What Might A Coaching Contract Look Like?

7 Alternative Ways How We Can Coach You

We can offer 7 different approaches to facilitating your learning, performance and development. Often a coaching contract involves one or a combination of the following.

1. Face to Face – 1:1

We meet either at your place of work or our offices next to the Guildhall in the City of London. Sometimes we will meet in some other public place such as a hotel lobby or an airport lounge depending on the time available, the sensitivity of the issues involved, and your own schedule needs.

2. Telephone

Face to face coaching is often supported by regular telephone contact. The telephone coaching is often helpful in supporting a client when the are carrying out challenging actions agreed in face to face sessions. Telephone coaching is also useful in between face to face sessions to ensure that momentum for change is carried through or because shorter time is available to meet up or schedules simply make it impossible to meet face to face. Telephone coaching is ideal for working at great distances or different countries.

3. Shadowing

Where it is difficult for a client to fully understand their impact on others shadowing is a powerful way of gaining first hand awareness and feedback for the client. It involves actually spending a period of time with client in their workplace, during a meeting or as part of the audience of a crucial presentation. ‘Shadowing’ provides the crucial ‘mirroring’ that is so effective in realising change. Time is set aside to review the learning from the ‘shadowing’ and use it to achieve the goals agreed at the outset of the coaching.

4. Feedback

While ‘shadowing’ provides a first hand dimension of feedback to the client there are other ways of getting this crucial insight into ones own performance or behaviours. Using psychometric tools such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, using 360 or 180 tools on influencing styles or using the coaching session to design a purpose built feedback form for the client to use to get the specific feedback they need from the specific individuals that they need it from.

5. E-mail

More and more people are using email as a form of threaded conversation. While there may be a time delay between responses it offers the opportunity for a conversation, which if built around an effective model of coaching can produce agreed results.

6. Video

Using video recording of the client involved in live events at work, doing pre-runs of crucial presentations in the coaching session or having conversations with the coach provide a further source of invaluable insight for the client of how they are actually impacting an individual or an audience.

7. Teams

Individuals do not perform in a vacuum. Individual performance is usually influenced by the relationships that surround it. Team coaching offers the opportunity to look at the performance, learning and development of the whole team.

• The need for a health check;
• Coaching the team to achieve result;
• Coaching ‘sick’ or under-performing teams;
• Coaching teams with relationship difficulties which are sapping crucial energy.

(Click for Team Coaching)

Setting up a coaching contract

• All coaching contracts are designed around the needs of the client.
• A contract may be for one or two session on a specific topic.
• A contract may be around six – eight sessions on changing a pattern of behaviour or exploring a more complex performance issue.
• A contract may be longer term, such as 30 hours over a year, with a combination of face-to-face and telephone coaching.