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Leader as Coach: Establishing the Coaching Agreement/ Contracting

contractingIn this series about coaching competencies, we move to establishing the coaching agreement, or in one word, contracting.

If you add contracting to your conversations, those conversations are much more likely to be transformational, as they will be focused rather than meandering.

There are three aspects to contracting:

  1. The Big C contracting before the coaching begins
  2. The small c contracting at the beginning of each coaching “session” (though session makes it sound like it has to be an hour off in a room away from the work, when in fact, it can be as short as a 5 minute corridor conversation).
  3. Recontracting part way through a programme of coaching or a session

Whichever one we are focused on, I developed this model called CONTRACT

It stands for:

Check in What is important for us to focus on today?
Only if they wish to talk about their progress since last time, continue with…
What are you learning about yourself since our last session?
I’d like to acknowledge your…
Objective           What would be useful to think about today?
Necessity What is important or meaningful to you about this?
Time What is your specific question for today’s X minutes?
Realisation How will you know this conversation has been useful for you by the time we finish?
Agenda What do we need to address or resolve here today to get us to that measure of success?
Co-creation How can we partner to achieve that?
What level of support and challenge do you need to think afresh on this question?
May I have your permission to interrupt in service of your new thinking?
Their agenda Where would it be most useful to start?

You can see how that model works for both the Big C and small c contracts.

We may need to recontract in the midst of a programme of coaching, to be sure that the thinker is moving towards the outcomes they said they wanted; or that they are consciously choosing new outcomes.  And we may need to recontract in the midst of a session, if the thinker seems to be talking about something different from their outcome for the session, to check that they are making a conscious choice about that.  So we would come back to CONTRACT again.

Try it out in your next conversation, in the order above.  There is method to this order, especially talking time AFTER subject, so they are not limited in their thinking at the start of the conversation, but do focus down like a funnel effect on the piece that is most important to tackle first; and ending with where shall we start, so that the agenda remains in their hands, and is not steered by you – one real differentiator of coaching, which is non-directive.

Let me know how you get on.

 

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