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by Dr. Sunny Stout Rostron

The coaching conversation provides a thinking environment in which business professionals are able to develop self-awareness and a deeper understanding, both of themselves and of others. Dr. Sunny Stout Rostron explains how this can lead to the embedding of newly acquired skills, competencies and attitudes, which subsequently impact the actions they take and visibly demonstrate new behaviours.

This article explores five aspects of the coaching conversation and defines the business coaching conversation as an alliance between coach, client and organisation, which is designed to maximise and transform thinking, behaviour and performance. They are as follows:

• The business coaching process;
• Goals and the coach/client relationship;
• Learning from experience;
• Listening, equality and the genuine encounter; and
• Measuring results.

The business coaching process

The business coaching process is one that helps business executives and leaders to develop a clear understanding of their roles and responsibilities. Business coaching, like sports coaching, is about high performance and sustained behavioural change; and breakthrough results. The critical value of business coaching is in it ability to help the individual executive to think more clearly about the core issues which present challenges in her job, career and daily working life. The focus of a coaching conversation is to help the client work towards achieving his desired outcomes. The coach primarily explores with each client what it is that is holding back or stopping the client from achieving her goals - by identifying and replacing disempowering assumptions and paradigms, with empowering ones for example. It has been challenging to find one authoritative definition of coaching in the marketplace (not just because every professional body has its own slant on the coaching process) but because there is no agreed global definition available. I myself define coaching as a process that creates sustained shifts in thinking, feeling and behaviour – and ultimately in performance. By asking the right questions, coaches help clients find their own solutions.

Goals and the coach/client relationship

Business coaching places great emphasis on clarifying and achieving goals. Often within the complex organisational environment, the client’s overarching goals may be set by a more senior power; where that senior individual may have different worldviews and paradigms, and differing limiting and empowering assumptions. It is therefore important that as goals are set, they are related to the intrinsic and extrinsic drivers of the client themselves. In other words, if it is to be achieved, the goal must be aligned as much with the values of the individual as they are with the organisation.

A secondary consideration is that goals change for the client over time as the relationship develops. For example, as he grew in competence and confidence over a two-year period, one of my clients working in an international organisation based in Johannesburg changed his overarching goal from that of developing strong leadership competence to being considered one of the most competent business leaders, not just within his own country South Africa but in the whole of sub-Saharan Africa!

The coach needs to have an in-depth understanding of organisational systems

There is a strong link between business results and emotional intelligence (defined as self-awareness, self-management, social awareness and social skill). In essence coaching ensures that leaders improve their Emotional Intelligence (EQ) skills, leading to better organisational performance. This includes achieving an optimal balance between the needs of the individual, the team and the organisation. If the client has grown in terms of self-awareness, the organisation will want to see this demonstrated at work: in relationships, management competence, leadership behaviours and EQ. But in order to do so, the coach needs to have an in-depth understanding of organisational systems. He or she must be able to see the coaching intervention from a systems perspective and understand the need for structure in the interaction between coach, individual client and the organisational system. A danger of not understanding the system in which the client operates is that the coach risks becoming another part of that system.

Learning from experience

Learning, and particularly learning from experience, seems to be one of the major components of the coaching conversation. Learning from experience implies an understanding of the language and content of the client’s story, with the coach helping the client to reconstruct her own reality by searching for meaning through dialogue.

There is so much power in language and content that the significance of the client’s story comes from both the structure and the interpretation and significance given. In some cultures, for example in Latin America, Africa and

India

; oral history and storytelling remain very important methods of passing on ritual, tradition and customs. The coaching conversation can literally be seen as an extension of telling one’s story and looking for meaning and significance in the telling. With this as a precedent, we can look at the coaching conversation not just as experiential learning, but as experiential education: learning from one’s own life experiences. These definitions suggest that learning is the key. This indicates that helping your clients grow, develop and become who they want to, requires asking for their best thinking, rather than sharing yours. The three levels of coaching intervention with which we as coaches are working are interconnected:

1. Doing: What tasks and goals need to be accomplished?
2. Learning: How will you develop the competences needed?
3. Being and becoming: Who are you as you grow, develop and transform? (Weiss, 2004)

