Matching coaches with clients, the next evolution in Internal Coaching by Simon Dennis (Part 2)
In Part 1 of this series, I reported on how external coaches have shifted their practice, as time has moved on, on refining their model and refining their offer so that they're offering something unique and specialist. Absolutely, it might restrict their market, I think though there's an element that says it makes you a better coach because you're dealing with your strengths and your unique offerings.
Building on this focus of being a better coach, I apply this notion into the internal coaching context and its practical application with a proposed blueprint.
Co-ordinating the matching process
Achieving a harmonic community approach, you would have thought would be easier to do, in a sense, in an internal coaching model because you're not in that competitive space. Interestingly what I've seen is some internal coaches still see it as a competitive arena, partly because there's been a lack of coachees internally and for some people they are just desperate to coach. It's almost like, "Forget the topic, I don't want you worrying too much about the detail I just want the coachee and they can decide." The danger is that in the current context, the current situation, that coach actually might not be the best coach for that individual. As coaches, I think we owe it to our coachees to be able to say, "Absolutely right, you're better with someone else."
For the client
As we've been building the model, and several coachee requests have come through, I've been challenged in terms of my knowledge of the coaches. Even though I’ve worked with the community of coaches for 10 years or more I've been challenged to articulate their uniqueness and strengths. Faced with the prospect of offering one or two coaches to choose from, based on the need of the coachee, it becomes difficult to apply any logic.
It's been quite interesting because on the one hand, you absolutely want every coach that you've known to be of a particular standard and ability and be able to say, "Actually, take your pick. They're all fabulous. They're all great so just crack on." But on the other hand, you have to say "No, I feel we owe it to the coachee to be more specific and be more genuine about our choice rather than simply picking the coach that is closest to their location or selecting a coach based on limiting potential conflicts of interest, or a coach that works in another department for instance.”
There are many factors you can include when you do coach matching. For instance, you could say, "geography is important." Is it important to be nearby or is it important to be distant? Now we’re mostly working online does that remove geography from the equation or not?
It might be that it's quite nice to have something in common, maybe discovering that you live or lived in the same area. I was on an online training course earlier in the year and as part of the introduction the host asked where the delegates were from, I said Manchester, and immediately she responded "Oh, whereabouts in Manchester?" I said, "Oh, a place called Middleton." She replied, "Oh, I live in Blackley," which is literally about a mile up the road. Straight away, there's a connection between us, and even though we're on Zoom, and we're talking to people from all over Europe, the fact that you now know I'm a mile away from you has created a link. However, is that connection enough to be the determining factor for assigning a coaching assignment?
I think when you're doing coach matching there are a series of questions to work though. The priority list can be:
You’ve got the topic itself, is that important?
If it is, is where you work within a business important?
If it is, is it important to match it, or not?
As we start to go through that questioning process in our minds, we start to make judgments based on certain criteria and then specialisms come to mind within that. As coaches we have quite good rigor, but it was a challenge to get to that conversation about who would be the best coach in a specific situation.
For the coach
If coaches accept the general principle that our coachees should be working with the right coach, that then leads you to the conclusion that in order to do that effectively as a coach, you need to understand your strengths and unique offering. You need to understand when and where you are truly working at your best, and not just, as you say, delivering an acceptable performance, an acceptable outcome, but actually delivering regularly an exceptional outcome. Then conversely, you need to understand the coachee, and their particular dilemma and challenge because that then helps you. What we've come up with now is the forming of a matching process that basically starts with a ‘coordinating’ coach helping the coachee to understand their challenge, using coaching in that process to really get to the crux of the matter, and then using some powerful information about the coaches to help you in that matching process.
The more traditional areas, location, timing and all those kinds of things go out the window. It becomes much more about the context, to enable a better outcome, which is slightly opposing to the idea that it doesn't matter what the content is. For me, I'm thinking about, "Where have I been at my best? What outcomes have I enabled?" But not from a point of view of the content because I think the content is irrelevant.
We're not saying it's not hard work but approaching coaching knowing that you’ve been matched because of your strengths takes a huge amount of pressure off. It's a really good time to be exploring all this so that we can start to really see where coaching can be more powerful. Content isn't vital because the coach should be able to handle whatever the content is, but context is important, and playing to each other's strengths is important. More importantly, for our coaches, it’s recognizing that what they've got and where they're strong sets them apart and increases the diversity of opportunities for coaching.
Sometimes it can be challenging to identify your strengths straight away, so it’s also useful to consider those secondary markers that have enabled you to successfully coach.
For example, do you coach best online? Do you coach best over the phone? Do you coach best in a quiet corner of a coffee shop or hotel lobby, or do you coach best when you're out walking? I know many who find it really beneficial to be able to walk in twos and explore topics and reflect. They found the process of walking and talking was more effective than simply sitting in a room or huddled in a corner. I think, over time, they're the things that coaches need to reflect on when we talk about how and when do you work best? It doesn't have to be about the content.
Look at where you coach best. Reflect on how you deliver your best coaching. Is it delivered in groups? Is it delivered face to face? Some coaches I know are hugely effective but don't like using video. They just coach over the phone, but that's fine if that's how they're incredibly successful, then actually knowing that is important when it comes to matching.
With time, as a coach you’ll begin to build your narrative of how your strengths and unique styles deliver the impacts you see with your coachee because you’re more attuned to the context of your exceptional coaching performance.
Case example of working as a team from strengths
In my day to day work, we were talking about our office and the people in our office, and we nonchalantly asked, "What makes it a great place to be?" One of the guys who has been there a lot longer than me said, “It's great, because everyone knows they have a role to play. Nobody tries to be better than anybody else because they all know we've got unique skills. And because of that,” he said, “The hierarchy is almost invisible, the hierarchy is only there for authorization.”
