Relational Coaching: Journeys Towards Mastering One-To-One Learning

By Erik de Haan and Sue Stewart

Manfred Kets de Vries, Professor of Leadership Development, INSEAD:
“The author takes us on an exciting journey to explain what coaching is all about, providing us with a roadmap that is second to none. Anyone interested in better understanding what coaching is all about, would do well to have a serious look at this book.”

David Megginson, Professor of Human Resources Development, Sheffield Hallam University:
“From a vivid personal story just before the first chapter to the fascinating mass of data in the appendices, this book is a captivating read about the concrete particulars of coaching and the theoretical perspectives we can use to make sense of them. Erik de Haan makes a case for relational coaching and prescribes clearly what his research and the tradition within which it is embedded can tell practitioners in the field.”

Bruce E. Wampold, Professor of Counseling Psychology, University of Wisconsin:
“I am thrilled that there is a coaching book that emphasizes the coachee and the relationship. In Relational Coaching, Erik de Haan places the emerging profession on a strong foundation that emphasizes the interpersonal aspects of the endeavour.”

Relational Coaching is a radically different way of looking at coaching that puts the relationship, from the perspective of the coachee, at the centre. Exploring both age-old tradition and reliable studies in recent decades, Relational Coaching gives the modern executive coach ten commandments to help improve his or her practice. The book demonstrates how each of these commandments is underpinned by sound quantitative research.

The book begins by giving a complete overview of the profession and the latest developments in coaching. The second part of the book presents new quantitative and qualitative research into effects and experiences of coaching. Part three contains an introduction to the activities that make a good coach and the mechanisms used to verify coaches’ understanding of their profession. Other topics covered include training, accreditation, supervision and recommended literature.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wiley
• Release date: Mar 3, 2011
• ISBN: 9781119995494

Book preview

Preface

Helping conversations are, happily, still an everyday occurrence, taking place around the kitchen table, in the workplace or on the train. If you look at conversations closely, many turn out to be helping conversations, if only because ‘learning’ is a recurring objective when people enter into conversations. Interlocutors exchange information, try to steer each other towards different ideas, or attempt to help each other deal with decisions or tasks that are facing them. These are activities that they learn from in one way or another, and they help each other in the process.

But in the complex world of today, conversations, and helping conversations in particular, have also become an area for study and specialisation. Consider the specialist fields of psychotherapy, social work and counselling – including their associated research tradition. Researchers attempt to identify the active or effective ingredients of helping conversations and ask themselves how to enhance the learning side of conversations. However, the ‘professionalisation’ and study of this area do not alter the everyday nature and importance of helping conversations.

Is it perhaps a sign of impoverishment that the art of conducting helping conversations has grown into a profession and a field of research? Is it perhaps an indication of how difficult it is nowadays to conduct a conversation imbued with trust in the workplace, an indication of greater distance and coolness in interpersonal relationships?

We now have over a hundred years of intensive research into the helping nature of conversations behind us, research that has been anecdotal and qualitative but also rigorous and quantitative. The conclusion from all of these studies must be, as I hope to demonstrate in the following chapters, that we are back to square one, back to the most obvious, naive intuitions that laymen have about helping conversations. At the same time, these are intuitions that have certainly not always played a leading role in the many traditions of conducting helping conversations. In other words, professionally there is a lot to learn from this research. It brings us back to the simple observation that the most important effective ingredients are the capacity for learning of the persons conducting the conversation and the quality of the relationship between the interlocutors. This is why I have called this book Relational Coaching. The most important question addressed in this book is: how can we as coaches make the best possible use of the only genuinely effective ingredient that we are able to influence, the coaching relationship?

Relational coaching is not just one more in a long line of approaches to coaching, yet another technique or collection of interventions. It is, rather, a radically different way of looking at coaching. Relational coaching means turning one’s gaze away from the coach and towards the coachee. Directive coaching, analytical coaching, solution-focused coaching, provocative coaching, even person-centred counselling, and many other approaches, are, in a way, recommendations or ideas for the coach. Those approaches are full of ways to ‘handle’ the client, and offer often explicit preferences for specific interventions or procedures. Relational coaching says that none of that matters very much. To put it bluntly, research has shown conclusively that the specific things that the coach does or doesn’t do, and the specific approaches that the coach believes in most, make little or no difference to the coachee.

