Introduction to Coaching Live Session Recording and Follow Up Notes 2023.

After the live session, the session recording and follow-up notes will be posted here.

Session Notes: Agenda

Overview

I call agenda and accountability the “bookends of coaching.” I emphasize a two-part agenda. Many people teach similar approaches to setting a coaching agenda, but many do not. My fanaticism about this technique has emerged over the years as I have supervised coaches and seen how often a one-part agenda leads to mediocre coaching. First, set the theme or topic. Second, get clarity on where the coaching session is headed– what is possible within the session and would feel satisfying to the client.

As you learn to coach, feel free to just focus on these two questions, but do not start the coaching proper—the main portion of the coaching session—until you are clear on the second part.

Additional points:

1. This is more advanced: Sometimes, it takes many questions to clarify that second part of the agenda. Clients often have not thought about this previously, and so need some hand-holding through this process. The act of setting the second part of the agenda can be an intervention itself because it is so clarifying. You can ask a few questions to help the client think through what they might want out of the session.

For example, a client wants to “discuss how to handle my micromanaging supervisor.” When asked what they want out of the session, they say, “I am not exactly sure.” Some strategies for dealing with this include:

• “Take a moment. We have time. Think about what you might want out of our discussion today. What might be most helpful?”
• “What is your instinct? What does your intuition tell you would be helpful?”
• “If you were able to address this issue adequately, what would you have? How could we use this session to step toward that?”

2. At the PCC and MCC level of coaching, there is an expectation that coaches take more time. I have spent ten or occasionally 15 minutes setting the agenda. The extra time is needed because more exploration goes into the agenda. These are more typical questions for more experienced coaches:

• What would you like to be coached on? (part one of the agenda)
• What about this is important to you? (clarifying to help set up part two)
• As we coach on this topic, what themes do you anticipate we will address? (clarifying to help set up part two)
• What would you have at the end of our time together that would make this a satisfying session? (part two of the agenda)
• How will we know that we have achieved that? (establishing a clear measure of part two of the agenda)

3. Sometimes, the outcome of the agenda (the second part) is abstract, such as a client who wants increased satisfaction, confidence, or clarity. When this is the case, using a 1-10 scale to make the abstract concrete can be helpful.

4. Please refer to the agenda handout. It lists ten common complications that can occur in agenda-setting. This should be a reminder that coaching is easy to learn, but hard to master. A good agenda is crucial but can also be trickier than you might expect. The recordings of the coaches setting agendas should also help you better understand this skill.

5. It is important that it is the client who articulates what the agenda is. I typically check the agenda with the client so that I know we both agree, and then make a clear demarcation that the coaching is beginning.

6. Where possible, I try to make my first question specifically about the coaching outcome that the client has requested. For example, if the client’s agenda is “to get three ideas of how they could be a better manager,” you might start by asking, “What’s one idea you have?” I do not always do this, but I can be helpful.

Fun Fact!

 In 2020 and 2021, I experimented with just asking the second part of the agenda. Instead of asking my clients what they wanted to be coached on, I simply asked, “What would you like to take away from this coaching session?” I thought it had the potential to streamline the coaching session (I am always looking for ways to create really deep and effective 15-minute sessions). It did not work as I hoped. Consistently, the clients would say, “Well, I should give you some background on what I want to talk about,” and then would say a bunch of stuff about the first aspect of the agenda (theme/topic) and then I would have to repeat my question about the second part of the agenda. It was interesting to experiment with, but it didn’t work out, so I abandoned it and returned to the classic approach. 

Session Notes: Accountability

A Caveat

Let me preface these notes by saying that this is just my opinion and not some widely accepted or standardized approach to coaching. My goal is to encourage you to expand your thinking about accountability and—ultimately- to arrive at your own conclusions about the topic.

Overview

There are three distinct ways you can think of accountability in coaching:

1. Classic Accountability. It is traditional to think of accountability as holding someone else responsible for their promises or actions. An example of this is ensuring that a client follows through with their stated goal of going to the gym three times during the week. In coaching, the classic questions that go with this are A) What will you do, B) When will you do it, and C) How will I know? Here are some ideas that you might find worth considering regarding this approach to accountability in coaching
2. Do you, the coach, need to be part of the story? Sometimes, coaches and clients assume that the coach is the most natural accountability partner and that this is one of the primary purposes of the coach. I am not so sure. First, when the coach asks, “What support, if any, do you need?” it empowers the client to choose their own forms of support and accountability (e.g., a best friend, their journal, themselves). Second, the coach must be clear about what their role is. Does the client want the coach to encourage them during the process? To scold them if they fail? To simply bear witness to the process? To explore something?
3. Do you want to create a success-failure dynamic for your client? Engaging in this type of accountability strongly suggests to the client that their actions will be evaluated on a continuum of failure—partial success—success. This might be fine, or at least fine, for some clients.
4. Does your client actually need this? I’ll give you a personal example: if I say I am going to do something, I am probably going to do it or have a very good reason why I change my mind or do not do it. I don’t need an external person looking over my shoulder for most things. If I say I am going to the gym on Monday, I am highly likely to do that unless something unforeseen (illness, emergency, sudden scheduling shift) comes up. I can think of an exception to this, and it is deadlines. I find external deadlines from editors helpful in that they create structure and a schedule in which I can plan my work.
5. Experimentation rather than homework. Although it is common in coaching to talk about “homework,” the tasks a client engages in between sessions are not assigned by the coach. They are created by the client and emerge from the insights and explorations coming out of the session. Further, a huge part of coaching is learning. One definition of coaching is engaging clients in self-directed learned. Framing actions as an experiment avoids the success-failure paradigm and emphasizes learning for the client. Here, you can use a few minutes at the beginning of the subsequent session to inquire about what the client has learned, no matter what they ended up doing.

• The end portion of the session. Sessions typically close with accountability. The session’s conclusion includes several parts and represents a shift from the exploration portion of the session. If the exploration yields insights, the conclusion is about using these insights. You must make certain to leave room for this at the end of the session—perhaps 10 minutes, as a rule of thumb (depending on session length). Common questions—or variations of these questions– in this portion of the session include:

• What learning has emerged from our conversation so far?
• What might you do with these insights going forward?
• When, specifically, are you thinking about doing this?
• What do you expect to happen?
• What are you hoping to get out of this?
• What support, if any, might you need?
• How have we done in terms of the agenda we have set for this session?
• Would it be okay to end here?