Dr. Scott Dust is the Chief Research Officer at Cloverleaf and a Management Professor at the University of Cincinnati.
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There are two prevailing assumptions regarding coaching best practices. First, coaches should focus on gradually and deliberately building trust with coachees. Second, coaches should help coachees to come to their own conclusions. Doing so maximizes emotional and skill-based growth, which then leads to heightened well-being and career success.
Interestingly, these well-vetted best practices do not always align with the realities of the 21st-century work environment. This deliberate, relational-focused approach to coaching requires a key ingredient that is increasingly rare: time.
Perhaps, then, some circumstances require coaches to break out of their traditional approach and instead take a more direct, urgent and performance-focused approach. Along those lines, I outline three situations that research suggests will likely require this counterintuitive approach to coaching.
Career Crisis
Coach-coachee conversations commonly go beyond day-to-day tasks and relationship management and include career-oriented conversations. Although career adjustments tend to be planful and deliberate, coachees regularly find themselves in career crises that necessitate swift decisions.
For example, in some cases, the “Peter principle,” whereby employees are promoted to their level of incompetence, applies. Alternatively, in some cases, coaches have been brought in to help guide coachees because a performance improvement plan and/or a personal development plan has failed. These situations require immediate change. Failure to help coachees make fast and immediate change could be devasting.
Interim Status
Temporary positions are quite common at lower levels of the organization, particularly when there is a short-term need for a highly specialized skill. Over the last decade, however, this phenomenon is also beginning to surface in executive positions. This could include positions like interim CEOs, former executives being brought in as strategic fractional consultants or highly skilled project-based leadership.
These individuals also do not have the luxury of time. They are being brought into the organization to have an immediate impact and typically don’t have much organizational history or context. Additionally, these interim positions will struggle to succeed if they do not immediately signal legitimacy. Such coachees necessitate a more direct, performance-focused approach that doesn’t align with the slow-burn, relational-focused coach-coachee relationship.
Organizational Distress
The traditional coaching model works well when organizations are humming along, making incremental progress while overcoming minor obstacles. But when organizations are in a state of distress, employees must make fast and immediate changes that do not align with the traditional timeline of coaching.
The Covid-19 pandemic, for example, is a perfect representation of an organizational crisis given that it forced employees to adapt and created immense stress and there was no clear or ideal response to the situation. As another example, employees who work in what are called “high-reliability organizations,” wherein failure creates extreme damage (e.g., nuclear power plants, oil refineries, air traffic control), also commonly require fast action. Coaches working with coachees in such times of distress don’t have the luxury of time for ensuring high-quality, relational-focused coaching.
A Contingency Approach to Coaching
Trust is the cornerstone of effective coaching, but this takes time. Evidence and experience suggest that having a reciprocal exchange where coaches are curious and engage in active listening is the most successful in terms of coachee growth and development. Indeed, “not providing the answer, only asking the questions” is a common mantra in coaching circles.
But such an approach is unrealistic in all settings. It is the responsibility of the coach, then, to be adaptive and align their coaching with the context in which their coachee is embedded.
In situations where the coachee is having a career crisis, they are in an interim position or the organization is in distress, coaches should take a more balanced approach whereby goal attainment and performance improvement are the primary goals. Then, when appropriate, revert to the trust-based, relational approaches whereby knowledge gain and emotional fulfillment are instrumental processes that eventually—over longer periods of time—facilitate performance.
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