In order to help a manager notice what expectations he might hold (and no doubt act out) towards a colleague he perceives as under-performing, a coach might ask her client:

• Be honest with yourself: are you sharing information generously with this person, or sometimes withholding it?
• Are you available or unavailable to this colleague when they need your guidance?
• Do you appreciate their work product and encourage their good accomplishments, or are you primed to look for errors and disappointments?
• Do you give them feedback and coaching, or are you withholding your input, leaving them in the dark?
• Is your body language and tone of voice with them open and receptive, or curt, impatient or even punitive?

Erich Fromm (1947) and Elias Porter (1996) use a similar kind of reframing in defining a person’s interpersonal weaknesses as his strengths used inappropriately or in excess. One must first acknowledge that a weakness is also a strength that, under most conditions, produces positive results for us. One must also acknowledge the secondary gains obtained from existing behavior patterns—much as in the case of reframing goals. Thus, rather than attempting to “eliminate a weakness,” we need only modify the extent to which it is being used or the setting in which it is being used. This is a central feature in masterful coaching: focusing on a client’s abilities and helping a client recognize and perhaps create the settings in which these strengths are fully and appropriately deployed.

The CEO of a non-profit, for instance, who is an excellent speaker and socializer, is ineffective in working with troubled members of her local community on a one-on-one basis. Her verbal skills help her in the first situation but not in the second. She is rewarded for being verbally active when working with many people, but not when she is expected to be a quiet and sympathetic listener in attending to complaints of members of her community. She could try to improve her ability to work one-on-one. This would be a first-order change.

A second-order reframing by this administrator could involve a shift in her job assignment. She could assign the responsibility for meeting with individual members of her community to other members of her staff, reserving more of her work with these constituencies to large team gatherings. Rather than focusing on her weaknesses, this administrator is encouraged by her coach to focus on her considerable skills in working with large teams and groups. In recognizing that these skills are distinctive and appropriate in most settings, she may become less nervous about being quiet enough in the one-on-one setting, and with the reduction in anxiety and in the frequency with which she works with other people she might eventually feel less need to be highly verbal. It is at the moment when a person does not have to feel threatened that she is most inclined to open up to alternative behaviors.