Coaching process Archives

This paper explores an integrative and systemic approach to business coaching which captures the way it interfaces with organisational, interpersonal and intrapsychic systems.

I have recently experienced some of the gifts offered to coaches worldwide to enable them to develop their discipline. These include practitioner research, international conferences, and research grants. My first column for the year discusses the importance of these gifts and how we can make good use of them.

What do we really know about how coaching works, exactly how well it works, and when it works best? In essence, not much. Our “knowledge” is based mainly on what coaches say they do, or on what they think makes sense-rather than on observation of what they really do, or on research into coaching outcomes experienced by individuals, teams, and organizations. As a coaching practitioner, it is essential to continually research your own practice, ultimately developing your own professional competence through reflective practice.

David Peterson (2009) suggests simple ways to do this. For example, try different techniques in your coaching, i.e., with alternate clients do a background interview that is only one third of your normal interview; see what happens and take notes on what you observe. Secondly, you can generate a list of experimental ideas for your coaching from reading about new techniques, new types of questions, or new processes. Try one new thing every coaching session and record your findings. Thirdly, you can ask your coaching participants what was the most effective thing you (as coach) did in the session, and why was it helpful.

Also ask what was the least effective thing, and why was it not helpful? Record your feedback, looking for patterns, and substitute new processes for the least effective things. Think about participating in coaching research studies, or finding clients from your own practice to participate in such studies. Most importantly, think critically about and read current coaching research, trying to incorporate findings into your own practice.

The general characteristics of practitioner research are that (Fillery-Travis, 2009):

In late September 2009, I attended and spoke at the second International Harvard Coaching Conference on Coaching in Medicine and Leadership. Coaching has emerged as a competency dedicated to helping individuals grow, develop, and meet personal and professional goals while at the same time building personal and professional capacity and resilience. Although every year coaches are servicing a US$1.5 billion market, the most developed market segment is leadership coaching in organizations-less than 20 percent of professional coaches are from the mental health or medical fields. The Harvard conference was therefore a groundbreaking event, with lectures and workshops by world leaders in coaching and coaching research. There were three tracks: Overcoming the Immunity to Change; Coaching in Leadership-Theory and Practice; and Coaching in Health Care-Research and Application.

In November I participated in the second International Coaching Research Forum (ICRF2) held in London, sponsored by the IES (UK Institute for Employment Studies) and the International Coaching Research Forum (ICRF). ICRF2: Measure for Measure looked specifically at how to design coaching measures and instruments, with the ultimate aim of discovering what makes coaching effective. Researchers from around the world met to discuss three major topic groups: process measures, outcome measures for executive/leadership coaching, and outcome measures for health, wellness, and life coaching. The format for each discussion was:

Critical issues in measurement and methodology were discussed, the biggest concerns relating to:

A final report will be made available on the websites of both the International Coaching Research Forum and COMENSA (Coaches and Mentors of South Africa) early next year. All of the group forums were recorded, and key points from each discussion will be included in the final report.

These recent conferences have implications for all coaches worldwide, and particularly for the work being carried out by the Global Coaching Community (GCC), an international dialogue aimed at furthering the development of coaching. The GCC’s last convention took place in Ireland in July 2008 and produced the momentous Dublin Declaration on Coaching. The declaration was supported by recommendations from the GCC’s ten working groups, and has been endorsed by organizations and individuals representing over 15,000 coaches around the world.

It is now South Africa’s turn to host this pivotal event and help take the dialogue forward, and so the GCC Rainbow Convention will be held in Cape Town during 10-16 October 2010. The convention will showcase the results of pioneering practitioner research being undertaken by “pods” of coaches around South Africa. It will also continue the development work undertaken by the GCC’s ten working groups, as well as host specialist workshops on aspects of coaching practice.

Another boost to the professional development of coaching practitioners is an endowment of US$2,000,000 from the Harnisch Foundation to the Institute of Coaching based at Harvard Medical School/McLean Hospital. The Institute is able to translate this generous endowment into grants totaling US$100,000 per year to fund rigorous research into coaching, thereby helping develop the scientific foundation and professional knowledge base of the field.

