Inside the Coaching Room

There’s no such person as a standard coaching client – they come in all shapes and sizes and the issues they bring are likewise unique. But experienced executive coaches soon begin to spot the common patterns – the things that very many senior manager seem to have as common concerns.

Long hours working

Yes, you can blame the culture of the organisation, or the downsizing that took away half the staff but left all the work and more – but in the end it’s a choice about whether you personally are willing to do that 60-hour week. When coach and client look hard at what’s really going on, it’s surprising how often it comes down to a reluctance to delegate. Many managers talk delegation while actually doing the opposite – keeping their team members on a very short leash. The coaching cure here involves learning how to let go – and how to manage the anxiety that this invariably involves – at least at first.

Conflicting priorities: work and home

Interestingly it is usually the male clients who bring this one to the coaching room. Perhaps women have lived with it for so long that it is no longer so worthy of note. Typically, the client is torn between the need to give work all the attention it needs and the need to attend to his personal life. Often there are multiple commitments here: a new partner, children from more than one marriage who may not live within easy reach, as well as elderly parents suddenly needing more time and attention. Unlike everyone else in the client’s life, the coach has no axe to grind. The coaching room is probably the one place where the client can stand back and look calmly and thoroughly at where his priorities really lie.

Targetitis

This is a public sector condition. The government needs to show it is being tough, so the Minister bullies the next layer down and the next layer down bullies their next layer down – and so on. Many of our chief executive clients are painfully aware that they are the ones who will get punished if their organisation appears to have slipped from these arbitrarily-imposed standards. Naming the fear and facing up to it is an important part of what such coaching involves. Suppose the worst did happen? I have yet to meet a client who can’t answer that question positively. Paradoxically, creating, however tentatively, some kind of exit strategy also creates the calm necessary to keep your head in severely taxing circumstances.

Where next in my career?

Often this question it is linked to the approach of one of those landmark birthdays with a nought at the end; sometimes it’s a reluctant acknowledgement that a job that was once exciting has now exhausted its potential for learning and challenge. The answer? It’s never to start from the question Who else will have me? Rather, it’s to ask the more profound question What do I really want? The answer is often surprising because it is rarely a bigger and better version of what I have now.

Personal impact

This kind of client has the good luck of working to an excellent boss who has spotted the client’s potential. However, the boss believes that the client lacks personal impact – code for an inappropriate degree of invisibility and the kind of niceness that can be interpreted as weakness. During the coaching we will look first at areas like communication style. Often these clients have a habit of unnecessary deference – such as compulsive apologising – combined with over-tentative and infrequent interventions in meetings. Learning to recognise the pattern and then to practise some alternatives in the safety of the coaching room will kickstart the process of change. Equally useful is to get some specialist advice from a coach who can advise on appearance: learning to distinguish between drab and businesslike can be an important part of what needs to happen.

The unconscious bully

This client has drive in abundance and wants to see results. The trouble is that when you are promoted into a senior management role, just giving orders is hopeless if it is your sole influencing tactic. When they come in for coaching, such clients are often deeply puzzled about what has gone wrong – tactics that worked perfectly well at earlier career stages are now exactly the tactics that people resist. Understanding their impact on others is a vital part of the coaching; closely followed by quickly mastering a whole suite of alternative influencing styles.