What relational coaching is all about is the relationship from the perspective of the coachee. As will be shown in Chapter 3, this has been demonstrated to be the most important predictor of the outcome of coaching, and is where coaches should focus their attention. The development of a relationship does not depend so much on the specific things done or said – relationship is defined by greater things, such as a certain ‘chemistry’ between personalities, and whether or not it engenders feelings of well-being, recognition or solidarity between equal partners. Specific behaviours can certainly help in this respect, and perhaps any manner of ‘chemistry’ can ultimately be dissected into behaviours as ‘elements’ in some ‘periodic table’. However, just as in chemistry, the interaction between the various elements gives rise to completely new properties and behaviours. The whole is much greater than the sum of its constituent parts. In other words, relational coaching, the practice in which we focus our gaze on the coachee’s appreciation of the relationship, contains all of those specific approaches and interventions, and at the same time none of them. The relational approach is not eclecticism or relativism, but means having the courage to put the coachee truly at the centre of the coaching, rising above all of those models and philosophies for the coach.

This book is structured as follows. In part one, after a brief introduction to coaching (Chapter 1) and an explanation of why it is such a popular and expanding profession (Chapter 2), I outline the main effective ingredients of coaching according to the latest research, and how coaches can make the best possible use of those things that have been shown to work. This part describes what relational coaching is, and outlines the tradition from which it stems.

In part two I set off on an exploration within the coaching profession and ask myself again what exactly it is that determines the effectiveness of coaching? How does coaching encourage change, from moment to moment, and what factors can the coach influence in order to contribute towards effective change? This part contains four different exploratory chapters. Chapter 5 is quantitative in nature and explores coachees’ comments on what they find helpful in coaching. Chapters 6 and 7 are qualitative and explore the critical moments experienced by new and established coaches respectively in their own practice. Finally, Chapter 8 draws on in-depth interviews to investigate how coaches react to their own critical moments and how they attempt to use them or learn from them for the future.

Part three contains a critical overview of the broad arsenal of aids and activities available to modern coaches in order to learn and increase our professionalism. I volunteer my own choices and preferences in terms of the design of coaching education, accreditation and supervision. I also give a list of aspects that I consider relevant in terms of coaches’ skills and their continuing professional development. Chapter 9 is devoted to coaches’ areas of competence and how their training and accreditation can be tailored to those areas. Chapter 10 describes different forms of continuing professional development for coaches. Chapter 11 discusses a number of other books that coaches can use as source material in their professional development. Finally, Chapter 12 explores how this fascinating profession might develop in future and a number of what I consider to be important research questions with genuine relevance for coaches and their clients.

I open each part of the book with an introduction highlighting some of my own personal ways to ‘coaching’, ‘research’ and ‘excellence’, along a variety of beaten and unbeaten paths.

In four of the appendices to this book (Appendices A to D) the reader will find a variety of case material from genuine coaching conversations. I am well aware of the ethical implications of publishing such material (see also Appendix II in Casement, On learning from the patient, 1985). Coachees expect complete confidentiality when entering into a coaching relationship, and should be able to count on it. On the other hand, it is virtually impossible to continue to learn as a coach if you can’t do so on the basis of case material from genuine coaching conversations, as well as reading through and discussing your own notes during supervision.

In my view, a coach ultimately learns the most from his own coachees, as Casement’s (1985) title so aptly reflects, or by stepping into the coachee’s shoes and being coached himself.

Learning on the basis of case material puts us on the horns of a real dilemma. On the one hand, there is something to be said for not publishing case histories because it irrevocably breaches the confidentiality of coaching conversations. On the other hand, seeking the coachee’s consent to share or publish material is often a violation of the relationship with the coachee and, as a result, must have consequences in terms of the effectiveness of the coaching itself.