The Institute offers four types of grant, with deadlines for applications on the first day of February, May, August, and November each year:

Please visit http://www.instituteofcoaching.org/ to learn more about the Institute’s various grants, membership programs, current research, and publications and for information on the recent Harvard Conference. As a Founding Fellow of the Institute of Coaching and a member of its Research Advisory Board, I am keen that all practitioner researchers in coaching are aware of these research grants. It is crucial that we begin to build the body of knowledge on what is working and what still needs work within the discipline of business coaching worldwide.

Our goal in developing reflective research and enquiry is to make a substantial contribution to the emerging practice of coaching worldwide (Stout Rostron, 2009). Your gift to our emerging discipline is to play a practical part. For example, you can:

Professor Peter Hawkins, creator of the Seven-Eyed Supervision Model¹and founder of the UK Bath Consultancy Group, is currently writing a new book on Systemic Team Coaching to be published by Kogan Page in 2010. He would like this book to best represent what is known and practiced in the field of team coaching. He is asking thought leaders, leading researchers, and senior team coaches to contribute from their experience. All contributions will be fully acknowledged and you will be referenced. Everyone who fills in the questionnaire will also be invited to the book launch in the UK in autumn 2010. Key questions are as follows:

Please email responses to: Professor Peter Hawkins or send to Barrow Castle, Rush Hill, Bath, UK BA2 2QR.

This article first appeared in Business Coaching Worldwide (Feburary Issue 2010, Volume 6, Issue 1).

References

Fillery-Travis, A. (2009). Practitioner Research Workshop, GCC Rainbow Convention, notes.

Peterson, D. (In press). “Executive Coaching: A Critical Review and Recommendation for Advancing the Practice.” In Handbook of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, edited by S. Zedeck. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Stout Rostron, S. (2009). Business Coaching Wisdom and Practice: Unlocking the Secrets of Business Coaching. Johannesburg: Knowledge Resources. Available from http://www.kr.co.za/.

Wilkins, N. (2009). “Countdown to the GCC Rainbow Convention!” COMENSAnews, November. Available from http://www.comensa.org.za/.

¹Hawkins, P. and Shohet, R. (2007) Supervision in the Helping Professions. United Kingdom: Open University Press.

Dr. Sunny Stout Rostron, DProf, MA

Dr. Sunny Stout Rostron, DProf, MA is an executive coach and consultant with a wide range of experience in leadership and management development, business strategy and executive coaching. The author of six books, including Business Coaching Wisdom and Practice: Unlocking the Secrets of Business Coaching (2009), Sunny is Director of the Manthano Institute of Learning (Pty) Ltd and founding president of COMENSA (Coaches and Mentors of South Africa).

The U-process is sometimes known as the process of transition, and in the field of coaching this U-process is typically represented in Scharmer’s model of change. In the process of transition, the client can move from anxiety, through happiness, fear, threat, guilt, denial, disillusionment, depression, gradual acceptance, and hostility to moving forward.

The U-process is considered a mid-range change theory with a sense of an emerging future. Scharmer’s process moves the client through different levels of perception and change, with differing levels of action that follow. The three main elements are sensing, presencing, and realizing. These represent the three basic aspects of the U (Figure 1).

This process helps the client to work at different levels of perception and change, and allows different levels of action to follow. All three levels are extensions of the learning process. As the coach and client move into the U, sensing is about observing and becoming one with the world; moving to the bottom of the U, presencing is about retreating and reflecting and allowing an inner knowing to emerge; moving out of the U, realizing is about acting swiftly and with a natural flow from the knowledge and understanding that have emerged.

