How to build trust and empathy in your coaching relationship?
Successful coaching involves working with – not against – an individual’s resistance. INSEAD Professor Kets de Vries shares his many years of experience coaching senior executives. To build a good relationship the advice is:
- Establish a working alliance with the coachee. In the early conversations it is wise to remember that the relationship unfolds in a specific context, not in a vacuum. Allow room for both parties’ characteristics and peculiarities and expect some amount of fumbling. Use the time to listen and learn about the coachee’ verbal and non-verbal cues.
- Help the coachee imagine a desired future. Identify the coachee’ thoughts by asking questions around purpose and desired objectives such as ‘What would they like to see in the future? What would you like the outcome of our work together to be? Feel free to explore personal history, e.g., education, relationships, or career trajectory, but stay away from topics that may be sensitive such as the person’s childhood. It is up to the coachee to decide if and when certain themes become part of the coaching relationship.
- Don’t go too fast, don’t go too slow. Be mindful progress can stall if a coachee is pressed to deal with issues that they are not yet ready to face. Coachees need to feel safe, accepted, and respected. The last thing coachees want is to be lectured to and feel controlled. The coach must be aware of what does and doesn’t work – and adjust accordingly.
- Carefully move into more difficult areas. After a working alliance has been established, it’s time to carefully start to challenge. Make the coachee curious. One way to do so is by encouraging the coachee to share details about their stressors, frustrations and dissatisfaction. This can help in formulating the goal component of the relationship.
While keeping these things in mind, it is useful to enquire how the client feels about the working relationship. Do they feel safe, heard, taken seriously and cared for? Do they still hope for – and even expect – success?
Feel comfortable to stay in the difficult conversations
It is generally understood that an effective coach should be positive, enthusiastic, supportive, trusting, respectful, and much more. However, coaches often work in difficult areas of personal development, and a good coach must also have the ability – and courage – to move into more difficult areas of discussion to challenge assumptions and embed change.
The key is knowing when to provide support and when to provide challenge. This links into a theory called the ZOUD (Zone of Uncomfortable Debate), the ability to realise when a coachee is under too much pressure and the tone of the conversation needs to change to allow them to reset, before going back to that subject and applying more challenge.
In this zone tension is increased and sometimes due to fear the pressure will permanently damage the relationship, the coach moves the conversation back out to the zone of comfortable debate. The tension is diffused, and the rapport is maintained, but the problem is not resolved. A more constructive strategy is for the coach to stick with the tension and accept it as positive.
Action Point
Imagine the first conversations you have with a new coachee. What would be your approach to building trust and empathy? Consider what questions you would ask and what a successful outcome would be?