CHAPTER
14

Using the Partnership to Motivate Change

AS YOUR RELATIONSHIPS WITH CLIENTS STRENGTHEN DURING COACHING ENGAGEMENTS, THEY STILL REMAIN IN FLUX. DIFFERENT CHALLENGES EMERGE REQUIRING ADJUSTMENTS IN YOUR APPROACH. JUST AS A GROWING tree can support more weight as it ages, the coach-client partnership needs to be able to handle more intensity and pressure as the engagement progresses.

Keep in mind that:

The support you provide during the early stages of coaching will shift toward expectations for behavioral change as coaching progresses.

As clients try new behaviors, you can set expectations for reflection and fine-tuning.

Your encouragement will help clients surface obstacles and use coaching as a forum for problem solving over time.

You and your clients can begin to ask for feedback from managers and other stakeholders as implementation of the development plan occurs.

A natural shift of responsibility occurs during the course of a successful coaching engagement. In the early stages of coaching, you are more responsible for leading a process that yields insight and developmental plans. Later on, it is up to your client to take more responsibility for developmental progress. A useful indication of the success of the coach-client relationship is a lessening of your role and a corresponding increase in your client’s commitment and activity level.

Having earned your client’s trust in the earlier stages of coaching, you are in a position to encourage, even urge, action on the challenges in the development plan. Your support, acceptance, and ideas remain valuable, but probably your expectations have increased that your client can accomplish developmental tasks even if they are difficult. At the same time that you empathize with those challenges, you convey confidence that the client can engender positive change. Clients need your optimism and support, along with focus and discipline, to take the necessary risks inherent in implementing the behavior changes in the development plan.

The reality is that there will be setbacks as well as successes. Progress does not follow a straight ascending line. Your openness to client discouragement provides a safe context to explore challenges, make adjustments, and get back on track. Being able to openly discuss disappointments motivates clients to stay focused on development objectives even though actions may not be yielding the intended results. Most clients will want to please you with reports of progress, but a strong relationship supports the open sharing of discouragement as well. It provides both the safety to admit the need for help and the collaborative structure to arrive at better options. If your coaching partnership is to foster change, mistakes and misfires are as much opportunities for learning as are successes.

A common challenge in coaching is associated with the mixed feelings most clients have about change. Even change that is designed by your client and aimed in a clearly positive direction will trigger concerns and doubts: Have we figured out the right things to focus on? Will others support me in doing things differently? Is the effort to change worth the risk? As clients depart from familiar patterns, they know there are no guarantees of success, so doubts are close to the surface.

Compounding those concerns, some clients may associate change with the loss of predictability, even if the original situation had been quite problematic; familiarity is a powerful force. The loss of what is known may be emotionally evocative, connected with other losses in the client’s life. While we cannot always predict these responses to change, as professionals we need to understand and accept emotional reactions that are stronger than we might have expected, even when they are associated with ineffective behaviors and backsliding on commitments.

In view of the risks inherent in change, it is not surprising that clients are hesitant at various points in change efforts, even when they are making progress. A coach might think, Why isn’t he doing what we agreed to? or Why is she moving so slowly to implement the plan? As was mentioned in Chapter 7, labeling lack of follow-through or delay as resistance reflects a negative judgment that does not support openness and joint problem solving. Since change is difficult and caution is appropriate, client hesitation is to be expected and accepted with curiosity rather than a negative label. Figure 14-1 offers suggestions on how to reframe resistance.

Reluctance to change can appear in the guise of a legitimate obstacle over which your client has little or no control. You may hear the client make statements such as, “I’m too busy to see you this month,” “I didn’t get a chance to try that new behavior we discussed,” or “I thought you were going to send me the development plan draft.” All these claims may be true at a rational level, but they reflect feelings of reluctance.

You cannot see those inner vicissitudes, but you can respond to their outer manifestations. Although clients seeking praise may report progress, you can demonstrate acceptance of reluctance by encouraging dialogue about doubts, difficulties, and perceptions of risk. Accepting the legitimacy of your client’s mixed feelings, even as you support the need for change, prompts exploration and understanding along with renewed commitment.