The U-model suggests co-creation between the individual and the collective, i.e., the larger world. It is about the interconnection or integration of the self with the world. At the bottom of the U is the “inner gate” where we drop the baggage of our journey, going through a threshold. The metaphor used here is that of “death of the old self” and “rebirth of the new self”; the client emerges with a different sense of self. On the Web is a lovely dialogue between Wilber and Scharmer where they discuss the seven states and the three movements in this one process (Scharmer, 2003).

Superficial learning and change processes are shorter versions of the U-movement. In using this as a coaching process, the client moves downwards into the base of the U, moving from acting, to thinking, to feeling, to willing. This is to help the client to download with the coach, to let go and discover who they really are, to see from the deepest part of themselves, developing an awareness that is expanded with a shift in intention.

Otto Scharmer (2007), in an executive summary of his new book, Theory U: Leading from the Future as It Emerges, describes the U-process as five movements: co-initiating, co-sensing, presencing, co-creating, and co-evolving. Scharmer describes this as moving “first into intimate connection with the world and to a place of inner knowing that can emerge from within, followed by bringing forth the new, which entails discovering the future by doing.” The following case study demonstrates the five-step process.

From July 2007 until July 2008, I played a role as Chair of the GCC Working Group, Research Agenda for Development of the Field, and Carol Kauffman took the part of Facilitator. The GCC was originally established to create a collaborative dialogue for all stakeholders in coaching worldwide, with the ultimate aim of professionalizing the industry. Nine initial working groups were formed by the GCC’s Steering Committee to discuss critical issues related to the professionalization of coaching, producing “white papers” on the current realities and possible future scenarios of these issues. These white papers were presented at the GCC’s Dublin convention in July 2008. Using the U-process model, this case study summarizes the working group process of the research agenda, which comprised a 12-month online dialogue, with the addition of monthly telephone conversations.

Co-initiating is about building common intent, stopping and listening to others and to what life calls you to do. In the Working Group for the Research Agenda, the group built common intent by first setting up the group, defining its purpose, and beginning to discuss the dialogue process. It was agreed that the chair and facilitator would invite specific individuals to join the working group, and those members would suggest other individuals who might have a key interest in the research agenda for the field (i.e., the emerging coaching profession). The group began their online dialogue, once all had accepted the invitation and received instructions on how to use the online GCC web forum. It was agreed that there would be three communities working together: the Working Group, the Consultative Body for the Research Agenda, and the Steering Committee, which was responsible for the leadership and management of the other groups.

Observe, Observe, Observe. Go to the places of most potential and listen with your mind and heart wide open. The chair and the facilitator of the working group had to learn to co-facilitate, observing each other’s skill and competence. They had to be willing to listen to each other, noting each other’s style in facilitating an online dialogue. They needed to create the group, and to facilitate the way forward with the group, learning to take constructive criticism and appreciation from each other, guiding the group forward without being prescriptive. Both chair and facilitator agreed to co-chair the process, remaining mentally and emotionally open to each other’s divergent opinions, ways of being, and styles of interpersonal communication, whether working with the group online or by phone.

Connect to the source of inspiration and will. Go to the place of silence and allow the inner knowing to emerge. Each individual in the process reflected and regularly added their thoughts and feelings to the online forum. Debate, conflict, and agreement emerged—with chair and facilitator taking responsibility to keep the group on track without being prescriptive. The chair and facilitator each had to connect to their own individual source of inspiration and come together as one voice to guide the group.

Prototype the new with living examples to explore the future by doing. This entailed harnessing the energy of the working group to draft a current reality document of its online and tele-conference dialogues; this document was revised four times. The group brought in a facilitator for a second consultative body who entered that dialogue at stage 1 (co-initiating), but who, at the same time, entered the working group dialogue at stage 3 (presencing). Trying to move forward with their own working group process, yet move the consultative body from stage 1 to stage 2 (co-initiation to co-sensing), was a complex, parallel process. The chair and facilitator enlisted the help of an editor, Nick Wilkins, to manage the writing process of the white paper during the working group’s co-creation (stage 4).

