Relationship or method? The best coaching happens in between

A few years ago I worked with a senior leader who needed a lot of room to think out loud. Our sessions were some of the best in-the-moment coaching conversations I’d had. I’m no longer sure they were as useful to him as I’d hoped.

Research puts the coaching relationship itself at something like 30% of the outcome, which suggests trust and rapport are doing a good deal of the work regardless of what model the coach brings into the room.

And yet most coaches have sat through sessions where the rapport was excellent and the progress wasn’t; where the client felt heard and safe and still, underneath it, stuck.

When the relationship isn’t enough

The unconditional regard I brought to those sessions gave him the room he needed. Conversations that would have been cut short anywhere else were allowed to run, and he got to ideas he hadn’t previously been able to put into words.

What I understood later was that I’d built an environment with almost no friction in it. What we made together was coherent and it felt true, but nothing from outside ever tested it, and I had no way of checking his thinking against anything beyond the two of us.

The opposite problem

Apply a framework, however well built, in a relationship where trust is thin, and it tends to produce the answers the model is fishing for rather than what’s actually going on.

I’ve done this myself, moving into structure before a client felt safe. Goals get set, actions get agreed, and none of it sticks, because neither of us had yet created the conditions in which anyone could say anything difficult.

Method without relationship is a questionnaire.

What I try to do now

I try to hold both at once: enough trust that someone will tell me the truth, and enough structure that the truth turns into something they do differently.

A framework that helps someone see the connection between their identity, their behaviours and their outcomes works far better when they trust the person holding it. And warmth becomes more than pleasant company once it’s attached to something that produces change.

Most of the coaching I’m proud of came from getting that mix roughly right. Most of what I’d do differently came from tipping too far one way or the other.