At the end of the day, when it comes to doing our jobs, everyone has a unique place in the workforce. It doesn't matter whether you're the managing director of our part of the business you will be pulled into conversations if people think you’re the right person to have in the conversation: knowing your strengths is key. It's also refreshing when people understand their strengths, they know what they're good at. It makes for a more collaborative workplace and an empowered workforce. Everybody seeks to help each other achieve the best outcome using the strengths in the room. It's great because it's a great place to grow, it's a great place to learn because all the time you're being challenged as to what your strengths are, you'll also be encouraged to improve your strengths.
The blueprint: Matching coaches and clients from knowing strengths
I believe this whole argument about making people who are strong, stronger, is important. I think that's where coaching has a real part to play. The way to do that is to make sure your matching of the coach is aligned to where they're strong and they will then help the individual. From where coaching is to where coaching should be is that key word - knowing. If you know your own strengths, you know your own style, you know when you are at your best, the way you help people get their outcomes, that makes a huge difference in knowing who to match with whom for that specific challenge.
I think somehow, we've got to encourage coachees to recognize that, although they might want coach X because coach X lives down the road or coach X used to work in my area so they'll understand my area, that coach X may not be the best coach for them. I think we need to remove a lot of that basic coach matching and look at the core, which is “what's the thing you want to work on with your coach and I'll find you a coach that's going to really help you in that space”.
The challenge for the coach is to recognize that just because they're not necessarily matched with that coachee doesn't make them a bad coach. It's because we're looking at matching based on strengths. Something I'm working through personally now is a reflective model to look at how you recognize coaching strengths.
The model, as I see it now, is to start with where you had successful outcomes.
Where have things gone really well versus just ok?
What were you doing in that moment? For example:
How were you behaving?
What style were you using?
When and where did you enable things to go really well?
The first step may not even link naturally to the second step – sometimes for me it’s a challenge because I will assume that the successes have nothing to do with me. It’s easy to think, "Oh yes, but they would have done that anyway." So you have to think beyond that and seek to attribute your actions/behaviours to the outcomes. And that's the point. Coaches have to grapple with that.
For example, look at where I've been successful in life, in business, in coaching, where things have gone really well for you and then, forgetting the fact that you may not think it had any connection, ask yourself what were you doing? How were you behaving? What did you do?" Just write it down, just capture it and try not over analyse your thoughts and statements with, "Actually, did it make any difference?".
Sometimes you have to suspend belief because if you don't, if you question every time, you'll never get anywhere. You have to just say, "Okay, the reality is this. X happened and X was deemed to be successful. Now then, what was I doing?"
Now go back and look at X again. Just ask the question, what was I doing? What was the role I played? - "I was the one that drew all the pieces of the string together and created a timeline of events." “Okay, what else did I do?" and "What else?" Be specific about what you did without necessarily saying to yourself you're taking credit for the outcome here.
Once you've done that enough times, you suddenly go, "Actually, this is more than a coincidence. A pattern begins to evolve. What I've found now is that every time I'm involved and there is a successful outcome, this is what I did." Almost the evidence then leads you to believe it must be linked.
There is a huge benefit in reflecting on strengths because that's where we get our uniqueness from, that's where we get our diversity from because no two individuals will be the same and have the same combination of strengths and style, and therefore, we create our own unique style of coaching. This is also my perspective on the good coach model[1]: by getting enough coaches sharing their practice and what they do to be successful, whilst it's shared learning, over time you're also helping them become better coaches because by reflecting on their practice and sharing it they're recognizing it for themselves as well.
Interestingly, it’s hardly a coincidence, because if you think about some of our biggest theories/models, a good example being the GROW model, they are born out of a series of successful outcomes and someone reflecting on, "What were the steps that took place? Let's ignore the outcome now, we know it was successful, what were the steps?" "Oh, the steps were these four things." Then you get another successful outcome, "What were the steps in that one?" "Oh, there were these four things." You do it enough times and guess what? Those four things were always the same four things." Then out of that, you get a model which is this case is GROW, but it's the same with other models too – they are born out of observed repeated successful behaviour – and by observing your own patterns you’ll discover your own model.
Where next
In service of our coachees in terms of what's the best to offer, we should be open as coaches to explore where our real strengths are with each other – perhaps through peer coaching or supervision – and working as a community with healthy competition. This would be a more wholesome model that enables a coach who genuinely thought they weren’t the right person to be able to suggest an alternative coach. Recognizing and using those strengths to focus on key aspects of diversity within the coaching community adds value through coaching. I believe that this is even more feasible in an internal coaching model because it doesn’t have that commercial conflict. And in this way demonstrate a lot quicker and in a more collaborative way how internal coaching could work and discover better complementary engagements with external coaches.
What do you think?
Will knowing your strength and unique style raise the quality of coaching overall, and enable you, the coach, to always deliver your best coaching?
Can internal coaching be that space to enhance the coach matching process with clear criteria and logic?
What challenges need to be overcome to apply a more wholesome model of coaching that ensures a basic principle that the coachee working with the right coach is working well?
Footnote
[1] I think a lot of people come to things like the good coach and they're almost looking for ideas and ways of plugging gaps in their own coaching. Yet, it's actually about coaches sharing what makes it work for them in a bid to help you think about what makes it work for you and I think that's the difference. You look at a lot of the coaching books and they're all full of really good ideas about how to be a better coach but all they're doing is giving you other people's models.