Encouraging openness when reluctance surfaces helps you find out more about what matters most to your client. In fact, the stronger the reluctance is in terms of avoidance, excuses, and inactivity, the greater importance you can assume the old behavior has. This awareness can suggest that you explore considerations weighing on your client about the real costs and benefits of behavior change. It is important for clients to feel safe in the coaching relationship to benefit from your questions about the fears and risks.

Figure 14-1. Reframing resistance

Some clients may credit you with more power and authority than you feel you have. They may convey admiration, submissiveness, frustration, or resentment, verbally and nonverbally, toward you. When clients project strong feelings onto a helping professional it is called transference. It is a central element of psychodynamic approaches to therapy originally described by Freud, but as a concept, it can be applied to any professional relationship. For practitioners trained to understand and use transference reactions, it can provide leverage in facilitating insight and growth. You need to recognize the presence of transference when it happens, but that may be all you choose to do. This awareness can help you keep your focus even if a client is reacting to you in ways that feel more extreme than warranted. Sometimes these reactions can be discussed with clients through use of self to bring more attention and understanding to them. If such reactions threaten to derail your relationship with a client, seek out counsel from a coaching supervisor, possibly one who has clinical training.

Another leverage point that should be used sparingly is your description of how similar challenges were handled by others. No one likes to be compared to someone else or lumped into general categories of people with problems. When you tell the success stories of others, especially if they were your clients, there are risks to your current relationship. Even well-intended comparisons can imply that others have the correct answers or that they were somehow better or stronger. A client may even misconstrue an example as if it conveys your recommendation about what the client should do.

Occasionally, however, a client will find the success stories of others useful. For example, telling a client about another manager’s successful passage from being too hands-on to empowering the team, or about the behaviors used by a naturally reticent leader to become more visible and interpersonally engaged, can legitimize the challenges of making these changes and provide specific ideas. Such stories convey that your client is not alone and that change efforts yield results.

Supervisor’s Observations

By the second half of a typical coaching engagement, coaches have established a working partnership with clients. Trust has deepened, and clients are actively engaged in making changes. This shift gives the coach a lot of leverage to be more assertive and to hold clients to commitments. So, it is important that Martha was able to use that leverage directly. On the continuum from being supportive, on one hand, to challenging the client on the other, both are important competencies for coaches so that they can respond effectively to the varying needs that clients have. Martha was able to move along that continuum by drawing on several other factors in the coaching relationship. She had consciously thought through the risks and potential gains in changing her posture with Jim. She was confident that the relationship would support more challenge. Finally, she knew Jim well in terms of his emotional stability and motivational structure so that she could both push and pull him toward the plan that he had committed to. She may not have been consciously aware of all these factors, but clearly her intuition tapped into them.

As is true with many forms of power, however, push works best when used very sparingly. If Martha decided to continue pushing Jim to implement change, then there are other issues that she would have needed to address. Martha might prepare for implementation by imagining herself in Jim’s place and thus tune into what else he needs. She may decide that even goal-driven Jim is a bit out of his element at HQ. He may need more time in his role to gain confidence and get more of a team feel in his relationships with peers, or build other hidden but important support systems. Martha has shown that she can be as direct as she needs to be, but she also will need to keep her empathy tuned into what Jim might need, beyond the specifics of the development plan.

Takeaways

All change is difficult. You can support your client by being positive and hopeful even at times when your client is discouraged.

Reluctance, instead of resistance, is a more useful label for client hesitation and concerns about change because it tends to open up dialogue and helps you focus on the issues behind the reluctance that you can address.

When you have earned the trust of a client, you may shift to a more assertive and expectant posture to support your client’s approach to challenges that have been agreed to.

As you leverage your maturing relationship with your client, it is important for you to remain connected emotionally to your client’s developmental experiences.

When clients are looking for ways to deal with long-standing or frustrating issues in themselves or in their context, an occasional story of another’s success can be motivational.