Looking at the literature and research on coaching, it is noticeable that while there is a considerable amount of emphasis placed on the skills of the coach, there seems to be less focus on the skills that a client needs for the coaching to be effective. In some ways this is unsurprising. Those who call themselves coaches, as opposed to those who call themselves mentors, are more likely to be paid for their services. While most who work as coaches would probably agree that coaching should be about developing capability in the client, there is nevertheless a pressure on the coach to demonstrate competence.
This can sometimes influence what Myles Downey refers as to as “the intent” of the coach within a coaching conversation. Again, while most who write about coaching would probably agree that coaching should be client- led, most writers appear to place more emphasis on what the coach does or does not do within a coaching conversation, rather than on what the client does.
Bresser & Wilson are a good example of this tendency. In their chapter exploring what coaching is, they argue that it should be “coaching-led”. Indeed, they go further in terms of specifying what the client does:
“The client is in charge of the content, such as:
- choosing the area of the coaching;
- creating the specific goals, strategies and actions to be worked on;
- deciding on the time frame”
However, it is interesting to note that while these areas of responsibility would seem to be crucial to the success of the conversation, the discussion of coaching skills focuses exclusively on the coach’s skills. The reason for this appears to be that the authors see the coach as being responsible for the process, whereas the client is responsible for content. This understanding of “division of labour” does not seem atypical of the literature on coaching and mentoring. This seems to rest on the tacit assumption that the selection and management of content is relatively unskilled when compared with helping someone else to work on that content.
However, if we look at the areas that the client is deemed to be responsible for, it is difficult to sustain this assumption. Selecting the issue that one wants to talk about is not without its problems. The client must have an understanding and awareness of what coaching is for and be able to select the issues and areas that would be amenable to this form of help.
Furthermore, articulating and crafting the specific skills, actions and strategies to be worked on, as well as deciding and managing the time frame, would also seem to demand considerable skill on the part of the client. Of course, a coach will have a role to play in all of these things the purpose of this article is not to minimise the skills and impact that the coach has. Rather, it is to point out the difference between the rhetoric and reality in coaching and mentoring literature. If, as is often argued, coaching is client-led, why do commentators, researchers and practitioners spend relatively little time talking about the skills that the client needs to develop if they are to lead the process?
Even allowing for the argument that the coach leads the process and the client leads on the content, there seems to have been relatively little attention paid to the idea that it is possible to develop skilled clients. This is an area that is ripe for further investigation.
Paul Stokes presented a research paper on “The skilled coachee” at the European Mentoring & Coaching Council’s annual conference in Djurönäset, Sweden, in October.
References
- M Downey, Effective Coaching: Lessons from the Coach’s Coach, Texere, New York, 2003.
- In J Passmore (ed), Excellence in Coaching, pages 9-25, Kogan Page, 2007.
Volume 2, Issue 6