By Liliane Held-Khawam, author of the book “Management by Coaching: Coping with Complexity in a Changing World”
Profiles of the coach and coachee
There can be three types of coaches:
- The coachee’s manager or project manager. Their role is essential in order to enforce the coaching on a daily basis.
- An internal coach who usually belongs to the HR department or to the training staff. They will normally be able to coach members of staff and managers up to the first hierarchical level. Top managers and managers who are in charge of important projects only seldom accept an internal coaching.
- An external coach who should possess a strong command of both the person’s functioning (without being involved in therapy themselves) and of the organization’s functioning. This person should therefore adopt an approach at both individual and organizational levels.
Coaching is available to everyone. Every single individual can be coached. However, coaching should first of all be offered to successful top managers, managers and project managers so that they may keep a certain distance from their environment and express their vision, values and creativity in an ever more complete way. It is also essential that they develop their capacity to simultaneously conceptualize, structure and act.
Coaching is also available to every person who considers a professional change such as creating a new company, starting up a new activity or an important project, or going through a professional reorientation or mobility process. It is, of course, also available to persons or groups who are going through professional and/or personal difficulties.
The success criteria of a coaching process
Applying a given methodology is not a sufficient condition to ensure a successful coaching process. A few conditions should also be met. These mainly refer to the quality of the relationship between the coached person and their coach, the respect of ethics, as well as the delimitation of the coaching program’s duration. Several dimensions of the relationship between the coached person and their coach can be outlined:
- It is essential that the coached person has a strong motivation for the coaching program
- It is necessary that the coachee does in fact trust the coach
- A clear goals contract should be agreed upon by bot the coached person and their coach
- The coached person should respect the deadlines and complete the work they have to do between two meetings
- The coach should be able to understand and structure their client’s situation
- The coach should listen to their client without any value judgment nor any attempt to transfer an ideal
The ethics of coaching represent another element that is essential to the successfulness of the coaching process:
- The appointments should be sufficiently distant, so as not to create a dependence (e.g. two months between two meetings).
- One should avoid entering into a therapeutically process
- Confidentiality is compulsory for all the information exchanged.
- The employer, the coach and the coachee should agree on the results and information expected by the employer. Play the game of transparency.
- The aim of the coaching should be to bolster the coachee’s autonomy.
- One should dare to interrupt the work should the coachee not take it seriously.
Finally, please note that the issue of what the duration of the coaching process should be is the most crucial of all! Moreover, the question is often asked by both coachees and their employers.
But how can this duration actually be assessed? It depends on the client’s personality, their level of motivation and openness, their needs that can be more or less demanding, as well as the project’s type and importance. We have obtained very good results over an average period of 6 months (4 meetings) and excellent results over a period of 1 year (6 to 7 meetings).
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