How do you maintain a coaching alliance with executives?

Assessing an executive's readiness before coaching is fundamental. Understanding their motivation, commitment, and openness to change guides your approach. Surveys, interviews, and self-assessments offer insights. Tailoring coaching to their needs maximizes effectiveness. Addressing barriers ensures engagement. This approach aligns coaching strategies, fostering meaningful growth and results.

I agree. My approach is to spend enough time before starting the coaching journey in order to establish trust, rapport, get into why the defined objectives are chosen.

Assessing the readiness can many times be an honest conversation at the beginning of the coaching relationship. Genuine questions pointing to what the executive understands by coaching, what they expect from it, what they are willing / prepared to do, what do they wish to explore and even and very importantly: what's off-limits.

As world's leading experts in Leadership Alliances, we coach executives on how to create an alliance with their employees, stakeholders, their competitors - how to become industry giants and role models by leading the whole ecosystem through a powerful strategic alliance. This starts by creating a leadership alliance together with our clients at the beginning of the coaching journey. We talk about the importance of leaning in 100% into the coaching process and our vision to become an extended member of their leadership team, deeply involved in their business - to make the executive coaching fully integrated into their every day business reality from day one.

One thing I found helpful is to have a structured starting point beyond the formal contract. It can be a simple canvas, a document, a whiteboard when coaching remotely. I usually offer my clients a Miro board where we explore the vision for the coaching and the scope changes that will happen. Yes, frequency, duration, etc. will enter a more formal document signed by the parties after a successful assessment for readiness. But it's not the most important piece of contracting in my experience. It is possible to jump too quickly into "the problem" and not continue the development of a coaching alliance: understanding how the client wants to be challenged, how we will assess progress and setting the stage for trusting relationship.

A coaching contract is more than a formal agreement; it's a pact that the coach and coachee are about to embark on a journey together. It crystallizes the essence of mutual investment. While outlining the tactical - purpose, scope, and roles - it also implicitly carries emotional undertones of trust, commitment, and respect. It serves as an anchoring document in the dynamic seas of coaching. To add depth to your alliance, consider including soft metrics, like communication preferences and signals for recalibration. Remember, a contract isn't set in stone; it's organic, meant to be revisited and revised, mirroring the evolutionary nature of the coaching relationship itself. Like any great story, it unfolds in chapters, each refining the next

I've found helpful to use the client's own language, metaphors, images and the quotes. Few things makes us feel seen and heard than the someone else using our own vocabulary and building on it. The sense of trust can grow stronger as the coach focuses on maintaining presence, not reacting too fast or too strong to any contribution from the coachee. The coach should notice when to push a little to provide the coachee with a sense of challenge and motivation, and when to hold back, as the coachee might just require more introspection and care. As coach and coachee dance together and develop their own rhythm, rapport and trust can grow freely.

An example I use often for systemic approaches is drawing the environment. It's for the benefit of coachee and not necessarily for contextualizing the coach. Drawing bubles or charts to understand the people, interactions and forces at play can work wonderfully for some, while others would be more interested in using formal tools such as their on 360 evaluations or their vision documents. It's helpful to understand and respect that some coachees are more visual, others more attuned to words; also that different situations with the same client will require different skills and tools from your coaching toolbox.

This is a yes, and part. While the coach usually offers their process to guide the client, it's not uncommon and rather helpful to negotiate responsibility from the starts. Yes, the coach can help with accountability. But no, the coach is not responsible for the actual tracking of the progress. A huge part of the client growth comes from the ownership of the transformation, including how to notice and leverage progress. The coach partners. The coach invites. Yet, the coach is not an accountability buddy.

What has made a huge difference in our ability to form a true alliance with our clients is stepping away from a 'per hour' fee model and rather committing to a full coaching journey together. What that allows us to do it, once we have agreed on the journey and the fee, we dive into the work and forget about the 'hours'! We spend time with them, their stakeholders, in their team meetings and do whatever else might be beneficial to their development. It sounds so basic but it has been a game changer in the strategic value we have been able to create for our clients!

To maintain a strong alliance with the executive team sponsoring the coaching, the coach needs to 1. Understand the business and its inherent challenges and accelerators. 2. Understand the KPI of the sponsor and it’s relevance and correlation to individual’s MoS. 3. Aggregate and report engagement metrics. 4. Set clear expectations and do briefings at the right cadence.