My own view is that the importance of continuing to learn from current or future coachees and from real conversations must be the deciding factor¹. This is why I have taken this decision to publish confidential material. For the longer case studies, in Appendices C and D, I sought the permission of the two coachees concerned. Fortunately, they responded positively and indeed were kind enough to help me carry out a number of adjustments to make the case studies more anonymous. They also contributed a few sentences with their reaction on reading the material, and which have been added at the end of the relevant appendix. Those sentences, and the coachees’ reactions, do indeed show that the impact on the coachee of reading case material from their own coaching experience is far from minimal. In the case of the shorter case material in Appendices C and D (a total of 158 ‘critical moments’ from real-life coaching conversations) I left the anonymisation and treatment of confidentiality to the 119 coaches concerned. I changed one specific reference to a recognisable organisation and submitted all of the moments – and my interpretations – to all of the coaches before proceeding with publication. I would like to thank all of those coachees and coaches for their willingness and assistance in making these case histories suitable for publication and accessible for other coaches. It sometimes takes courage to give the necessary consent. Although I can’t name names here for obvious reasons, I would like to express my appreciation for that willingness and courage.

It will all have been worthwhile if the brief descriptions in Appendices A and B, and the longer studies in Appendices C and D, help the reader to develop further as a coach. The case histories certainly held quite a few lessons for me, as I hope to show in the relevant places and in Chapters 6 to 8 in particular.

The cover illustration depicts a scene of relational coaching in mythical times (it is one of the twelve famous metopes from Olympia’s Temple of Zeus dating back to 456 BC). Athena was Hercules’ guide. As he lay exhausted by his famous Labours, calling Zeus’ name in vain, Athena came down to earth to comfort him. In the illustration, Athena is shown aiding Hercules in his attempt to persuade Atlas. Hercules is to bring the golden apples of the Hesperides, Atlas’ daughters, to his client, but has heard that it would be too dangerous for him to pick them himself. Athena suggests that he offer to carry the world for Atlas for a while. Atlas will be so relieved that he will gladly fetch the apples for him. The plan works and Atlas is so enthusiastic that he offers to take the apples to Hercules’ client, something Hercules doesn’t permit for fear that Atlas will not return. This splendid relief shows how Athena the coach is herself prepared to assume some of Hercules’ burden for him, and how Hercules in turn, with her help, is able to focus fully on his opponent Atlas. The artist depicts each relationship beautifully, and the relationship between Hercules and Athena, coachee and coach, is clearly one of enormous trust and support.

More generally, Athena in Greek mythology became an emblematic guide and protectress of heroes and demigods, who literally flourished under Athena’s aegis. She helped Perseus and Hercules in their heroic quests on several occasions, and coached Odysseus and his son in her guise as Mentor (more on the latter example in Chapter 11, section 11.2.1 of this book). It comes as no surprise to me that Freud’s favourite statuette in his large collection was one of Minerva, Athena’s Roman equivalent. Freud’s own Minerva is depicted on the back flap of this book. This small bronze cast of Athena was so dear to Freud that it usually took pride of place in the centre of his desk. Marie Bonaparte personally smuggled it out of Vienna at Freud’s request, such was the figurine’s importance to him. When he collected it in Paris he wrote that the family was continuing its flight to England ‘proud and rich under the protection of Athena’. It depicts the goddess of protection and wisdom with her usual attributes: left hand raised to hold a spear (now long gone), right hand holding a decorated libation bowl, and on her breast the aegis with the head of Medusa. The sculpture is Roman but is probably a copy of an earlier, and greater, Greek original.

This book both attempts to offer an overview of the latest research with a bearing on coaching, and to continue in the age-old tradition of helping conversations, which has its roots in ancient Greek mythology. Several chapters of the book have been published previously, in the form of articles or columns in various journals:

• Chapter 1 as ‘A new vintage – old wine maturing in new bottles’ in The Training Journal, November 2005, pp. 20-24. Chapter 1 is also an abridged summary of our earlier book on coaching, Coaching with colleagues (De Haan & Burger, 2005).

