Matching Coach and Coachee

For both internal and external coaches, ensuring they are a good match for the individual coachee is a critical component of the coaching engagement.  The process for matching a coach with a coachee is as follows:

1. Define the reasons for engaging a coach.
2. Identify prospective coaches.
3. Provide the coachee with bios to select three coaches for interviewing.
4. Schedule the interviews / introductory sessions.
5. Coachee selects their coach.

Step 1: The reasons for engaging a coach will vary from person to person.  Sometimes it is over-all skill development, leadership development, or change management.  Other times a coach serves as a sounding board or to develop a strategy.  Occasionally a coach is engaged to address a derailing behavior.  In some cases, there is a specific goal the coach will support.

Step 2: Identifying prospective coaches, whether internal or external, was covered in the previous two blogs.

Step 3: Once the prospective coaches are identified, collect the one-page bios of each to provide the coachee for review and narrowing to three possible coaches.

Step 4: In addition to arranging for interviews as mentioned in the previous blog post, another tool is a brief introductory coaching session.  Typically an Introductory session is 20 to 30 minutes and it may be combined with an interview.  In addition to the coachee having a sense of how the coach works, it also creates coachee buy-in to the process.  To prepare a coachee, provide a simple checklist of considerations.  For example:

When interviewing three prospective coaches, rank each on a scale of 1 to 5 where

1 = Limited, 2 = Poor, 3 = Average, 4 = Good, and 5 = Excellent

Step 5: After the coachee has interviewed and/or experienced an introductory session with each of three prospective coaches, have the coachee select their coach.