Establishing the coaching contract

The coaching contract is the agreement that you have with the stakeholders. Very often this will be in writing.

Whether you are an in-house coach, or you have been commissioned as an external provider, some ethical issues may come up for you. Who are you responsible to? At one level your main responsibility is to the coachee; you will be working with the coachee on a one-to-one basis, you will be gaining his or her trust and potentially sharing confidences. On another level, when asked to coach by a third person you are in effect being contracted to complete a task by that person and therefore you are accountable to him or her. There may be things that you are told by the third party, or which you are aware of because of your role within the organization, that you cannot pass on to the coachee . You will need to decide what to do, probably on each occasion, but with consideration to your own values, the organizational culture/needs and the precise nature of your relationship with both coachee and third party.

These following areas would be included in a coaching contract.

Agreeing objectives

An important issue is whose objectives you will be working to. Regardless of the briefing that you receive from the third party, you will still complete all the stages of the coaching process, including analysing the coaching need and setting objectives for the programme with the coachee. Potentially, therefore, there may be some conflict or differences between what the coachee wants to achieve and what the line manager thinks the coachee should achieve. Your role is to negotiate, and perhaps mediate , between coachee and line manager until all three of you can agree on a set of objectives for the coaching programme. This sounds easy, but it could take a long time, involve a number of meetings and may even result in the cancellation of the coaching altogether! The coachee must completely buy into the coaching objectives for the process to be successful.

Feedback

The contract should establish what feedback the third party will receive. Experience suggests that line managers and other stakeholders will want feedback on how the coachee is doing. You have a responsibility to provide

feedback to them; the issue is what type of feedback you will give and how much detail you will go into. This is part of your initial negotiations and all parties should agree before the coaching programme begins. The coachee must be made aware of what feedback you have promised to give to whom. One option in dealing with this situation is to encourage the coachee to give the feedback; this could be part of the learning process for the coachee and is particularly important if the third party is the line manager as the coachee should be discussing his or her progress with the line manager. There will be times when the third party still wants you to give him or her feedback; at the end of each coaching session, agree with the coachee what you will each report back on.

Support for the coachee

What support is the coachee going to get back in the workplace, both during and after the coaching programme? It is important that as the coachee makes changes in behaviour and performance, he or she is given positive

encouragement and reinforcement. Equally if the coachee is focusing on specific jobs or tasks , he or she should be given the opportunity to continue to carry them out during and after the coaching. Some changes are difficult to make, especially if they concern making changes about ourselves or jobs that we have done for a long time; this change process can be helped or hindered by the way the people around us react to it. Identify the support available for the coachee whilst talking to the person who initiated the coaching, and be prepared to pass this information on to the coachee.

In summary, if a third party approaches you to provide coaching, take the following steps:

• Meet with the third party to discuss what he or she thinks are the needs, how the needs were identified and what the coachee has been told about the needs and the process to address them. This is an opportunity to find out what the third party is expecting from you and what he or she is expecting to see as a result of the coaching.

• Clarify the coaching process with the third party. Even when a manager has asked for coaching, it may be that that person doesn t really know what he or she is asking for.

• Clarify principles and ground rules for the third party s involvement in the coaching process. This includes discussing the type and content of any feedback that you will be providing for him or her.

• Discuss how the third party can support this process by creating an environment in which the coachee will feel able to change and implement his or her learning. This includes giving personal support to the individual as well as providing the opportunity for the coachee to practise “ in some cases that might mean reallocating some of the coachee s tasks to other people.

• Summarize this in the coaching contract, in writing if appropriate.