• The final part of Chapter 4 was published in an extended version as ‘Becoming simultaneously thicker and thinner skinned: the inherent conflicts arising in the professional development of coaches’ in Personnel Review, 2007.

• An extended version of Chapter 5 appears as ‘Executive coaching in practice: what determines helpfulness for coachees?’ (E. de Haan, V. Culpin & J. Curd) in Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 2008.

• An earlier version of Chapter 6 is ‘I doubt therefore I coach – critical moments from coaching practice’, in Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 2008.

• Chapter 7 is a reworking of ‘ I struggle and emerge – critical moments of experienced coaches’, in Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research, 2008.

• An extended version of Chapter 8: Critical Moments in the Coaching Relationship: Does Supervision Help? (A. Day, E. de Haan, E. Blass, C. Sills & C. Bertie) has been submitted to Human Relations.

• Chapter 11 was previously published as a monthly column in the periodical The Training Journal, under the title ‘Coaching on the Couch’ (January-December 2006).

With Athena as our guide we can assume that the female form is the more suitable for coaches. Still, I decided in this book to use male and female forms indiscriminately for coaches, coachees and supervisors, in order to reflect the diversity of the splendid practitioners that I see around me.

I would like to thank the following people who have made crucial contributions to the gestation of this book.

My fellow researchers at the Ashridge Centre for Coaching, especially the co-authors of Chapter 8, Colin Bertie, Eddie Blass, Andrew Day and Charlotte Sills; and Judy Curd, who made many contributions to Chapter 5.

The staff and participants of our programmes Coaching for Organisation Consultants and the Ashridge MSc in Executive Coaching including, once again, Andrew Day and Charlotte Sills; and also David Birch, Bill Critchley, Lindsey Masson, Michaela Rebbeck and Ina Smith.

My colleague Yvonne Burger and the participants of the Coaching module of Sioo business school in Utrecht.

James Tattle and Lorraine Oliver of the Ashridge Learning Resource Centre for tracking down and obtaining some quite obscure of articles and books.

Juliet Warkentin of Emap Communications for editing the book reviews in Chapter 11, and my Dutch-Canadian colleague Nico Swaan for reviewing the English translation.

Gerard Wijers of the Instituut voor Beroepskeuze en Loopbaanpsychologie for reading through the manuscript and acting as midwife to a breakthrough in my thinking about the place of coaching in our society (see Chapters 2 and 12).

London, 1 May 2007

Erik de Haan

[e-mail]

www.ashridge.com/erikdehaan

Part I

The Ways of Coaching

Introduction: the paths towards coaching

At the age of 18 I took a gap year and travelled solo round Germany and France, working and living in Berlin, the Pyrenees and Paris. My aims were to improve the language skills I hadn’t properly mastered at school, and to lead a ‘working’ life before spending the next few years in academia. I also wanted to pin down exactly what it was I was going to specialise in. My first two aims were more or less achieved, but I didn’t actually devote much thought to the third, and at the end of the year signed up for physics, the same subject that had attracted my lukewarm interest a year before.

Most of my year out went well and in fact flew by, but there was one moment when I really did lose my way, a moment which in retrospect is indicative of how I often feel as a coach. I was heading from the Pyrenees to Paris and decided to walk to Carcassonne for the first few days, then hitch-hike from there. All I had with me on this hike was a road map of the whole country, on a scale of one to a million. But I wasn’t worried because I intended to keep to roads and beaten tracks. One day, however, while hiking through the foothills of the mountains, I must have had a bout of over-confidence, when I decided to leave the road I was on and head straight north in a short-cut towards another local road. I ended up in a wooded area with a maze of tiny paths and denser and denser undergrowth. This was the infamous French maquis, which sheltered many a resistance fighter during the Occupation, so becoming a byword for the Resistance.

