How to Run the Perfect Coaching Session

Judith Barton is Director of Coaching at the British School of Coaching and has been coaching and developing senior leaders in government and private sectors for 23 years.

Timekeeping:

• If you have to travel to a venue, ensure that you arrive there in plenty of time so that you can prepare the room and yourself for your coaching practice.  This includes making allowance for travel delays, checking road conditions and/or real-time train departures and arrivals when deciding when to leave your own starting point (home or office).
• If the client is coming to your offices/home go to the room where you will be coaching in plenty of time to prepare the room and yourself.

Materials/resources:

• Ensure that you have ready access to all the materials and resources you may need during your coaching practice, for example flipchart, paper and pens (for scaling, noting down ideas, action points), glasses of water.
• Make sure that chairs are comfortable and positioned so that you and your coachee can see each other clearly without being so close that you risk invading each other’s space.

The paperwork:

• It is good practice to keep the business administration (how much, how and when to send invoices/make payments), of your coaching practice separate from the actual coaching sessions. 
• If you have the benefit of employing a secretary or administrator, it is best to refer all business administration to them and maintain your distance from these matters unless negotiations beyond their competence or role are required. 
• If you have to manage this yourself, try to ensure that these matters are fully agreed in advance of the coaching sessions. 
• All components of Terms and Conditions should be dealt with beforehand, before the coaching proper commences. 
• It makes sense to use PayPal, a debit or credit card rather than cash for payment.

Preparing yourself to coach:

To ensure that you are wholly present for the client, try the following:

• Centre yourself, focus on deep breathing and removing all distractions from your thoughts – this will lead to you asking better questions and being more able to pick up all the nuances of what your coachee is saying. 
• If you have a number of sessions in the day, make sure you eat slow release energy food (porridge, bananas etc.) prior to the session, and only a little caffeine.
• Remove any assumptions about your coachee, their progress since the last session, their personality, their issues. 
• Review and reflect upon any previous coaching sessions, your knowledge and understanding of the coachee. 
• If the client is new to you and, where relevant, find out something about their organisation. 
• Put into the client into the front of your mind and be ready to go into the session, without having to refer to notes from previous sessions. 
• If you are meeting a number of coachees, e.g. for a corporate client, know who you will seeing, and the order in which you expect them to attend. 
• Consider what information you may wish to exchange with client, in order to develop trust, and personal safety 

During the coaching session:

• Ensure that you remain open-minded and suspend judgement so that you are able to really hear what your coachee is saying – verbally and non-verbally.
• Sit with your feet flat on the floor (not cross legged) with an upright posture (not slouching) so that you are physically demonstrating your focus on and interest in your coachee. 
• At the beginning of each session review contract, revisit confidentiality, your code of conduct, and reconfirm the coach’s objectives from the session. 
• Agree with client how many notes you make are to be disposed of or retained – you could offer to give them your notes at the end of the coaching programme.  Good practice is to invite the client to keeps notes of their actions.  This may depend on how the client best learns eg. visually.

After the coaching session:

• Review and reflect on the session – what went well, what really worked, where you could have improved your coaching practice. 
• Maintain proper records with the minimum necessary information to enable you to issue accurate invoices and continue with the next session where you finished the last. 
• Identify and keep a note of any issues you will want to raise with your coaching supervisor. 

Judith is currently running the ILM Level 7 Certificate in Executive Coaching and Mentoring, and the ILM Level 2 Award in Mentoring for Young Learners with the British School of Coaching.  To read more about Bsc's coaching and mentoring courses click here.

Why Run a Coaching Practice?

Judith Barton, Director of Coaching, bsc

To me, running a coaching practice is similar to being in a legal or medical practice.  As a professional coach I am going on a journey with my clients enabling them to delve into their own resources so that they can develop a sense of their own potential and are supported to realise that potential through listening, questioning and challenging.  But in the end it is their own decision – as a coach it is not my place to provide guidance or advice but to draw out from clients their own understanding and enable them to make choices to develop their own careers and futures. 

 

Professional coaches are also practicing – practicing our skills, reviewing and reflecting on how each coaching session progressed and the interactions which took place.  Finally, a coach must create an accurate an accurate baseline. This sets out their strengths and areas for improvement and leads to a personal development plan to be actioned.  Once implemented, this plan is subject to review, reflection and further planning for improvement.  As part of this process, the coach must also recognise and celebrate their strengths and achievements. This leads me to four central tenets of running a coaching practice – which are: self-review supported by supervision, maintaining their skills base; keeping up to date with research and thinking about coaching practice; and ensuring that purchasers of coaching understand the concept of ‘coaching practice’. 

1: Self review supported by supervision is critical.  To be effective, review of practice should be carried out soon after each session is completed.  You will need to find your own balance between being to close to the interaction to be objective; and too far to be able to remember key points.  Self-review on its own however carries risks – that you will become overly self-critical or insufficiently self-aware.  In order to ensure some degree of distance and to avoid getting too drawn into feeling that you have to sort everything out on your own, the input of a supportive, challenging and knowledgeable coaching supervisor is an equally critical element of self-development.  You should choose a supervisor who understands your approach to coaching who is willing and able to be both supportive and challenging to question your assumptions and self-evaluation and provide a platform for continuous improvement of your practice. 

