This is The Coaching Inn, a podcast from 3D Coaching. So welcome to The Coaching Inn. Today it's my pleasure and my privilege to be in conversation with Helene Seiler from somewhere else in the world. Helen, where are you from? Well, I am calling you from Connecticut, east coast of the United States. Great. But that's not where you're from, is it? no, I am from France. As you can probably hear, least some of you recognize my accent. It's hard to get rid of this accent.
Yeah, and you're here to talk about the launch of your new book. Yes, I am. Fabulous. Using client feedback in executive coaching. And we have the same publisher, Open University Press. Yes, yes. I really enjoyed getting to know them. And I've had a wonderful experience writing the book with them. And I'm sure it's been the same for you. Yes, definitely. They're very collaborative, I would say. Yeah. That was great. So I'd love to know your story and why we've never met.
Yes, well, one of the reasons that we may have never met is that I have been a globetrotter for a very long time. So, yes, so as everybody can hear from my accent, I was born and raised in France and I didn't get to learn English until my teenage years. So I've been told that after seven years old, it's almost impossible to get rid of an accent. But anyways, so I started my career in management consulting in France.
And I was working for one of these American companies with high emphasis on scientific management. And I enjoyed these years. But then in my early 30s, I'd started a family and my husband got an opportunity to move to the United States and actually to move to Connecticut. And I thought to myself, I was pregnant with my first child and I thought to myself, let's give it a try. And so that move was not very successful for me professionally.
I was asked to travel you know, all over the US and I had my young baby at the time. So it just didn't work for me. And I stopped my career as a management consultant. And at that time was really wondering what I would like to do. And I fell into executive search. So I started my first foray into working with people, working for people. in executive search and that was so in the United States. Yeah, yeah. So we lived, our first stay in the US was for 13 years.
And at this during that time that I transitioned from executive search to outplacement. And then one day I fell into coaching. And the reason I fell into coaching was because so, we had hit the dot com bubble, remember way, way a long time ago, we're talking the early thousand and my executive search business wasn't doing so well.
had fell into outplacement because some of my clients said to me, you know what, instead of recruiting, we need your help helping people, you know, transition out of our companies. I started and, These were all small companies, know, that I was, I had started my own small company and I was partnering with other executive recruiters.
And one of them who had made the transition with me to outplacement said, know, outplacement is fun, but I've heard of something even more fun, which is called coaching. And I've signed up for this course. Would you like to come with me and check it out? And so off we went, it was in, Providence, Rhode Island of all places. And I started my first training programming coaching. Wow. And just realized the power of it and never left, you know, never left the practice sense. And so that was in 2001.
So I've been, you know, in this business for a while. And so, you know, a lot of stuff happened. I can build, I wanna say a pretty successful one-on-one coaching practice. And when all was selling, one day my husband says, I've got an opportunity to move to Southeast Asia. And so at that time, and this is 2008, and I'm thinking, we've got two very young teenagers at the time. And I'm thinking, okay. let's give it a try and off we go to Kuala Lumpur. So this is 2009, we're moving to Kuala Lumpur.
And then I am professionally coaching was just emerging at the time in Southeast Asia. But I had a blast, complete blast. Imagine the brand new market, lots of people eager to learn. I started to travel like, worked in of course Malaysia, worked in Indonesia, China, Singapore, and really working on, you know, women leadership coaching, high potential coaching, branching out, looking at group coaching, which is something I've never done before.
And so absolutely exhilarating, had a lot of fun with that. And then, that again, you can start seeking the narrative. One day my husband tells me, okay, I've got an opportunity to work in England. And like, that sounds like fun. I've been doing coaching in a while. I want to step back and I'm going to apply to the doctorate of coaching and mentoring in Oxford Brooks. And that's what I did. So off we go. So this is 2015, off we go to England.
And then I did my doctorate in coaching and decided to focus on that topic of client feedback. Yeah, so that, and then of course moving again, and that was as soon as I finished my doctorate, decided, my husband, I decided to retire. So I'm like, okay, let's go back home, quote unquote. and we went back to our house in Connecticut and that's where we've been for the last two years. So that's probably why you haven't really had the time to meet me.
Because I was very busy, very busy in England working on my doctorate. I'm sure. I'm really particularly interested, Helene, because there's something for me that so often we deal in coaching with self-reported data. And so we say that reflective practices that I reflect on my own practice, but there's no real observable data from anybody else.