As the scrub got thicker it became harder to follow some of the paths, and the ones I was on seemed to have been made by creatures smaller than a human being, so frequently did they disappear beneath low bushes. Because I couldn’t see any way through it, I decided just to walk up towards the highest point, where I would undoubtedly get a better overall picture. This strategy seemed to work well at first, because there came a point when the scrub died out. I found myself just below the summit of an elongated hill that I could easily climb. Everything seemed to be becoming clear, but the opposite was in fact the case. The hill, covered with grass and low bushes, turned out to be around a kilometre long, perhaps a hundred metres wide, and surrounded on all sides by dense vegetation. I could see a long way from the top, as I’d hoped, but what I saw caused me to break out in a cold sweat. An endless succession of similar hills and valleys stretched out before me, all arranged more or less in parallel and with no sign of buildings or roads, let alone wind direction. At least, not to an inexperienced hiker such as myself. Closer by, there was only a jumble of crisscrossing paths, used for horse-riding judging by the hoofprints and other evidence. It was late in the afternoon, I had no idea where to head next and was quickly losing sight of where I’d come from. I was able to walk to and fro over the bare back of the hill, but that made absolutely no difference to my current predicament. My throat closed up, I felt feverish, my breathing quickened and I felt almost compelled to cry out. Because no one would hear me, I didn’t, as far as I recall. In the end I did the only thing I could think of: dive into the undergrowth somewhere at random and walk down in what felt like a straight line, for better or worse, looking for some form of habitation.

In the end I did make my way out and found roads and signposts again, but the existential angst I felt at the top of that hill has stayed with me ever since. It reminds me of a feeling I get during most coaching conversations. Fortunately, the angst experienced during coaching is accompanied by less panic, because it has now happened many times and I know I will always return to an ‘inhabited world’, but it is exactly the same feeling nonetheless.

I believe it is worthwhile to describe that ‘angst’ or anxiety in more detail. I know it isn’t ‘stage fright’ or ‘performance anxiety’ because I know what those feel like. I get them regularly when I have to stand up before a large group of people. Stage fright is accompanied by a surge of adrenalin, butterflies in the stomach, disturbed sleep beforehand and a state of hyper-alertness. And it disappears the moment I get to know the group and the podium and when I start to feel that things are going well. It often leaves me with a sort of ‘hangover’ of irritability and tiredness.

‘Coaching anxiety’ is quite different because it brings none of those symptoms, not even any particular tension before the coachee’s arrival. On the other hand, this anxiety doesn’t decline when I feel that things are going well. It is the pure fear of the unknown, the fear of not knowing what will happen next whilst realising that knowing is impossible.

To continue the parallel drawn above, the ways of coaching can probably best be compared to the jumble of crisscrossing paths in the maquis, or the absence of paths beaten by human beings. We need to find our own way, without a map or outside assistance.

It is this exploration off the beaten track that makes coaching such an unpredictably rich profession, constantly full of surprises. It also explains, for me, why there are so many different ways of coaching, probably as many as there are coaches. Or perhaps even more than the number of practitioners, because each retelling spawns new and different approaches: each time we recount our coaching experiences we cannot help adding new interpretations and ideas, and leaving others out.

In the first part of this book I hope to give an overview of the state of the art of the profession, paying special attention to its fundamentally ‘unexplored’ nature and the various paths and roads proposed by professionals. In Chapter 3 I examine what is known about helping conversations. Precisely because so much is unknown about each coaching conversation, it is good to know that some important results have been achieved in determining the most effective factors in one-to-one conversations. This chapter contains a summary of the findings from decades of quantitative research into effectiveness. Not that such facts, based on the retrospective analysis of thousands of therapeutic relationships, can help with the existential angst itself, because that is different every time and has to do with this relationship and this conversation. But the results of research can certainly give the coach confidence and point him, or her, towards the attitude towards coaching that is most effective. To illustrate this, Chapter 4 lists ‘ten commandments’ for the executive coach based on empirical research in the field of psychotherapy.