Listening, equality and the genuine encounter

The structure of the coaching intervention needs to be framed by the coach’s ability to listen and to actively intervene only when needed. Listening, asking questions and silence are core skills for the business coach — as they help to create safety for clients within the external physical environment and enhance the client’s internal thinking environment. It is also important that the coach/client relationship be based on an assumption of equality. In a coaching relationship, neither coach nor client is superior to the other: both are travellers on the client’s journey. A safe thinking environment is built through the development of the relationship and research shows that the relationship is what can help with the onset of change (Stout Rostron, 2006:79).

Measuring results

In working with an individual client, there is no point in simply developing a leadership plan in isolation from the rest of the business processes. If the coaching intervention is to be successful in organisations, it is critical to develop a systemic, fully integrated coaching strategy that is in alignment with both the business and the talent strategies for that organisation. Moreover, although I agree that in the business context, results are often measured in three specific areas (namely: behavioural change, improved performance and the individual’s personal and professional development [Shaw and Linnecar, 2007; cited in Ting and Scisco, 2006:58–9]) I define these categories a bit differently.

The business coach’s job is to facilitate insight, which leads to observable behavioural change impacting on performance

1. Visible behavioural change

It is essential that any changes in self-awareness and relationship awareness show up visibly in the workplace through the client’s behaviour, otherwise, it is difficult to measure what has changed as a result of the coaching. Coaching is a complex process where both qualitative and quantitative goals are set. Your job as a business coach is to develop the core competences of the managerial leader. The development of those competences needs to show up visibly in work-related and behavioural changes. The client’s work often starts with growing self-awareness, increased emotional maturity and improved interpersonal skills and competence.

2. Improved performance and business results

Performance improvement should have a direct effect on business results. Although it is not always possible to quantify how coaching has directly impacted performance, it is one of the key criteria linked to business coaching. This may require a systemic and developmental approach on the part of coach and client, integrated with an understanding of the complexities of the client’s working context, market environment and level of competence. For example, diversity, culture and gender may have an impact on both the individual client and the organisation itself.

3. Personal and professional development

The personal development plan you create with your client relates directly to the areas where it is perceived that they need to work. Their plan will be linked to individual management assessment profiles, 360 degree feedback surveys and shadow coaching, all of which help identify emotional, behavioural, cognitive and performance-related issues. One of the essentials in creating this personal development plan is to identify the skills and competencies that will impact each area, creating medium-term and long-term plans. This includes the client’s learning journey, the importance of identifying their learning style and how they will be able to develop themselves personally and professionally when they have ceased to work with an external coach or internal organisational coach.

The (American Marketing Association) AMA’s 2008 research study into the reasons why organisations use coaching, revealed that 79 per cent wished to improve individual performance/productivity, 63 per cent wanted to address leadership development succession planning; 60 per cent wanted to increase worker skill levels and 56 per cent wished to improve organisational performance (AMA, 2008:11)

The business coach’s job is to facilitate insight, which leads to observable behavioural change impacting on performance. This is because organisations expect to see clear and effective deliverables.

This article is an excerpt adapted from Business Coaching Wisdom and Practice: Unlocking the Secrets of Business Coaching (2009) by Sunny Stout Rostron. Johannesburg: Knowledge Resources.

Resource Materials

American Manufacturing Association (AMA) (2008). Coaching: A Global Strategy of Successful Practices. New York, NY: AMA.

Stout Rostron, S. (2006). Interventions in the coaching conversation: Thinking, feeling and behaviour.

Unpublished D Prof dissertation. London: Middlesex University. Stout Rostron, S. (2009).

Business Coaching Wisdom and Practice: Unlocking the Secrets of Business Coaching. Johannesburg: Knowledge Resources.Ting, S., and Scisco, P. (2006).

The CCL Handbook of Coaching: A Guide for the Leader Coach. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.Weiss, P. (2004). The Three Levels of Coaching. San Francisco, CA: An Appropriate Response. Webpage: www.newventureswest.com/three_levels.pdf.