How a Coaching Partnership Works

If you are new to coaching, you might be wondering how it works and what actually happens. If you are looking for individual coaching you’ll have an agreed number of sessions that help you achieve your aims described in more detail below. If you lead a team and are wanting to ensure your team develops to be truly high performing, adding value to stakeholders, then the process will start between you and the coach and expand to the whole team as described below.

Individual Coaching:

  1. A coaching partnership normally involves a number of face to face or virtual sessions (Zoom, Skype, other) between coach and client of between 30 minutes and 2 hours.
  2. Typically the first session will be longer (1.5-2 hours) and subsequent sessions may vary depending on whether the client wants some time to think and explore a number of focus areas or to power time on one particular area.
  3. The coach and client explore what the client hopes to achieve from the coaching in the first session.
  4. During sessions, the coach helps the client to think about their coaching focus area of interest and to gain new insights, decide on courses of action, develop their thinking and mindset and prepare for action post session.
  5. Between sessions, the client normally takes some action which is then reported back at the next session in terms of how things went and what was learned.

Team Coaching:

  1. A team coaching partnership involves a number of face to face or virtual sessions (Zoom, Skype, other) between coach and team.
  2. Typically, the partnership will begin with an exploration between coach and team leader to scope out the nature of the partnership.
  3. Once a high level understanding of the scope of the partnership is agreed, the coach and team contract on ways of working for the partnership.
  4. From there, a diagnostic approach is often taken to support the team to understand their current state with respect to their standing with stakeholders, value created, effectiveness, culture and team dynamic, and performance.
  5. The coach is able to support the team to learn and grow in the moment through observation of meetings, feedback, and providing interventions to support the team’s growth and learning.