Embody the new in ecosystems that facilitate seeing and acting from the whole. The final stage of the process was the physical gathering at the Dublin convention. This took place in three stages: pre-convention, convention, and post-convention (post-convention work has just begun). Several months prior to the convention, all nine working groups began to work together online and by telephone to share their own varied stages in the U-process; they learned from each other as they gathered momentum moving toward Dublin, which was to be the culmination of their year-long project. Some groups had lost participants during the 12 months through disagreement; others managed to harness the energy to move through each of the stages together. The three stages were:

This U-process is applicable to large innovation projects where the unfolding takes place over a long time (a year in this instance). The team composition in such projects will change and adapt to some degree after each movement; in the GCC process, the Working Group for the Research Agenda lost and added new members, whereas the Consultative Body was a looser entity with only certain members playing a strong role. This was a process of discovery, exploring the future by doing, thinking, and reflecting. As Scharmer explains, it facilitates an opening via “the tuning of three instruments: the open mind, the open heart, and the open will” (Scharmer, 2007).

At any one time there were three U-process journeys taking place for the research agenda: within the working group, the working group interacting with the consultative body, and the working group interacting with the steering committee.

Models offer a great sense of structure yet flexibility for the coach practitioner, but remember that simplicity is a prerequisite. In this series, I explore models from an experiential learning premise, as the client always brings his or her experience into the coaching conversation. The client’s experience is underpinned by a range of factors, including gender, race, culture, education, life experience, and personality. In my next article, we will begin to explore the use of four quadrant models.

This article is adapted from the author’s Business Coaching Wisdom and Practice: Unlocking the Secrets of Business Coaching (2009, Johannesburg: Knowledge Resources). Her book Business Coaching International will be published September 2009 by Karnac, London.

This article first appeared in Business Coaching Worldwide (October Issue 2009, Volume 5, Issue 3).

References

Scharmer, C.O. (2003). Mapping the Integral U: A Conversation between Ken Wilber and Otto Scharmer, Denver, CO, 17 September. Dialog on Leadership. www.dialogonleadership.org/interviews/Wilber.shtml.

Senge, P., Scharmer, C.O., Jaworski, J., and Flowers, B.S. (2005). Presence: An Exploration of Profound Change in People, Organizations, and Society. London: Nicholas Brealey.

Stout Rostron, S. (2009). Business Coaching Wisdom and Practice: Unlocking the Secrets of Business Coaching. Johannesburg: Knowledge Resources.

Dr. Sunny Stout Rostron, DProf, MA

One of the core areas where coaches work with clients is that of learning. However, the conversation with your client centers on what is meaningful to them. If significance and relevance are to emerge from the coaching conversation, it doesn’t matter what is relevant to you; it matters what is relevant to them. It is therefore important to be aware of your own assumptions about what the client needs.

If you are guiding, directing, and giving your clients all the information they need, it will be difficult for them to ever be free of you. It is helpful if the client embodies new learning personally and physiologically; you can’t do their learning for them. What you do as a coach is to help them reconstruct their own thinking and feeling to gain perspective and become self-directed learners. At the end of each coaching session with my clients, we integrate their learning¹ with the goals they have set, confirming what action, if any, they are committed to:

Although models create a system within which coach and client learn, it is essential that models are not experienced as either prescriptive or rigid. If the model is inflexible, it means it is fulfilling the coach’s agenda, rather than attempting to understand the client’s issues.

This nested-levels model was developed by New Ventures West (Weiss, 2004), and introduces the concept of horizontal and vertical levels in coaching models. The nested model works first at the horizontal level of “doing,” eventually moving into deeper “learning” one level down; reflecting about self, others, and experience at a third “ontological” level where new knowledge emerges about oneself and the world (Figure1).

In her article, Pam Weiss talks about the two different camps of coaches. In jest, I call them the New York versus the Los Angeles camp. The New York camp says, “I’m the expert, let me fix you,” while the L.A. camp says, “You are perfect and whole and have all of your own answers.” Joking aside, each of these camps comes up short, even though coaches often fall into one or the other. The role of coaching is actually about developing human beings. It is not really about “I have the expertise” versus “you already have all your own answers.”