In a nutshell, Chapter 1 contains an overview of the entire specialist area of the executive coach. Chapter 2 deals with the history and development of the profession and the current surge of interest in executive coaching. Chapter 3 summarises the meta-analytical studies in psychotherapy which hold lessons for coaches. Finally, Chapter 4 outlines my perspective on the most effective form of coaching, relational coaching.

Chapter 1

From Intake to Intervention: the Outlines of a Profession

The discipline of coaching is currently enjoying a resurgence of interest in the form of new and diverse initiatives on the part of government, industry and consultancies. A potential risk, however, is that the label of ‘coach’, which already has precious little statutory or professional protection, will be further eroded. What exactly does the word ‘coaching’ stand for in the twenty-first century; and what is needed to give coaching the support that its intensive and widespread practice demands, and that can make the discipline an independent and clearly delimited profession?

1.1 Coaching: a new trend?

The term coaching may appear fashionable but it has a long history behind it. In Chapter 2 I will look at the history of the word coaching. It is important to realise here that inspiring coaching conversations have been passed down from classical times², in the dialogues of Plato, Cicero’s conversations in Tusculum, and Seneca’s letters to Lucilius for example. The first coach appears in Homer’s Odyssey, where the goddess Pallas Athena assumes the form of Mentor in order to assist adventurous mortals. There is currently a growing interest in this age-old tradition of work-related learning that relies primarily on one-to-one conversations. In those conversations, the coach is focused on facilitating the coachees’ learning and development and tries to take care that the coachees take care of themselves. The aim of coaching is to improve the coachees’ performance by discussing their relationship to certain experiences and issues.

The coach’s intention is to encourage reflection by the coachee, to release hidden strengths and to overcome or eliminate obstacles to further development. The focus is on such topics as:

• how the coachee works with others and makes sense of organisational life;

• how the coachee acts in specific situations, such as those involving managing, negotiating, giving advice or exerting influence;

• how the coachee handles difficult situations, such as with colleagues and clients;

• how the coachee forms judgments and makes decisions.

These topics are linked not only to the coachee’s professional role and the content of the specialist area but also to the person of the coachee and the knowledge and skills at their disposal, the way in which they think and act. Because there is a personal component, it is important for coachees to become aware of their own actions and to consider alternatives. The coach helps in this respect, in the first instance mainly by clarifying the problem. There is often a link between the person who has an issue and the nature of that issue. For example, a given question can be very difficult for one individual to address, while someone else barely registers it or is able to resolve it without difficulty. The degree to which a problem affects us, makes us insecure, causes sleepless nights or intrigues us, says something about the problem, of course, but also something about the person who perceives and ‘owns’ the problem. I distinguish the following possible relationships between ‘problem owner’ and ‘problem’:

1. Some problems are ‘objective’ or technical in nature. For example, if someone is having trouble with certain software packages, this might relate to resistance to information technology, but usually has more to do with a lack of knowledge or skill. Sometimes, therefore, there is simply a need to acquire knowledge or learn a particular skill. Expert advice can provide a solution here.

2. Sometimes, however, acquiring knowledge or learning new behaviour is not enough. There are underlying patterns which suggest that, though this specific problem may be solved, the same problem (possibly in a different form) will reappear the next day. Here it is important to consider not the incident, but the work context and the patterns that led to the incident. This is not always easy, because a feature of such patterns is that they often go unrecognised by the person concerned. Many people have a tendency to define problems as separate from themselves: ‘It’s not my fault; it’s the work environment; it’s my colleagues’. Coaching can provide a solution here.

3. Sometimes issues and problems are so personal that a thorough exploration within the context of work and professional experience is insufficient. An individual’s abilities and limitations underlie the problems at hand. A characteristic aspect of such problems is that they are experienced as much privately as they are at work. Therapy can provide a solution here.

A coaching conversation therefore centres partly on personal performance, but always in the context of practice. In my experience, the scope of coaching issues is more or less as follows:

1. Issues where content is at the centre will often relate to unexpected experiences, for example in drafting proposals and giving advice. These are often put forward in terms of ‘what’ questions: ‘What kind of system should I use here?’.

