COACHING FORORGANIZATIONALCHANGE 175
An organization may shift from product-driven to bundling services, requir-
ing a transformational change in systems, skills, and strategy. Coaching for
transformations involves helping people to reconceive themselves, their roles,
or their organizations in a whole new way.
To be a successful change coach, I think it’s less important to have a per-
sonal theory about change than it is to be able to recognize and embrace a good
one. It also helps, I believe, to have an understanding of power and how power
does or does not drive change. A coach needs to be adaptive and f lexible in
order to understand where the client is going and the uniqueness of his or her
situation. Certainly, the ability to provide nonjudgmental listening goes a long
way. It may be an old counseling technique, but it’s amazing how many people
in senior levels simply need to talk and be heard by someone without an agenda.
So much of a successful coaching relationship is based on chemistry and
trust, and how quickly that can be established. The coach needs the capacity to
get on the individual’s wave length, to understand their business drivers, to in-
tuit their culture, and to really see who they are. To do so, the coach need to
cut through all the trappings. This takes a certain amount of personal clarity
and self-awareness. I think senior executives can smell caution, ambivalence, or
confusion in a coach and can sense how grounded he or she is as a way of eval-
uating how the coach can help ground the client in turn. A coach also needs a
certain sense of detachment. As someone who follows Buddhist principles, I re-
ally believe that detachment is critical in helping people understand how their
own attachments create suffering and pain, particularly during change.
My own coaching journey has involved a number of stages. I started out
as an academic, then went on to business, then went back to academics and
moved on to consulting. Much of my philosophy and point of view is based
on having lived and worked in different systems, experiences that have
helped me a great deal. I think it’s important to always consider carefully
who the client actually is in any coaching engagement. When I was in grad-
uate school many years ago, I studied with Jack Sher wood. His advice to me
was to “remember that the client is always the system.” Although that may
be easier said than done, I try to think in those terms when I enter into a
coaching relationship. Coaching does not begin or end with the person you
are coaching. The client may not be the person you are working with di-
rectly but may in fact, include the direct reports, the person paying the bill,
the shareholders, or the organization itself. Sometimes, these interests are
contradictor y, and a good coach needs to consciously sort through his or her
loyalties. I don’t have a rigid set of rules in this regard, but I do think it’s
important to ref lect on the question if only to realize that the change you
are working toward may be viewed differently, depending on the stake-
holder group.