Compass or straitjacket?
A client’s lack of clarity in the contracting process may prove problematic at first, but measurables will often surface during the coaching relationship
By Lindsay Wittenberg
Measurement – or, rather, lack of it – and contracting are attracting my attention. I’m thinking of the client who resists expressing specific coaching objectives – and whose measurables for those objectives are therefore hard for them to define. The line manager who is convinced that a report will benefit from coaching, but who is vague and general in their expectations, objectives and measurables. The organisational sponsor of a large coaching programme whose evaluation criteria rest solely on delivery of the contracted service and feedback (unspecified) from coaching clients.
In such situations I have encouraged, given examples and attempted to facilitate some clarity. But these tactics have sometimes proved useless, and during each coaching session I continue to enquire about what the client is really after.
My question, ‘How will you know that this programme has made a difference and delivered value to you and your organisation?’ remains unanswered in any substantial way, and I am left unsatisfied. I don’t have a clear idea of our contract (‘What’s the work we’re doing?’) and neither does the client.
I might sense what the client and/or their organisation would benefit from. I might propose a framework and they might agree with it. But that’s a passive process, which doesn’t appropriately engage the client, even though they seem to enjoy the coaching relationship. And perhaps that’s precisely where the value is: not only in the relationship, but in what Gestalt refers to as the Fertile Void: the space of not knowing, where anything is possible.
This scenario presents itself most frequently at the beginning of a coaching programme, and it has concerned me because I want to be confident that the coaching client and their sponsoring organisation understand what they’ve purchased and the impact they want.
However, as unsettling as this is for me as coach, in my experience the contract and the coaching objectives become clearer to the client as they get in to the programme and as the coaching relationship, trust and systemic perspective develop: they begin to see what may be possible for them to work on, outcomes they could create and areas they can explore in coaching. These may well be areas that, at the beginning of the programme, had been opaque, too sensitive or have threatened to expose them to intolerable vulnerability that early on.
Equally, issues that are important to the client begin to reveal themselves as the coaching proceeds. As we share perceptions, we can identify the coaching contract, objectives and measurables with a rigour that had previously seemed elusive.
I’ve found too that there can be benefit in my going back to the line manager and/or the sponsor part-way through the programme to explore greater specificity with them and with the client once they’ve had a chance to observe changes the client is making. In other words, the organisation gets a better sense of what they want once they’re seeing it.
So what has felt like tricky, uncertain territory morphs into something clearer, which emerges from both the essence of the coaching relationship and a systemic view. A coaching agenda forced into an inappropriate straitjacket at an inappropriate time in a coaching programme can distort its ultimate purpose.
Sometimes, the change that occurs helps define the change the client actually wants.
- Lindsay Wittenberg is director of Lindsay Wittenberg Ltd. She is an executive coach who specialises in authentic leadership, career development and cross-cultural coaching
- www.lindsaywittenberg.co.uk