The Completely Revised Handbook of Coaching by Pamela McLean

Author:Pamela McLean
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2012-06-27T16:00:00+00:00

If a client or organization is surprised by your approach midway into the coaching, it’s a clear signal to you that you likely did not do the important pre-work of providing critical information about how you work, what your experience and background bring to the work, and seeking to fully understand their expectations. It’s often helpful to include information in your packet of materials on what coaching is and isn’t, including the helpful distinctions articulated in Part One of this book relative to coaching, consulting, counseling, and facilitating. Even with this explanation, complexities and surprises arise. Consider this coaching vignette:

Coaching or Consulting?

You’ve been engaged to provide coaching inside an organization where coaching is new. Its leaders have heard great things about the results colleagues have achieved through coaching work and they are interested in giving it a try. You receive a call because of a mutually respected colleague and you have a short conversation over the phone. You agree to send contact information and your Web site for further information and set up a first meeting.

You arrive at the meeting believing you have provided a clear picture of what coaching is and how it might differ from an experience of using a consultant to tackle a specific problem situation. As you sit in the meeting with the senior vice president of human resources, what surfaces as the most important issue is a growing concern about the organization’s declining market share during the current economic downturn. The human resource partner wants you to coach three of the company’s top leaders and make recommendations to identify strategies that will increase their sales by 9 percent over the next twelve months.

It’s clear to you that this organization needs consulting, not coaching, and perhaps you could not have identified this until you met face-to-face and explored the organization’s needs and challenges. You let your contact know that his needs are much more in the consulting domain than the coaching and provide a referral to two consultants she might want to reach out to in this area. You also share your thinking about under what circumstances coaching might prove a useful approach, and you both agree to continue to check in with one another in the coming months.

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