And I think there's also something for me about we can get into an echo chamber and I can say, actually, can look out for really excellent coaching by watching coaches coach, but actually, it's about watching clients or what I would call thinkers think, isn't it? So it's all a bit upside down. So I'm very inspired by you absolutely going straight in to what I perceive to be a real issue.
Yes. I mean, I love that you bring up this, this up, because for me, all these years I was doing coaching, I really was looking for feedback. You know, I was looking for feedback. And so, Everything I could get, got, you know, I got myself a supervisor. I even got trained in supervision to understand also how I could be a better supervisee. I was always, whenever there was an offer to do peer coaching, I took it.
I was constantly, you know, trying to do some exams, you know, especially I went through all the ICF process to become an MCC. So I was always trying to get feedback, feedback. And the one area where I got really frustrated actually was client feedback, because if you think of it. So I was working for large organizations and sometimes through agencies. And agencies, they like to request feedback. The type of feedback you get is at the end of an engagement.
So when everything is said and done, you get a nice sheet of paper and that says on a scale of one to five, How much did you enjoy the coaching? And so, you when you got a five, you were super happy. Sometimes you got a two. You know, what is going on? But so what it measured obviously was the satisfaction of the client, which is a great thing.
But we know from research and we can get a little bit more into this later that it's not actually the best way to measure the effectiveness of coaching, right? I, yes, because if I like you, I'll score you five, even if it actually hasn't has any impact. if. Right, and even worse, you know, you have a pleasant conversation with someone very pleasant, everything sailing. And you're going to get that person a five was a great conversation, but learning is not a pleasant experience.
Actually, sometimes it can be. But when you're hit with something that you didn't know or you want to stretch yourself, it's always pleasant. So a lot of researchers have said, actually satisfaction is a very poor measure of coaching effectiveness. It's a measure, but it's absolutely incomplete. And also the problem with satisfaction is that you don't know as a coach what you did that worked for the client. So you're left with... something that's over and you can't really reflect on it.
So that's why I was always frustrated with the way client feedback was communicated to me as a coach. And that's why I wanted to work on this topic. Yeah, I call that happy sheets. Yes, I learned that terminology when I first presented my topics. Somebody said, yeah, you want to talk about the happy sheets. Great idea, because really we're all frustrated about this. Yeah, it's mad, isn't it?
And I often say to, when I start training leaders to use coaching, I say to them, you're going to find this very uncomfortable because you're going to get feedback about what you actually do in the room. And the feedback you've probably got through your career is when people like you, they say it was great. And when they don't like it, they tell somebody else. But that doesn't mean that one was great and one wasn't. It's to do with happiness.
So what are the real key learnings, without giving me the whole content of your book? Because of course we want people to read it. But what are the headlines of the learning for you? Well, I want to say one thing that I bumped into very early on was, well, yes, it's great conceptually. to get feedback from the client, but how interesting is it? Because actually if the feedback of the client is the same as the internal feedback, so your own self-reflection, or if it's the same as say an observer.
So for example, you're going through MCC accreditation with the ICF and there's people telling you how it went. So what's the point? And so that was one of the questions I was asked early on. And then, I discovered actually there's been a lot of research about this. The client sees and experiences the coaching very differently from the coach and especially the observer.
And so there's a scholar and I think teacher called Eric Dehaan and he has done a lot of surveys trying to compare what were important moments for the client, the coach and the observer. And he found out they were completely different moments. And they were even for a particular moment, different appraisals. So for example, an observer would say, this was a very poor question. And then the client would say, it was the question that actually triggered that insight for me.
So that was for me the OK for a reason. if I were to say, What was the most important learning for me initially was, okay, I'm doing this and it makes sense to see what I mean. That's amazing. Cause one of the things that I think is, think we look in the wrong place. So one of the things that I notice is that if you put an observer in a, in a group with a coach and a thinker, the observer will watch the coach, but actually they need to be watching the thinker.
Because as you say, a very impressive or a poor question, actually it's about the impact. And I'm paying a lot of learning attention at the moment to what happens in the space between the coach and the thinker in relation to the thinker picking it up or giving it back or doing their own processing. And I think that when I demonstrate coaching to coaches on their coaching journey. I say to them, it's not about what I do. It's about what happens.
we're so, I think we're so looking in the wrong place when we're the external observer. Absolutely, we do. And that's why I think actually the power of client feedback is probably at its most productive when you talk about it with, for example, a supervisor. So I'm going to give a little webinar on that to the Asia Pacific community of supervisors, I think in the early fall, to them. And that's one of the chapters in my book where I say, OK, How can you use this in supervision?
