Note: this follows on from a previous article: Is It Ever Right for Developmental Coaches to Give Advice?
Let’s say you’re an enthusiastic adherent to the non-directive approach to coaching, and you’ve tamed your inner ‘Fixing Reflex’, so you never offer advice to your coaching client gratuitously. That still leaves you with a decision about what to do if your client asks you for advice.
A lot depends on the reason why your client is asking. Let’s consider three possible scenarios, which could also coexist in different proportions.
The first might be that the client is looking to you for approval. They may have ideas of their own, but they are not going to expose them to your judgement (as they see it) without finding out the direction of your thoughts first.
Let’s be clear. If the client is dependent on you, especially if the interactions are what Transactional Analysis would describe as ‘parent-child’, that may be a great business model for an unscrupulous coach (because the client keeps coming back for session after session), but it’s not a context that supports developmental coaching. It’s not our role to judge the client’s choices, as they know more about their own situation than we can ever do, and our aim should always be to help them develop to the point where they don’t need us any longer – or if they do, it’s because they’ve raised their game and are taking on more ambitious challenges.
The standard advice from experts on what to do when the coaching relationship is one of dependency – setting boundaries, preframing what the roles of coach and coachee should be before the coaching relationship starts, asking questions that encourage the coachee to find their own resources and think for themselves, sharing tools and resources that will help them to help themselves – is all valid. In addition, we would expect that the coaching relationship would be less likely to fall into the dependency trap with appreciative coaching than with some other approaches, because asking appreciative questions that help the coachee to remember their successes, what works for them, and what is important to them, tends to increase their sense of self-efficacy and so helps them to feel less dependent.
Another reason that a coaching client could look to you for advice is that they feel they don’t yet know enough about what they are doing to make good decisions based on their own experience. A very common, and quite functional, pattern when someone starts a new job is that their frame of reference for making decisions is largely external; they look for approval or advice from outside themselves until they’ve developed enough experience in the role to rely on their own internal standards. As they accumulate reference experiences, their frame of reference gradually moves inwards.
You could gain an idea of where the client is on this ‘internal/external frame of reference’ spectrum by asking this question (which I’ve taken from Shelle Rose Charvet’s very useful book Words That Change Minds: The 14 Patterns for Mastering the Language of Influence):
“How do you know when you’re doing a good job?”
The answers you get will range from “I just know” (strongly internally referenced) to “I don’t know unless my boss tells me” (strongly externally referenced). Reference to objective results or meeting standards would be somewhere in the middle, as would checking both internal and external sources: “I can generally tell, plus the feedback I get from customers backs it up.”
Because the human brain usually gives more weight to negatives than positives, many people will tend to forget their successes and discount their strengths, instead focusing more on their failures and weaknesses. One way to help them gain confidence, and move to where they ideally should be on the ‘internal/external frame of reference’ spectrum, is to ask appreciative questions about their best experiences and greatest successes, following up with supplementary questions about what makes those experiences significant to them (which helps them reconnect with their motivating values), and the conditions that were present that enabled those good experiences to happen, which helps them identify the factors that help them perform at their best.
One more possibility is that consulting other people for their advice is part of the coachee’s preferred ‘strategy’ for making decisions. This is a valid strategy in principle, as long as this is not a substitute for the work of reasoning through their own decisions (thinking is hard work, after all, so people are often motivated to try and avoid it if they can), and as long as they are asking the right people.
If you have a client like this, you can ask questions to help them to optimise their strategy, make it more likely that they are asking the right people for advice (i.e. not you), and perhaps build their confidence in their own decision-making and problem solving skills.
“Who is a good person to ask about this?”
“What makes them a good person to ask?”
Or perhaps: “How do you decide who is a good person to ask?”
“How do you know when to ask for advice?” If they are in the habit of asking for advice on autopilot whenever they have to solve a problem or make a decision, this question might make them more aware of that behaviour and more able to distinguish between the cases where asking for advice is useful, and the times when they can trust their own judgement.
I hope that this consideration of the reasons your coaching clients might be asking for advice gives you a few more options for when it happens. Remember that, if you’ve previously been asking appreciative questions, that will build the client’s confidence and self-efficacy by helping them recall reference experiences of success. Follow-up questions along the lines of “What’s important to you about this experience?” help them connect to their personal values; research into ‘values affirmation’ (identifying and reflecting on values that the individual finds personally meaningful) shows it to make people more confident and effective, and to improve learning performance. Consequently, clients will feel less compelled to ask advice and more able to find the answers within themselves.
As a coach, it’s up to you how much advice you give, or whether you give any at all. The key thing is that you are aware of when you are stepping out of non-directive coaching to do it – and, ideally, that you step back into non-directive mode as soon as you reasonably can.
What do you do if your coaching client asks you for advice?
If you want to learn the practical how-tos of using Appreciative Inquiry to coach teams and small groups (with plenty of tips to scale up to larger groups, or down to one-to-one coaching), join the Practical Appreciative Inquiry facilitator training starting soon!