2: Coaches need to Coach – this may sound obvious but coaching is not something you can do once or twice a year whilst maintaining professional standards of competence. I feel that I need to be practicing my coaching skills at least twice per month. Coaching a number of people who have different issues to resolve, different learning styles and different interpersonal skills ensures that I can maintain a variety of coaching skills and the ability to deploy these skills in working with a range in types of client 

3: Keeping up with new thinking in coaching.   As a professional coach I can only provide a ‘state of the art’ coaching experience for clients if I spend time on a regular basis reading, evaluating and, where appropriate, working out how to use new techniques in my coaching practice.  I regularly read a number of journals – Coaching At Work, Edge, Management Today, Harvard Business Review – which keeping me up-to-date with not only coaching theory and practice but also management thinking.  As well as providing some coaching articles, the latter keep me up to date with the issues which may be facing my clients in their professional roles. In addition, I attend relevant conferences and CPD events.  For example, Association for Coaching conferences and Institute of Leadership and Management events can provide useful insights into developing my coaching practice and ensuring that my practice is evidence-based and leading edge. 

4: Purchasers of Coaching need to understand the concept of practice.  For those who purchase coaching, for themselves or members of their leadership or management teams, it is critical that they appreciate and seek out coaches who undertake regular supervision; who maintain their coaching practice, at the appropriate level of seniority, and who can demonstrate that they are up-to-date with the latest thinking and practical skills.  Purchasers have an in-depth understanding of what they are purchasing and what they hope to achieve for both individuals and the organisation.  I will be further sharing my thoughts on ‘Selecting the Right Coach’ in future blogs.

Judith Barton

Director of Coaching

British School of Coaching

"As we come up to our 19^th year, I wanted to share my experiences and thoughts on the practical, the essential and the humorous aspects of my coaching career so far.  I have learnt so much from the coaching successes, challenges and recognition of limitations along the way, as well as from coaching in what I call the ‘cultural cocktail’ of the Middle East."

Judith is currently delivering the ILM Level 7 Certificate in Executive Coaching and Mentoring as well as leading the British School of Coaching Practice.  Read more about this and the other courses BSC are running here.

The Top Four Challenges Workplace Coaches Meet

by Charlotte Randall, CPD Leader 
 Dubai English Speaking School

Who owns the challenge?

It is important when embarking upon workplace coaching to fully explore and understand who owns the challenge when uncovering a particular challenge that is presented in the session.  If the challenge is linked to organisational change that is policy driven, then the coach’s job is to ensure that the client is fully aware that they will not be able to change the outcome of this – it is going to, or is already happening.  The role of the coach is to help the client to explore their own behaviours relating to how they might approach this change process for the benefit of the stakeholders and their professional progression. Connected to this is the coach’s skill in being able to explore patterns of thinking and organisational political awareness in the client, that acknowledges the management pressure from stakeholders to bring about change as a result of business drivers or raising standards at base level.

Workplace matching of client and coach

To prevent matching becoming a barrier to success in work place coaching, time has to be spent to ensure the profile of your coaches is linked closely to the client pen portrait.  It is important to consider the role, personality, backgrounds, relationships and scope of ability within the coaching team; whilst considering the same for the client. The challenge the client is bringing to the session also has to be considered; how this may be linked to organisational culture and potentially, how the conversation may progress to touch the boundaries of the roles and responsibility of the coach or people that they may manage. This is also imperative to remember when avoiding the trap of colluding with the client or moving from empathising to sympathising with them.

Suspending judgement from prior knowledge

The literature states that in order to become an effective coach, a core competency that a coach needs to master is the ability to suspend judgement; something that can be challenging when workplace coaching because of prior knowledge of the client or the organisational culture. When coaching someone in a similar role, or with similar challenges, human nature is such that the coach may become more directive and tell the client of their experiences and how they might solve their issues through your (the coaches) solutions. Questioning may slip into containing hidden instructions such as, could you……what about trying ……… and the coach may start to manipulate the conversation (and relationship) because they have a preconceived idea of the best way to solve this challenge for the client. A workplace coach therefore, must remain professional at all times and refrain from reflecting on their own past experiences and control their urge to offer personal advice.

Operational logistics

Planning for this is crucial from the outset with evaluation, feedback and reflective processes built in at different stages throughout the journey.

An operational agreement should outline:

• What coaching is within your organisational context?

• The coaching model utilised within the organisation

• Contracting (organisational and personal)

• Entry and exit from the programme

• Quality assurance linked to supervision and on-going monitoring and evaluation paperwork

• Key performance indicators linked to return of investment

• Deployment and matching of the client and coach

• Reporting system for conflict

• Health and safety linked to the coaching environment

As the coaching goes live, it is important to pre-empt issues that may arise with releasing both coach and client from their everyday role. It is important to review this regularly to ensure that the coaches have the time built in to move from professional role into coaching role prior to the session commencing. 

Charlotte Randall

CPD Leader

Dubai English Speaking School 

Charlotte is currently leading and promoting the coaching culture at Dubai English Speaking School, supported by the British School of Coaching.  To find out more about DESS click here, or to read about  our coaching courses currently running, take a look at our programme schedule.