The anatomy of my typical coaching engagement

Context

COVID-19 has forced the issue. All my teams are now distributed because everyone’s working from home. As a coach, this has given me a few things to think about. Mostly about how I need to rethink many of my coaching strategies, as they mostly take advantage of the rich information flow that’s tacitly a part of face to face.

As part of my attempts at designing new coaching strategies that could be used with entirely remote teams, I’ve been going back to basics. This post is about the basic structure that my coaching engagements end up being designed around.

Structure

Broadly speaking, I’ve found that all my coaching boils down to one of two categories of topics – known unknowns and unknown unknowns. My coaching engagements usually have two strands running, one for each of these categories. They have different cadences and topics from the “unknown unknown strand” can make their way over into the “known unknown strand”. I’ve not yet seen a topic move in the other direction. Please read The Structure of a Coaching Intervention for a more accurate view of the content I cover when I coach.

Known unknowns are relatively straightforward. This is closer to training, or facilitated learning. Both coachee and I are clear about what knowledge is needed, and we can usually rely on accurate insights from the coachee about their levels of expertise and whether or not it is increasing. I usually end up producing a catalogue of concepts and lesson topics, and my coachee orders them in a list. I suggest changes to the ordering only if I feel there’s a more consumable flow of content (or some pre-requisites). This also has the handy side effect of demonstrating how a delivery team and a product owner can work together to collectively order a backlog.

Unknown unknowns are much harder (especially if the gaps are deep ones such as culture or values & beliefs). Some unknown unknowns can be converted into known unknowns with identification (as there’s a degree of unconscious knowledge in the coachee). Maintaining a general principle of doing no harm, I usually end up doing something along these lines

1. Observe the natural state
2. Form a hypothesis
3. Run an experiment to test
4. If proven, identify “treatment” options
5. At some point, bring the coachee up-to speed with what’s happened
6. Together with the coachee, agree the treatment option
7. Design the treatment plan
8. Implement, measure effect, choose to keep or roll back
9. Restart the loop.

Step 1 cannot be rushed, otherwise my biases play too big a part. In step 8, I’ve only ever had to rollback once in my career, otherwise I’d never have even considered it an option.

Remote Execution

For the known unknown category of topics, being remote poses no fundamental problems, mostly logistical challenges and a greater noise-to-signal ratio in the communication between my coachee and I. It also adds delay to the building of rapport, but that is less crucial when both parties know exactly what needs to be learned, as the coachee can also attempt to infer credibility by their perception of the quality of my coaching materials (legitimately or not is beside the point).

Being remote adds a lot of complexity to my structure – specifically the first step (but none of the steps gets away unaffected). I’ll write up how I approach this later and link it.