Establishing purpose

Having made the offer to coach and it being accepted, there is a powerful instinct to jump straight in and ask the coachee to identify their goal.

Goal setting is the assumed starting point of most coaching. You go to a gym and the personal trainer asks you what your goals are, in order to put together a schedule. You attend a course and you are expected to define your learning goals at the outset. You spend annual appraisal discussions setting goals based around the SMART mantra of specificity, measurability, achievability, relevance and time boundaries.

Goals are good. Goals are motivating. ‘If you can dream it, you can achieve it’, is the language of self-help manuals. The most commonly applied coaching model in UK organizations starts from goals.¹ Goals are important.

The limitations of goals are that often they are premature. There is a pressure to be able to state the goal before both parties are clear on what the correct goal is.

When asked to state a goal early in a conversation, most people will state a goal that they think the other person will view as socially acceptable.

On day one of a course to develop skills in a particular coaching approach, I was paired with a young attractive man in his early 20s. When asked to state his goals he expressed ones linked to applying the learning to his work. Later in the week I coached him, and we returned to the issue of his goals. This time he was far more hesitant, before eventually saying,

‘I don’t know if I can say this to you’. ‘Try me’, I offered. Embarrassed, he said, ‘The real reason I want to learn this stuff is so that I can be irresistible to women’. Could he have admitted that on day one? – unlikely.

He had to establish that I was a safe person to disclose to before he could name his strongest motivator to learning.

Because goals are the motivational currency of organizational performance, people feel that they have to be able to state a goal as the starting point for change. The logic states, identify the goal, identify the gap between current reality and the goal, identify the means to reduce the barriers to achieving the goal and take action.

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Christine knows that she finds it difficult to say ‘No’ to requests for her help when they come from someone that she likes. She sets a goal of being assertive with her colleagues. She identifies that, at present, she rarely if ever shows any signs of dissent to any request, no matter how unreasonable she feels it is. She recognizes that the barrier is a fear of being disliked, so tries to convince herself that if being assertive means risking losing your friends that is what she must do. She starts saying

‘No’ loudly and frequently, and pretty soon she finds she has few requests made of her. She has achieved her goal. However, somewhere in the process of achieving the goal she has missed the point, because she never established what her purpose was. Now that her days are spent on her own work with no expectation from her colleagues that she should help them out, she strangely feels no better about herself, although she has learnt assertiveness skills.

A more useful starting point for Christine would have been to establish her purpose in wanting to be more assertive. Is it to reduce the number of social interactions she has? Is it to have more time to focus on key areas of her role? Is it to signal that she is not a push-over? Is it to develop skills that will help her get wider recognition for her work? Until Christine is clear on the purpose of changing her behaviour, the application of the skill of assertion will risk being misplaced. When we start from a goal, it helps provide us with a structure of certainty, but often we do not understand the implications of the goal we have set.

Rather than focusing on goals, individuals in the Set Up stage are helped by being allowed ‘fuzzy vision’.²Fuzzy vision validates people for not knowing precisely what they want, by encouraging them to talk about how they would like things to be different rather than setting a precise outcome.

Consider the difference between goal setting and allowing for ‘fuzzy vision’

in the case of Richard, the reluctant meetings attendee.

The manager observes that Richard is reluctant to speak out in meetings and offers to help. They start from the question ‘What is your goal for yourself in meetings?’

Richard, recognizing a SMART approach when he sees it and not wanting to let his manager down, replies, ‘I would like to be able to contribute to all meetings that I attend within three months’.

The manager now guides Richard into setting subgoals for his contribu-tion to forthcoming meetings so that, at the end of 3 months, they can judge progress.

Both understand the logic of this process, and Richard may even hit this performance measure, but has he achieved his real target?

It is possible that Richard is unclear at the beginning what his goal is.

He knows there is something about him and meetings that does not work well, but he does not know how to change it. Being asked a ‘fuzzy’ question, ‘What would be a good way of spending our time in looking at you and meetings?’, allows for the conversation to take any number of directions. Richard may:

g want to think through what he does in meetings that makes him feel more and more marginal

g want to get feedback on how he comes across in meetings

g want to think through how he could go to meetings with a more positive mindset

g want to find ways of interrupting the flow of conversation so that he is heard at the right time.

He may be at an even ‘fuzzier’ stage if he has not, until that moment, considered that he could be any different in his behaviours. His vision could be as blurred as, ‘I would just like to talk through with someone how I behave when I am in large groups, to help me get some perspective on it’.

Allowing for ‘fuzzy vision’ is about allowing the individual to define the purpose of the conversation, without forcing their attention on goals.

‘Fuzzy vision’ is something that people in organizations believe is unallow-able, since displaying less than 20/20 certainty risks being read as inadequacy.

The value of ‘fuzzy vision’ is that it allows for looking at things without focus-ing on one outcome. A coach who can allow for ‘fuzziness’ is not wastfocus-ing time, they are encouraging the individual to explore until they find the right goal.

Herminia Ibarra, writing on the process of career change,³ has argued strongly that career planning that follows the process of identifying abilities,

strengths and values, and matching them with opportunities, has unarguable logic but often leads people to unsatisfactory outcomes. This approach assumes that humans are creatures of pure reason and will therefore want change to be an extension of what they already know. In reality people often don’t know what they want, but they do know what they no longer want. It is only through the process of being allowed ‘fuzzy vision’ that they can think about themselves more openly and honestly, and in doing so find an outcome that is right for them.

At some point, goals do become important (see Chapter 9), and research on the value of goals conducted over 30 years⁴ has shown that:

g goals that are specific and difficult lead to the highest performance

g commitment to goals is most critical when the goal is difficult and specific

g high commitment is attained when the goal is important to you.

However, getting to meaningful specificity, gaining real commitment and wanting to set oneself difficult goals comes from being allowed to define real purpose through a tolerance of ‘fuzziness’.