What Are Coaches Actually Promising Their Clients? The Case for a Promise You Can Keep

Read enough conversations among leadership coaches and facilitators and a question forms that nobody in those threads asks out loud.

What exactly are we promising?

Not what we deliver. What we have told the client will be true at the end that was not true at the beginning.

Quick answer: Most coaching promises are promises about process: sessions, presence, powerful questions, a confidential space, a thinking partner. All of that is real and some of it is excellent. None of it is a promise about the leader's behaviour. When the behaviour does not change, there is nothing to hold the work against, which is precisely why the conversation turns so quickly to culture, follow-up and the coachee's readiness.

What does the standard promise actually say?

Look at what we put in proposals. A number of sessions. A diagnostic or a 360. A safe space. Challenge and support. Accountability. Confidentiality. A thinking partner for a senior leader who has nobody else to think with.

Every one of those is true, and the last matters more than it sounds. Senior leaders are structurally alone, and a good coach is sometimes the only person in their week who is not managing them.

But read the list as a client would. It describes what happens in the room, and says nothing about what happens in the meeting on Thursday when the leader is challenged in front of their team, which is the thing the organisation is paying to change.

That gap is not dishonesty. It is the inherited shape of the profession: we were trained to own the process and to treat the outcome as the client's property, and underneath that sits a sound ethical instinct, which is that the leader is an adult, the change is theirs, and a coach who claims to change people is claiming a kind of control over another person that nobody actually has.

The trouble is that the instinct has quietly expanded until it covers everything, including the part we are responsible for.

Why do the usual explanations let us off the hook?

When the change does not hold, the reasons offered in these discussions are almost always the same four.

• The environment undermined it. Often true. A leader returns to a system that rewards the old behaviour, and new behaviour is fragile before it consolidates. I would go further than most coaches do: when change is slow, the environment wins almost every time.
• The culture was never going to allow it. Sometimes true, and worth saying at contracting rather than at the end.
• There was no follow-up. Usually a design failure in the engagement rather than a client failure.
• The coachee was not ready. Occasionally true, and the easiest of the four to reach for, because it cannot be checked.

Notice what is not on the list.

Not once, in any of those discussions, does anyone ask whether the method they used was capable of reaching what was driving the behaviour. The environment, the culture, the sponsor and the client all get examined. The limits of our own skillset do not.

That is the one item on the list we control.

Is a guarantee the answer?

Not a blanket one, and I would be careful with anyone offering it. A guarantee without a diagnosis is a gamble dressed up as confidence.

But the opposite position has a cost too, and clients feel it before they can name it. A coach who commits to nothing is asking the organisation to carry the whole risk of an intervention the coach designed. It is a large part of why coaching gets bought as a benefit for individuals rather than as a solution to a problem the business can price.

The honest middle is narrower and much more useful: promise what your method can actually reach, say plainly what it cannot, and make both specific.

What can you honestly promise?

These are promises about reach and rigour, not about the leader's free will. Every one of them is inside your control.

• A diagnosis, not a description. You will say which level the behaviour is being generated at: what they can do, what they believe, what they value, who they take themselves to be, or what fires in them under pressure. "He micromanages" is a description. "He micromanages because letting go contradicts who he has been rewarded for being" is a diagnosis, and the two lead to completely different work.
• Work aimed at that level rather than the level you prefer. Most of us have one we are good at and reach for it regardless. Naming yours is uncomfortable, and it is where a real promise starts.
• A test against the pressure that produced the behaviour. Not a satisfaction form. The specific meeting, the specific person, the specific challenge where the old response used to fire.
• Honesty about what you cannot reach, before you take the engagement. If the organisation rewards exactly what you are paid to change, say so at contracting, in writing, and name what would have to be true for the work to hold.
• That the change survives your absence. This is the only promise the client was ever really buying.

What this question asks of you

The question is uncomfortable because answering it honestly points at our training rather than at our effort.

Most of us were taught to work at one level: what the leader knows and can do, through insight and conversation. That was the promise the training made to us, and we have passed it on in good faith ever since. When a leader is stuck at belief, identity or nervous-system level, the work is competent, the client is engaged, and the behaviour stays where it was.

That is a skillset limit, not a character flaw. Limits can be extended. Which is a far more hopeful position than blaming an organisation's culture, because the culture is not yours to change and your range is.

Before your next proposal

• Write the promise in one sentence that a CFO could hold you to, and see whether it survives.
• Say which level the behaviour is being generated at, and what evidence you have for that rather than for the level next to it.
• Name the one thing you cannot reach with your current method, and decide whether to learn it or to refer it.

See what reaching all of them looks like

On Thursday 8 October I'm running a free 90-minute masterclass for leadership and executive coaches, internal coaches and L&D professionals: How to Create Lasting Leadership Behaviour Change: The 4 Hidden Levels Most Coaching Never Reaches.

We'll work through the levels where leadership behaviour is generated and how each is diagnosed. Then a coach from the room will bring a real pattern from their own practice, and I'll trace it live to the experience it was formed in.

11:00 AST / EDT · 16:00 BST · 90 minutes on Zoom. Recorded for everyone who registers, but questions are only answered live.

Register: https://www.shaneram.com/lbcwr

So: what are you promising? I would genuinely like to read your answer, especially if you disagree with mine.

Dr. Shane Ram is a behavioural scientist and leadership architect, a former HR Director, and the creator of the Meta-B Leadership System. He is the author of Future Ready Leadership.