Using the Trojan Horse strategy to provide more value to executive coaching clients

This article will show you a psychological secret to succeeding as an executive, leadership, or business coach. Let's call it the Trojan Horse strategy. I don't know that the metaphor is perfect, but it has been helpful to me as I have grown my practice.

To get at this secret, it's important to review how coaches and other professionals earn the right to become trusted advisors to clients. You can't post on your website that you are a trusted advisor, even though some misinformed coaches do exactly that. You have to earn this distinction from each and every client. It takes time. The client tells you when you have achieved this status with them. You don't get to declare it when you feel like it, or as a marketing ploy.

The first step to becoming a trusted advisor is to get your foot in the door. You get your foot in the door by being credible enough to show that you can help them solve a pressing problem that they are willing to discuss with you. Credibility comes with your track record, reputation, and ability to ask great questions to help the client see that you can bring value. If you aren't credible yet, then that's the subject of a different article.

Once you get hired and provide value, trust goes up exponentially between you and the client. They know they can rely on you. They feel more comfortable with you. It is very likely that they are now more willing to open up to you about more serious issues where you can also contribute. It's an upward spiral from there: The more value you provide, the more trust goes up, until you become part of the client's circle of trusted advisors.

A mistake many coaches make is that they want to jump ahead a few steps with prospects and clients. They want clients to open up right away and share problems that make them feel too vulnerable for the current state of the relationship. They use scary (and vague. at least to the prospective client) buzzwords like: transformation, emotional intelligence, awareness, mindfulness, authenticity, and blind spots. Worse, today we see a new group of coaches coming out with words that scare the heck out of most leaders, and cause them to feel like they are being judged as morally flawed, words like: microaggression, privilege, and unconscious bias. I don't know about you, but I don't want to hire anyone who accuses me of being associated with any of those things, not when others can help me get better as a leader with more neutral approaches.

It is therefore logical that, when clients hear you use words like the ones in the above paragraph, and they don't have a relationship with you yet, they back away real fast. They feel like you are judging them (and many coaches seem to be doing just that) or asking them to open up more than they are ready to open up to a relative stranger. You haven't earned their trust yet, you haven't given them the security they need to be more vulnerable with you, and if you start pitching theories or buzzwords that make them feel uncomfortable, you are going to lose them.

This gets to the Trojan Horse strategy. My clients frequently open up to me about sensitive issues. But it takes time to get there. To reach this point, I don't impose all the buzzwords that you hear among coaches today, because those are designed to judge, implicate, and treat clients like they are wrong, flawed, or ignorant.

Instead, I listen, ask questions, and reflect back what the client is saying - using their own language. I don't add anything.

Because it takes time to earn trust, the first engagement I work on with a client is usually something that they feel safe disclosing. It's usually more of a left-brained issue. It often involves a them or an it: a team that's not working, a strategy that needs to be developed, a change initiative that is stuck, a new role where the leader needs a sounding board. In addition, the more pressing and urgent, the more likely I am to get hired.

I listen to the client's description of the problem, find out what it is costing them and the value of addressing it, and I don't add anything. I definitely don't try to make them feel more vulnerable than they already do, and there is no way I am going to make a client feel like they are somehow defective or -- as many social justice warrior coaches are doing now -- suggest that they are on the wrong side of history.

Often we start small, with a single six-month engagement, an data-driven assessment, or a team retreat. Keeping it simple makes a big difference if you want to get your foot in the door.

That's the Trojan Horse, the way to get in.

Once you get your foot in the door with a first engagement, it usually doesn't take long from there to demonstrate value. That causes trust to go up. That encourages the client to open up and be more willing to be vulnerable about what's really going on. From there, the relationship can evolve and, if I continue to be a good coach, I can reach that trusted advisor status.

So...The Trojan Horse in this metaphor is some kind of logical, or safe issue that a client is willing to discuss. The army inside the legendary Horse refers to what happens next, once you have established trust with the client. Now they are willing to open up to you about other issues. They open up to me about their fears, insecurities, career aspirations, and family matters.

Start small. Start safe. Build up from there, until you are invited into their inner circle. That's the Trojan Horse strategy.

Now, some might say: Isn't this manipulative? No, it's not. I'm just listening and coaching the client through the buying process. They tell me where they want to go and how they want my support. All I am doing is discussing exactly the issue that the client is willing to bring up at the time, and helping them with that. In this sense, the Trojan Horse metaphor has some limitations, because obviously I'm not an army on the attack.

Even with the limits of the metaphor, I hope you find this way of thinking about how to build long-term client relationships to be valuable. If you find that you aren't getting clients to hire you initially, perhaps you are forcing or adding too much of your own agenda to the conversation. Maybe you are asking the client to be more vulnerable than they want to be. Back off, listen, and find the value the client wants to receive -- not the value you want to deliver.

Best of success!