Because that's where it becomes the most powerful. You collect during the coaching session. So in the book, there's a number of behaviors that I've studied that make sense to ask the client about, because these are behavior that the client can actually see, experience or hear, and get that data and then bring it to, of course, self-reflective practice.
but even more excitedly to someone else and say, okay, you I did these behaviors and actually this is the impact that my coaching session had on my client. And I think that's important because when you think about feedback, I spent an entire chapter on that is to explain what are we talking about? You know, there are two kinds of feedback, right? There's what we call the summary back, which, you know, satisfaction is actually a sort of summary feedback, it's fine.
but there's more important somebody feedback such as the generation of new insights, for example. It's a huge, know, and then also the quality of the working alliance, the bond and the level of floor agreement, you know, between the client and the coach. So what I did, what I did study was how coaching behaviors actually relate to the generation of insights and to the strengthening of the working alliance.
So in my feedback process, I asked the client not just to what extent I did certain behaviors, but also to what extent do you the working alliance or strengthen it and to what extent did you get some insights? And so that's combination of everything. you know, that needs you to think. Cause if I were just to ask about behaviors, Well, maybe I did the behaviors by the book today, but maybe they didn't have any impact. So that's the problem. So I need all, you know, I need both.
I need both the formative and the summative feedback. And it's when they come together that you actually can have a productive self-reflection or supervision session or peer coaching session. I so love that Helen, because one of the things that I notice is that you can follow all of the ICF competencies for coaching. And at the end of the conversation, the insights were all had by the coach.
So the coach knows lots of things they didn't know before, but the client doesn't know anything about their own stuff that they didn't know before at all. So it can look like amazing coaching. But if the purpose of coaching is about the impact it has in the client or in the thinker, then we are so looking in the Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.
And you know, when I was doing all that research about impact, so I discovered something that, at least in my data, I was a little bit counterintuitive, which was that I measured, you know, the extent to which the clients had reached their goals. Because we always think of coaching of, know, yeah, I mean, it's goal-oriented and clients need to reach certain goals.
Well, at least in my study, the coaching behaviors did not have a significant impact on whether or not the client had reached their goals. It had a huge impact on the level of insight of the client, but what the client made of the insights was something else altogether. There were other things. I'm not saying maybe the coach had part in it, but it was mostly a client driven thing. And I was a little bit perturbed by them.
Like, my God, maybe there's something wrong with my data until I came across some more literature that says, you know, we all think about the coach as a babysitter for the client. did you do, did you, did you, did you, you you said, you said you had a couple of insights about goals. And then did you actually reach the goals? You know, did you do this? Did you do that?
And it turns out, at least from my research, some of the research I've read is that the coach does probably help the clients start the process. So they'll get some insight, they'll set goals, but whether or not they achieve the goals has very little to do with a coach. It's really something that happens, you know, afterwards. And so that was interesting for me, because we tend to so much think, you've got to coach to the goal.
You've really got to push the client to set goals, also reach their goals. It's your job. And suddenly I thought, you know what? These behaviors that are so important for the company, they are not the behavior that are, OK, did you? Did you do X goal three times a week like you said you would? mean, the coaches actually do that. They use WhatsApp and they say, did you actually meditate 15 minutes at the start of every day? Cause if you didn't, that sort of thing.
And so that is one of the learnings I got from reflecting about feedback is that, that's not the sort of feedback that's gonna... advance the power of coaching? No, it's going to create dependency. Yeah. And people don't grow and they're dependent, do they? I love what you're saying though, because you have researched what I have experienced. So it feels as though we're coming together with some stuff.
So one of the things that I say in my book is that the best insights happen after the coaching is over. as long as we end well and actually ending a conversation well is about being clear that we're not dependent and that I'm not gonna check up on you. Really interesting stuff, Helen. Yeah. And you the other thing that I learned, cause you were actually asking that question earlier was, you know, when I started my research, I...
So I really wanted the client to define which behaviors we were gonna work on. So I was going to study whether or not a number of coaching behaviors were linked to some coaching outcomes, but I didn't want to take the ICF list because the ICF list has been made using a very valid approach. It's the expertise approach where you put a bunch of experts together and these experts talk and they're like, okay, what do you think? What do you think? And they come up with a list.
