Fundamental Coaching Perspectives

As we specifically review the coaching strategies that could be engaged when working with high potential and high performance clients, it is important first to identify several of the fundamental perspectives that underlie effective coaching. In each case we will identify ways in which these perspectives are tailored for work with these two client populations.

Challenge and Support

First, coaching will be effective if it balances challenge and support. To the extent that the coach challenges the client—by offering penetrating questions, encouraging ambitious goals, or confronting the client’s assumptions, the coach must then also provide support—by offering encouragement, identifying strengths and opportunities (an appreciative perspective), or suggesting resources that the client might engage that can be used to meet the challenge. Nevitt Sanford (1980) suggested that all significant adult learning requires this balancing of challenge and support. In a similar manner, Csikszentmihalyi (1990) indicated that high levels of motivation and performance (what he identifies as a “flow” experience) are inevitably associated with the threshold between anxiety (challenge without support) and boredom (support without challenge). The effective coach demonstrates the capacity for and artful skill of collaboratively identifying what the client recognizes as “challenge” and “support” in relation to the learning agenda.

We propose that levels of both challenge and support are distinctive for high potential and high performance clients. High potential and high performance clients are likely to bring their own challenge to the coaching session. Such clients are likely to be perfectionists and workaholics. The coach often assists high potential and high performance clients in finding ways by which to build support that matches the challenge. This often means encouraging these clients to establish better work/life balance, to recognize the potential for “burn out,” and to recognize the need for more external support (doing more delegating, seeking out expert advice from other people, learning how to open up regarding their own personal vulnerabilities). While the troubled employee/client is likely to avoid challenges (yet must take on the challenge of developmental improvement), the high potential and high performance clients are likely to overlook the support that they need to sustain their exceptional or potentially exceptional work. The proclivity towards ignoring the need for support makes the concept of support an “alienated need” that the coach can help these clients identify and embrace as a move in service of their  own development.  Lack of support or the unwillingness to accept support has been a factor in derailment for high potential and high performance clients.  A skillful executive coach can normalize this beneficial need for the high potential and high performance client.

Information, Intentions, and Ideas

A second fundamental perspective concerns the domains in which coaching takes place. At times, the coach and client must focus on issues related to the domain of information. These are the moments when the coach and client become “realistic”—seeking to gain a clear understanding and appreciation of the current situation in which the client finds herself. At other times, the coach and client must operate in the domain of intentions. In this domain, the coach and client become “idealistic”—seeking to gain a clear understanding and appreciation of the situation in which the client would like to find herself. What are the outcomes, the aspirations, the purposes of the client’s work? The third domain is that of ideas—what actions should be taken to move from the current situation (“real” state) to the desired situation (“ideal” state)? An effective coaching engagement is one in which the coach and client move through all three of these domains: information (current situation), intentions (ideal situation), and ideas (strategies for moving from the current to the ideal). We will propose that high potential and high performance clients work in a somewhat different manner than other coaching clients with regard to these three domains.