2. Issues where the actions of the issue holder and the way in which he or she handles a problem are central, are often put forward in terms of ‘how’ questions: ‘Will you, as my coach, help me to decide how to do this, or how to tackle this issue?’.

3. Issues where the very person raising the issue is at the centre are often put forward in terms of ‘what’ questions too: ‘What kind of assignments suit me?’ or ‘What is it about me that makes me come up against this time and again?’. As these are more personal ‘what’ issues, they can also be put forward as ‘who’ questions, along the lines of ‘Who am I, and what type of work is suitable for me?’.

Figure 1.1

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In coaching, a number of different levels are present simultaneously. The focus is often not only on the technical or organisational issue raised, and on ways of dealing with it, but also on the personal dynamic and emotional undercurrents at the root of such issues. The coach is constantly having to choose which of these levels to pursue, or at which level to make a contribution. In making that choice, the coach determines to a large extent how the conversation will continue. The importance of choosing the ‘right’ level of intervention therefore often becomes clear only in retrospect.

Various traditional forms of coaching, such as mentoring, individual consultation and counselling, are often differentiated by the level at which they tend to intervene, as is also demonstrated by the overview of the scope of coaching conversations given in Figure 1.2.

The role of coach was previously assumed largely by managers and external coaches, and we are now seeing an increase in the training and use of internal coaches. Coaching has become an instrument for enabling organisational renewal from within.

1.2 Developing a coaching relationship

The first impressions that people gain of each other have a significant impact on the course of the subsequent coaching. First impressions can, after all, be strong and persistent. They can tell you a lot about the underlying themes, but can also be deceptive. A particularly positive or negative first impression often indicates that something is going on that might obstruct an open, exploratory approach. It is worthwhile registering a number of things consciously right at the outset, such as:

• Are both parties on time, or does one arrive early or late?

• Do they shake hands? What does the handshake feel like? Do they look at each other?

• What associations does this person have for you? Who do they remind you of?

• How do the two parties get on? What body language do you notice?

• Do you use first names? Do you break the ice, or give a formal introduction?

Figure 1.2 The scope of coaching.

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There is no single correct answer to these questions, but it seems important to consider them as experience shows that ‘minor’ impressions at the start can have major consequences later on. The start of a coaching relationship is often dominated by the needs of both coachee and coach, and by their degree of openness about those needs. The coachee often needs help, and is quite possibly hoping for a specific type of help and a specific approach from the coach. In a sense, such a coachee supplies the problem and the solution right at the outset!

The coach clearly needs a coachee in order to be a coach. In a wider sense, a coach often has a need to be helpful to someone and to consolidate that helpfulness. It helps to be aware of the existence of such needs, their translation into specific wishes or their concealment using diversionary tactics, right from the start. Managing them explicitly and in a productive way can then commence, if necessary, right at the start of the coaching relationship.

It is advisable for you, as the coach, to enter into and build up the relationship as consciously as possible. To that end, it may be useful to investigate for yourself – patiently and almost a little suspiciously – how the coachee arrived at the issue in question, and what role you are seen to play in handling the issue and therefore in the life of the coachee. The following thought experiment may be useful in this connection³:

1. What does this coachee actually want? To get away from something, or to achieve something? To explore something, or to arm against something?

2. How has the coachee arrived at this wish? What else might the issue relate to? What does it point to? What might be hidden behind the issue? What is the history of the wish or issue and what attempts have already been made to address it?

3. Why coaching? What has led to this request? What does the coachee expect from it? What recommendations is she following, and from whom?

4. And why me? What expectations does this coachee have of me – what prejudices, perhaps – what assumptions about my method? What is the coachee hoping for?

5. What feelings does this coachee prompt in me? Do I think we get on? What do I think of the quality of our contact? What is the coachee appealing to in me? Can I and do I want to offer that? What is my own interest? And what am I hoping for myself?

6. What approach is the coachee requesting? What