That's how the ICF list has been built. It makes perfect sense because they're coming from what we call a positivist ontology, right? So, which is, we believe in expertise and the truth is in the hands of the experts because they've studied for so many years. It's perfectly a valid way to think about science. It makes perfect sense. Anyways, but I'm like, okay, that's good, but I just, I don't want to use that list.
So I started to compile an enormous amount of lists because there are so many people have made lists of effective coaching behaviors. And then I asked the clients, so I ran about five or six focus groups and it was a lot of fun. So focus groups of up to 12 experienced clients of coaching. And I had narrowed down the list to 90 behaviors. Wow. And I told them, okay, let's look at this and tell me the one that you think are the most important.
And also if they are not phrased in the right way, you are free to change them. And you are also free to invent some new ones. One of the things I discovered is that clients don't like the coach to tell them what they should be thinking about. So I just want to give a very precise example. Good. So one of the behaviors I had was I asked the client to explore unintended consequences of their actions. Makes perfect sense. But they say, uh-uh, doesn't work.
If I don't want to think about my unintended consequences of my action, it's my right. So the way we should phrase the behavior is I invited you, not I asked you, I invited you to explore. And then I can take that invitation or not. And so what I realized is they were changing these behaviors as if to tell me, we want to be part of the process. We just don't want to be fed certain questions. We want to be invited to think about certain things. Yeah. And that's about tone, isn't it?
So I did a podcast a few weeks ago with Stuart Reed, who does improv. And we were talking about the difference between an offer or an invitation and an instruction. And that for me, tone matters because I think that great coaching comes from the client or the thinker feeling perfectly able to go, I don't like that question. Yeah, it's not moving me forwards.
But I think often we, coaches get into the art of great questioning and ask long, beautifully grammatic amazingly looking questions that don't quite hit the mark. Yeah. And average questions, I would say, or poor questions, as you said earlier, often give far more insight, which raises all sorts of questions about credentialing, doesn't it? It does. mean, that being said, you know, for me, it's a little bit like, you know, when you think of a psychometric or a 360, it's just an invitation.
You don't want to take it for granted and say, I'm going to put you in a box, but it's just a way to start a conversation. So I think if both the coach and the client get in their eyes wide open, then I'm going to ask you a bunch of questions. It so happens I've learned these questions, but you are welcome to challenge me and offer me say, you know what? part two of this question. I'm only going to answer part two.
And so it's an invitation to make the client more of an agent of the process, which required me to think and think, okay, we tend to live in that expertise sort of world view when we coach, we come in as an expert of the process, right? And they say, you you will be a good coach if you let go of the substance. So you don't give advice, you'll think like that, but you are the master of the process. And what my research confirmed was that we are the master of nothing.
We are not the master of the substance for sure. We're not the master of the substance. I mean, come on, if you think about it, our clients are very resourceful people. A lot of them actually coach already, right? And so it would be very strange to put yourself on the pedestal and say, well, I'm the expert of the questions.
And I think that's the tiny problem with credentialing because it sort of makes you think, you know, we're this maybe if there's one thing where experts office is a container, how to start at an end, maybe. Yes. Make sure we end up time on time. It sounds very silly. but so many coaches don't even know how to end on time. So one hour session, you end at the top of the hour. I think that's an important skill, way more important than learning and memorizing 25 questions. thank you. I agree.
The master of nothing. like that. Because yeah, I think that we're simply a companion in somebody else's thinking process. and we keep them company while they're thinking. But I think there's a, that whole thing isn't there about power and partnership and who has the power and who gives it and who takes it. How interesting. So Helene, how do people find your book? Well, it's interesting you ask that question.
So these are very early days, but I can tell you of some of the pushback I've had, little bit because, you know, this book was made after I wrote my doctoral thesis. while I was writing my thesis and while I was writing my book, I was, so this was pre-COVID. So I was lucky. I was able to go to some conferences and my book. And I think one of the things that people, so people actually liked before saying what people don't like. That's my French way.
We like to be negative all the time, but let's be positive first. So what people really liked about my model and my book was this idea that it gives really some data to the coach to develop themselves. additional, so they really liked that all things we talked about earlier about, the client has something to say. And so you can capture that data, that's really good. That's gonna help you be a better coach.
But on another end, there was some pushback about, know, who's, you know, so who are we if we're no longer an expert, right? That was big, you know, and also linked to that, that fear of getting negative feedback. You know, that fear of a client telling you, Well, not only you executed these behaviors or you didn't execute these behaviors that are supposed to be effective, but also I'm sorry to say that your impact was weak. because the coach tends to carry the responsibility, right?