Contrary to what experts might think, clients are not broken and are not in need of fixing. Clients may be anxious, stressed, nervous, overworked, and even narcissistic—but they don’t need fixing. They are mostly healthy human beings going about their jobs and lives, experiencing their own human difficulties. Your job as coach is to help the clients learn for themselves, so that when you are no longer walking alongside them, they have become “self-directed” learners (Harri-Augstein and Thomas, 1991) and do not need you anymore. The second view about “expertise” also has limitations. The role of expertise is that, as coach, you are an expert; but coaching is not about the coach giving all the answers; that tends to be the role of the consultant, i.e., to find solutions for the client.

The “you have all the answers” assumption is partially true, but there are several limitations. The first one is that we all have blind spots, and it is your job as coach to help the client to identify their blind spots. Secondly, it’s perhaps a bit of “mythical” thinking that the client has all of the answers already; the flip side of that argument is that, if it does not work out, the client assumes blame and fault. In other words, “If I have all the answers, I should be able to do it myself without help.” If that is not the case, they could feel, “Oh dear, if I am not able to do it myself, then perhaps I’m a failure.”

Both of these approaches are “horizontal,” i.e., they skim the surface of the work you can do with the client. Both help people to maintain the lives they currently have. The expert “New York” approach helps the client to do it better, faster, and more efficiently, and the “Los Angeles” approach may withhold key insights and observations from the coach that could help build the client’s awareness of their blind spots. What is important, rather than “fixing” the client, is the skill of “observation” on the part of the coach. There is no problem in helping the client to do it better, faster, or more efficiently—that is often what the organization hopes for in terms of performance improvement. However, it is important for the client to gain the learning they need to address blind spots and to build their own internal capacity and competence.

If you continue to help people accomplish tasks, achieve goals, and keep on “doing,” they risk falling into the trap of being “busy” and possibly overwhelmed. They may not, however, necessarily get the “learning” they need to develop self-awareness and self-management. I know all too well about this trap of being excessively busy. If we keep “doing” without reflection, we eventually burn out. To keep individual executives performing better and better, they need to work at one level lower-at the level of learning. They need to learn how to “do the doing” better. As soon as an executive begins to work with a coach, they begin the possibility of working at one or two levels deeper.

As coach, you will be asking questions to help clients reflect, review, and gain useable knowledge from their experience. In the nested-levels model, the higher levels don’t include the lower ones, but the lower levels include the higher ones. So we need to help clients address their purpose one level down, at the level of learning. At this level you may ask questions such as, “How are you doing? What are you doing? What are you feeling? How are your peers/colleagues experiencing you/this? What is and what isn’t working? What is useful learning for you here? What needs to change and how?”

The third and fourth levels of the coaching intervention using this model are that of who the client is and who the client wishes to become in terms of thinking, feeling, and being. Your questions move from “what do they need to do” and “how do they need to do it” (doing), to “how does their style of learning impact on how they do what they do; what do they need to learn in order to improve thinking/behavior/feeling/performance/leadership” (learning); to questions about “what do they need to understand and acknowledge about themselves, who are they, how do they be who they are, and what needs to change (being and becoming)?”

So what assists people in getting things done? Above all, it is about clarifying goals, creating action steps, taking responsibility, and being accountable. In order to perform more effectively, we need to help clients shift down a gear to learn how to work with competence (a set of skills) rather than just learning a specific new skill.

Your job as coach is to help the client be open to possibilities of learning something new, and to help them relate to themselves and others at a deeper level. To use the nested-levels model, you could ask questions such as:

Our aim with this model is to shift any limiting sense of who the client is so that they can interact and engage with the world in new ways. As clients begin to shift, it has an impact on others with whom they interact in the workplace. It also means addressing issues systemically, from a holistic perspective, whether those issues revolve around health, stress, anxiety, performance, or relationships with others. Our task as coaches is to widen the circle, enlarge the perspective of the client, and help them learn from their own experience how to reach their potential.

