Executive Coaching with
Backbone and Heart
A Systems Approach to Engaging Leaders with Their Challenges

Excerpt from
CHAPTER FOUR
The Triangled Coach: Being Effective in the Middle

The occupational hazard of coaching is to step in and "supervise" the leader. This usually occurs because the coach becomes anxious about providing value. Instead, you must continue to focus on being present with your clients so you can withstand their anxiety: not catch it from them, not abandon them in their anxiety, and not be thrown off course when your approach may not look like help to them in the moment. This kind of calm presence in the middle can be enormously useful to leaders seeking answers to their organizational dilemmas.

Here are the actions you can take as a coach to keep you most effective with your clients when you are brought into the middle of the triangle between them and their relationship with their challenge:

  • Identify and avoid Rescue Model attitudes and behaviors.

  • Use the attitudes and behaviors of the Client Responsibility Model -- sustain a belief in your client's resourcefulness.

  • Support the primary relationship between the executive and her challenge, whatever / whoever that challenge may be. With heart and backbone (compassionate and firm) keep turning your client back to facing her own challenge.

This chapter covers the risks of the Rescue Model. It also outlines the opportunities to help the leader and the coach in the dilemmas of self-management that arise during organizational stress.

 
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