And they tend to think, whether or not a coaching session is successful has all to do with me. Whereas we know. We know, mean, even, you know, it was first observed in psychotherapy, but then it's been, it's been shown also in coaching. The success of coaching, the coach may have no more that 30%, 70 % is owned by the client and various extraneous things. And so to think you're solely responsible for the success of coaching.
And so people panic, so if they're going to give me negative feedback, my God, you know, And I'm thinking, no, on the contrary, it's an opportunity to say to the clients, well, it appears that I did what I could. so, but what did you do as a client? And what if coaching was actually helping the client do what they need to do? Because sometimes we're so basking into our own expertise that we forget that we've got to challenge the client to do what they need to do.
in order to make the coaching successful. So that's how we had that conversation. The other big pushback I got was about the goals, right? The panic that suddenly, actually the coach was not that instrumental in the fact that the client was reaching or not reaching their goals. They were like, so then what is coaching about? It's not about goal. So that was the other thing. And it's not about goals and it's not about us. Right. Exactly.
But and of course, another big question for coaches is, well, how do I make it work? Because it's not easy to ask feedback to a client during the coaching session. Right.
I mean, it seems difficult, but what I've found you know, by using it myself and having a few coaches before I published a book, I had asked a few coaches to try and experiment with me, you know, with the feedback instrument that it actually fosters fantastic conversation because what you do is that you start the coaching session by asking question to your client about the level of insight they got from the previous session.
the level of bonding and working alliance that happened in the previous session. And if the client said very little or a lot, obviously the next question is what happened? So you can imagine what you learn, right? And then when you ask client about, what extent did I do such and such behavior? And the client said, you did it to a very little extent. And now we think, well, maybe that was right. And it helps both of the client and the coach think further.
So allocating 10 minutes or sometimes five minutes of your session from time to time, not all the time, to check in about these coaching behaviors actually helps both the client and the coach. Because you're not actually saying, was I any good today? You're actually saying, is the process serving you? I ask in the middle of a conversation, I'll often say, and what insights have you had? And I'll be looking and listening and you can see if they haven't had any, but then that makes it easy.
So what do we need to do in the next 30 minutes? So you get some insights. Boom, off you go. Exactly. this is Yeah. And you know, I didn't reinvent the wheel there. It's been done in psychotherapy where there are instruments where, you you start a psychotherapy session. with a survey about the level of the working alliance with the patient. And so I've started to emulate that. I said, we're starting this coaching conversation.
My client and I, and I asked the client, how are we doing with our working alliance? Because it needs to be super strong. It's a conduit. So that's also another thing I measured in my research. I revalidated it. I'd been done before that. The working alliance is a conduit. So without the working alliance, cannot have has powerful insights. You can have some, but you lose some effectiveness. You've really got to have that working alliance.
So measuring it as the start of the coaching session makes sense. Cause you're like, okay, well, what do we need to do to up it a little? Cause the more we work together, the better we are going to help you generate insights. So Helene, how do people make contact with you if they want to pick up the conversation? So I think the best way is definitely, I would say to invite me on LinkedIn.
I'm easily found there, Helene Seiler, and you can just invite me, send me a message and we can pick up from there. Fabulous. Thank you. And the book is called Using Client Feedback in Executive Coaching. Improving Reflective Practice by Helene Seiler and it's published by Open University Press. Yes, and it can be found on Amazon, UK and also US. So you don't have to pay extra fees, shipping fees or whatever.
But I'd love to hear more from everyone who's interested in the topic and continue the conversation. Well, thank you so much, Helene. What a pleasure it has been to meet you. Well, same here. So I'm Claire Pedrick MCC and I've been in conversation with Helene Seiler MCC. Have a good day. Bye. Bye bye. Hi, we hope that you can join me for drinks at the Coaching Inn to launch 3D Coaching's book group where we're going to be reading Simplifying Coaching.
Wherever you are in the world, you're welcome to bring your coffee or your beer. I'll be sharing the story behind the book and answering your questions. Find out more about our book group that will be launched on the 5th of May through any of our social media channels through LinkedIn, 3D Coaching, Twitter, at 3D Claire or Facebook, 3D Coaching. Hope to see you there. You've been listening to The Coaching Inn. Find out more about us at www.3dcoaching.com slash B hyphen developed.