A great way to start any coaching intervention is to ask your clients to tell their life story. The coach begins to understand some of the current issues and presenting challenges, and begins to observe patterns of thinking, feeling, and behavior. Because we work with Kolb’s theory of “understanding experience in order to transform it into useable knowledge,” this model helps us to determine the context in which the client operates, where individual and systemic problems may be occurring, and how organizational values and culture impact on individuals and teams. It is at this level that the coach’s ability to observe, challenge, and ask appropriate questions can be most transformational.

Coaching models help us understand the coaching intervention from a systems perspective, analyzing the “structure” of the interaction between coach and client. This series of articles takes a practical look at how coaching models are constructed, and how they can help you to flexibly structure the overall coaching journey as well as the individual coaching conversation with your business client. In my next article, we will explore the use of the U-process model, sometimes known as the “process of transition,” typically represented in Scharmer’s U-process. This article is adapted from Business Coaching Wisdom and Practice: Unlocking the Secrets of Business Coaching (2009, Johannesburg: Knowledge Resources). Business Coaching International will be published mid 2009 by Karnac, London.

This article first appeared in Business Coaching Worldwide (June Issue 2009, Volume 5, Issue 2).

Resource Materials

Kolb, D. (1984). Experiential Learning: Experience as the Source of Learning and Development. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall. Stout Rostron, S. (2009). Business Coaching Wisdom and Practice: Unlocking the Secrets of Business Coaching. Johannesburg: Knowledge Resources. Stout Rostron, S. (2006). Interventions in the Coaching Conversation: Thinking, Feeling and Behaviour. Unpublished DProf dissertation. London: Middlesex University.

¹ “Learning conversations” refers to research into learning conversations and self-organized learning, developed by S. Harri-Augstein and L.F. Thomas (1991:24).

Dr. Sunny Stout Rostron, DProf, MA

Everyone in the business coaching profession agrees that executive coaching works. However, according to Coaching and Buying Coaching Services (London: Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, 2004), an even greater impact, more sustainable results and increased effectiveness can be achieved when a systematic approach to executive coaching is applied.

Novice coaches wonder if effective, experienced coaches possess mysterious methods for producing magical results. In fact, the genuine trust that renders coaching effective is created when both coach and client have a clear understanding of the coaching process and methodology. We have always believed in the value of such transparency, and have made it a cornerstone of our practice. To validate our belief, we conducted research and monitored our own coaching results.

In order to determine and define what actually happens in sessions facilitated by an effective coach, we observed and analyzed transcripts and video tapes from executive coaching colleagues in the US, England and Germany. We investigated how the coach achieved results, what specific actions the coach took to improve executive performance, and what distinguished an effective, experienced coach from a novice. Our observations, analysis and study of various coaching models led to our development of the seven-step Achieve Coaching Model^®, which has been applied successfully in some of the finest organizations in the world.

A brief description of each of the seven steps follows, along with insights into the skills and techniques employed by an effective coach at each stage.

Step 1: Assess the current situation
In this step, the executive is encouraged to reflect deeply about his or her current situation. The enhanced self-awareness obtained by describing that situation helps in identifying areas to address, and provides a useful context for the sessions ahead. However, the most important benefit of this step is the client’s opportunity to reflect on past events, enhance understanding of what specific actions contributed to the current situation, and how those actions may have stimulated specific responses in others.

Step 2: Brainstorm creative alternatives to the client’s current situation
This phase broadens the executive’s perspective and creates a sound foundation for the development of creative solutions and behavioral change. The objective is to increase the choices available to a client who is facing a challenging situation.

One of the most pressing issues for clients is the feeling of being “stuck” in a particular situation with no visible alternate course of action available. In some circumstances, particularly in times of heightened stress, perspective can narrow, resulting in mental and emotional “tunnel vision.” The effect resembles a confrontation with a massive wall–nothing is visible but that wall.

