Those familiar with the practice of executive coaching would agree that organizations sponsoring coaching, managers of those being coached and the individuals being coached almost always share behavior change as the primary Explicit Outcome of coaching.
While neither empiric or exhaustive, there are five Implicit Outcomes that I have observed arising from executive coaching.
-
Greater awareness of one’s impact versus intent
-
An increase in the client’s intentionality
-
A clear or clearer view of a guiding personal vision
-
A deeper understanding of the importance of a network of relationships
-
A greater appreciation of individual strengths and their contribution to success
Greater Awareness of Impact Versus Intent
One of the coach’s goals is to help clients make productive and conscious choices about how they “show up” with others. This is often accomplished through formal means such as coach-led interviews with stakeholders or formal 360 feedback collection instruments. Clients, in general, are often motivated to receive feedback as a way to understand how they are perceived since getting feedback in most organizations, such as the performance management process, is often of little or limited value.
At the heart of this outcome is self-awareness. In a 2018 Harvard Business Review article, Tasha Eurich points out that most people believe they are self-aware however, only 15% of those she studied met the criteria for being self-aware.¹
While clients may not always declare greater self-awareness a goal for their coaching, and sponsors and managers of clients may not care as long as the desired behavior change occurs, successful coaching engagements often yields a greater degree of awareness of a client’s intent versus her or his impact.
Increased Intentionality
No matter where a coach operates on the continuum of guiding a client’s self-discovery to providing advice or “being more directive with clients, another Implicit Outcome is a heightened sense of intentionality accompanied by a conscious approach to making choices in key situations and interactions. This intentionality is often aided by providing tools and frameworks for delegation, listening or managing a difficult conversation. Most coaches have these tools at the ready and deploy them when the situation requires it. These tools and frameworks can shape new mental models and attendant behaviors that become habitual long after the coaching has ended.
A Clear Personal Vision
Most coaching seeks to identify a future state of being and doing for the client, and to juxtapose that future state with current reality, thus yielding the gaps that need to be closed in order to achieve personal change. The differentiator is the degree to which the future is imagined as a compelling personal vision rather than a set of transactional actions that need to be taken. A personal vision that activates the client’s sense of purpose and self-efficacy is far more likely to sustain the hard work of personal change.²
Coaches guide sponsors, managers and clients to move from a set of presenting or “felt needs”, toward a set of designed objectives that satisfy both organizational and individual expectations.³
The Increased Importance of Relationships and Networks
Very few coaching assignments happen in a vacuum. Multiple stakeholders will have a conscious or unconscious interest in an executive coaching assignment. In today’s organizations, almost no one does their job without some form of interdependence with others.
Often clients realize the importance of relationships and the need to have a well-developed network, but they may slip into the pitfall of viewing relationships and networks as transactional, existing to satisfy a quid pro quo relationship that is the norm in many organizational settings.
Coaches can illuminate the value of developing and maintaining relationships that weather the test of organizational politics and competition. Sometimes, particularly with peer relationships that are often freighted with competition, clients fall into the trap of making temporary or superficial changes only to satisfy the optics for sponsors and bosses. They have trouble accepting or trusting that there is more power in genuine and, as Daniel Goleman has characterized them, “Resonant” relationships.⁴
Coaches can role model the value of relationships nurtured through vulnerability and understanding, something clients may have little experience with given that we still labor under the false belief that we should leave our humanness aside when we enter the work environment.
Greater Appreciation Strengths
Much has been made of the strengths-based approach to coaching and human development emerging from the Positive Psychology movement and made popular by authors and speakers like Marcus Buckingham.⁵ While some clients will have heard of strength-based development, few readily embrace it as a viable way of developing themselves. We all know the cliché of the person who upon receiving their 360-assessment report, skips over the strengths and goes immediately to the development needs section.
Coaches help clients move beyond a passing acceptance or acknowledgement of their strengths and guide them to use their strengths as a means of mitigating their weaknesses. Successful coaching almost always yields a realization of, and hopefully, a lasting internalization of a client’s true and differentiating strengths.
As noted at the outset, even if we are not contracting for these outcomes explicitly, they can be useful guideposts for us as we navigate the unique and nuanced arc of any given client engagement.
Sources:
- What Self-Awareness Really Is (and How to Cultivate It), Tahsa Eurich, Harvard Business Review, January, 2018
- Helping People Change, Richard Boyatzis, Melvin Smith and Ellen Van Oosten, Harvard Business Review Press, 2019
- Becoming an Exceptional Executive Coach, Michael H. Frisch, Robert J. Lee, Karen L. Metzger, Jeremy Robinson, Judy Rosemarin, AMACOM, 2012
- Primal Leadership, Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatizis, Annie McKee, Harvard Business Review Press, 2002
- Now Discover Your Strengths, Marcus Buckingham, Donald O. Clifton, Gallup Press, 2020
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of any other person or entity.
