use of self can be powerful in coaching, especially when you translate your frustration into I messages and observations.
As a coach, your self-awareness of your own reactions to a client’s story is key to making choices about how to respond. It is not uncommon to get caught up in a client’s story and forget to step back and think about its meaning, the client’s objective in telling it, and how you feel as you listen to it. If you focus too much on the content of the story, you will overlook more important questions for the client to consider. When you use what you observe in the client as the story is told, what you feel in response to the story, and the message the client is conveying, then you can facilitate a different story experience. Your goal is to help generate insights and ideas that the facts alone will not prompt. The extent to which your clients respond with growing interest in your questions and observations about their stories is usually an indicator of their readiness for coaching.
Takeaways
To foster client self-reflection and insight, coaches use skills that facilitate dialogue, such as open-ended questions, supportive comments, summary statements, reflection of feeling, and positive nonverbal cues.
The use of broader, self-reflective questions is a facilitation skill that has particular value since these types of questions tend to prompt client stories.
Telling a story often suggests new meaning and messages to the client.
Client disclosure of troubling or upsetting stories creates bonds and trust with you.
When coaching leaders, you need to tap into your client’s stories, not only to understand them, but also to assess the impact their stories have on the people they are leading.
When clients tell stories that deflect inquiry and serve to maintain the status quo, facilitation skills can help in getting to deeper meaning.
In some cases, you may choose to tell a story from your own experience that illustrates a leadership principle or a developmental struggle.