An effective coach draws the client back and restores a broader perspective, which is a prerequisite for the next stages in the coaching partnership. Absent creative brainstorming, the client continues to circle and repeat the same patterns of behavior. Essentially, the first natural reaction in this “stuck state” is to do “more of the same.”

Step 3: Hone goals
In Step 3, the client forges alternatives and possibilities into specific goals. This is the stage at which SMART goals are created and/or refined, and it is essential that the principles of effective goals formulation be taken into account. This is more difficult than it may first appear. Most executives are very aware of what they do not want. However, they frequently find it highly challenging to specify exactly what they do want. In this step, the coach helps the executive to clearly articulate specific, desired results.

Step 4: Generate options for goal achievement
Having decided upon a specific goal, the aim at Step 4 is to develop a wide range of methods of achieving it. At this point, the purpose is not to find the “right” option, but rather to stimulate the client to develop an abundant array of alternatives. No option, however seemingly appealing, should form the sole focus of attention. At this stage, the quantity, novelty and variety of the options are more important than their quality or feasibility.

Step 5: Evaluate options
Having generated a comprehensive list of options, the next step is for the client to evaluate and prioritize them. As is the case in Step 3, “Hone Goals,” this is the stage at which an experienced coach can guide the executive towards developing focus. Without a well-defined focus for action, the executive is unlikely to move forward effectively.

We have found that executives who are skilled at evaluating options for their business objectives often find it difficult to apply the same techniques to their private lives. In such situations, the coach can serve to remind the client of the value of these techniques, and encourage their application on a personal level.

Step 6: Design a valid action plan
As one coach described it, “This is where the rubber meets the road!” At this stage, a concrete and pragmatic action plan is designed. One of the main advantages of executive coaching in industry and commerce is that it provides “just in time” learning and development when and where an executive needs it. This stage of committing to a plan means that the executive is ready to take action.

With many executive development programs, the challenge is translating “classroom learning” into everyday practice. Coaching helps bridge this gap, and the executive commits to taking action using newly acquired skills.

Step 7: Encourage momentum
This is represented as the final stage in the Achieve Coaching Model^®. While the final step in a coaching partnership may be to facilitate the client’s execution of the defined action plan, the role of the coach in encouraging momentum between coaching sessions is equally important.

As a US coach explained, encouraging momentum is a “crucial part of the process. Until the new behavior becomes the new reality, it remains difficult…executives who are in the transformation process need encouragement and reinforcement.” We have found that it is important to reinforce even the smallest steps, since this helps to build and maintain momentum and increase the executive’s level of confidence. Cumulative small action steps create the critical mass necessary to accomplish the desired goal. Sustainable change is easier to achieve with continuous reinforcement and encouragement.

The aim of this article has been to describe and provide insights into the practical application of the Achieve Coaching Model^®. Coaches can use the model to structure their coaching sessions and coaching programs without confining the coach to a “straightjacket” which inhibits flexibility and individuality. For those considering hiring a coach, the model provides a transparent, forthright description of coaching methodology. It can also help potential clients to evaluate coaches when choosing those with whom they wish to work.

This article first appeared in Business Coaching Worldwide (Spring Issue 2006, Volume 2, Issue 1).

Source:

Sabine Dembkowski, Ph.D

Sabine Dembkowski, Ph.D is based in Cologne, Germany. Following a successful career as a top management consultant at A.T. Kearney and Monitor Company, Sabine founded The Coaching Centre, an international consultancy for executive coaching and leadership services. Sabine can be reached by email at sabinedembkowski@thecoachingcentre.com.

Fiona Eldridge

Fiona Eldridge is the Director of The Coaching and Communication Centre. She is a Master Practitioner and Certified Trainer of Neuro Linguistic Programming. Fiona has appeared on television and radio and frequently contributes to newspapers and journals. Learn more about her work at The Coaching and Communication Centre.