Sixty Six Leadership Coaching

A coaching relationship can feel productive, honest and genuinely useful, and still be missing something critical. If the only truth being examined is the one constructed inside the room, you might be working with a very incomplete picture.

I once had a conversation with an associate coach that stopped me in my tracks. We were both working on the same leadership programme, different clients, and in passing, something came to light. His client was experiencing a significant negative impact from my client’s behaviour. My client had never once mentioned it. As far as our coaching conversations were concerned, that whole dimension of his reality simply didn’t exist.

It wasn’t dishonesty on his part. It was something more subtle and, in some ways, more interesting. We had built a strong, safe relationship. He brought real depth to our sessions. And precisely because the environment felt so open, neither of us had noticed that openness had a boundary; it only extended to the version of his world that he chose to bring into the room.

The problem with a well-constructed coaching relationship

There’s a concept in coaching that I find both useful and slightly dangerous: the idea that meaning is co-created between coach and client. What gets named, explored and understood in a coaching conversation is shaped by both people in it. That’s part of what makes coaching feel different to other professional conversations; it’s genuinely collaborative.

But collaboration has a shadow side. If coach and client are co-creating meaning together, they’re also, without necessarily intending to, co-selecting what gets examined and what doesn’t. A coaching relationship with no external reference points can quietly become its own closed system. Safe, coherent, and only partially true.

I’ve seen this play out in my own practice. I’ve sat with clients in sessions that felt rich and productive, and later realised that the picture we were working with had significant gaps; gaps that only became visible when some piece of outside reality broke through. Feedback from a stakeholder. A 360 result. A comment from a colleague. Suddenly the story we’d been developing together looked different.

What this means for how coaching should be set up

I don’t think this is a reason to distrust the coaching relationship; quite the opposite. The relationship is what makes those conversations possible in the first place. But it does mean that the relationship, on its own, isn’t enough.

The most effective coaching I’ve been part of, on either side of the conversation, has always had some mechanism for bringing the outside world in. Structured stakeholder feedback. Explicit conversation about how a client is landing with their peers. A deliberate question about what perspectives might be absent from the room. These aren’t add-ons. They’re part of what keeps the coaching grounded in something real.

If your coaching exists only between you and your coach, it’s worth asking: what might be true about your impact on others that neither of you can currently see? The answer to that question is probably where some of the most useful work is waiting.