What to expect from coaching?
Defining coaching outcomes is beneficial, even though they will very likely evolve along the way.
Here’s how I think about coaching outcomes. It’s a question that all clients ask themselves before starting to work with a coach, especially given that it’s an expensive endeavour. All coaches also have some idea of what value they are creating. Doing the work without knowing you’re helping clients would be unethical.
Let’s start with the definition of coaching. There isn’t just one “right” definition, but this one from the International Coaching Federation (ICF) captures the essence of coaching quite well.
ICF defines coaching as partnering with clients in a thought-provoking and creative process that inspires them to maximize their personal and professional potential. The process of coaching often unlocks previously untapped sources of imagination, productivity and leadership.
Two things stand out here. First, coaching is described primarily as “partnering” and a “process” instead of an outcome. Second, the outcomes (maximising potential and unlocking untapped sources) are described in an impossible-to-measure way.
Yet coaches and their clients know that coaching leads to tangible results. However, these results are very different for different clients and are hard to define in advance, even for a specific client.
The reason the results are different for different clients is simple. When we unlock “previously untapped sources of imagination”, we will imagine and do different things.
However, the reason why they are hard to define for a specific client is more interesting. Good coaching results in a transformation of some kind, where the client starts to look at their situation or themselves differently and, as a result, sees, feels and does new things. These new perspectives are not visible to the client at the start. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be much of a transformation.
Sometimes, a coach might have a hunch of the work's trajectory before it becomes evident to the client. But my sense is that such a hunch would be best held lightly by the coach, if not ignored altogether.
The reason is that if a coach formulates a hypothesis about where the work “should” be going, it likely won’t be going in some other direction, which might not be apparent to either the coach or the client. It would limit the potential of coaching.
So, to do good work, a coach needs to be quite open about where the work is taking them and their client. This is how I understand the “thought-provoking and creative” process the ICF definition refers to.
This creates a contradiction. The more open and creative the coaching process is, the harder it is to predict where it’ll land the client. Likewise, the more the client and the coach focus on some specific outcome, the less open and creative the process will be.
This is not to say that defining outcomes doesn’t matter. It is beneficial to have a sense of direction in each session and overall in a coaching engagement. This creates a structure that gives work direction, but it’s equally important to hold this structure lightly to allow something more meaningful or essential to emerge.
So, what does it mean for clients considering working with a coach? First, the fit with a coach matters more than the outcomes you’re looking for at the start of the engagement. A coach with whom you have a good level of trust and rapport and that hard-to-define “chemistry” will likely help you go further than someone equally qualified who isn’t a good fit for you.
Second, defining what you would like to get out of coaching work matters. However, defining it together with the coach and reflecting on why it matters is more important than the goal itself. Whatever the initial intention, it’s a good idea to hold it lightly, allowing the creative process of coaching to unfold.
After all, when I think about some of the most productive coaching relationships I had, the clients' descriptions of what they got out of coaching at the end are usually quite different from what they said they were looking for when we started working together.
The dots connect but only looking backwards.