How to be a Better Coach? 7 Best Practices to Deliver Inclusive Coaching Experiences Since 2015, I’ve spearheaded several initiatives to promote diversity and inclusion in tech products and the workplace that were recognized with the UK 2020 Women in Tech Changemakers award. An inflection point in that trajectory was when, in June 2018, I launched my website focused on diversity and inclusion to broaden my audience as a DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) advocate, a role I’d been actively playing alongside my corporate job as Head of Customer Support. Six months later, I shared my website with an assistive technology expert whom I met during a MOOC. She asked me if my site was accessible and shared a post from The Life of a Blind Girl blog where the author — a blind woman who uses a screen reader — shared her frustration about people making their websites inaccessible and ten tips easy tips to mitigate the problem. I was floored and disappointed with myself. I had assumed that because I considered inclusion one of my values, the result of my actions would automatically reflect it. At that moment, I realized the gap between intention and impact. Moreover, when I broadened my focus beyond women’s equity to other aspects of identity — ethnicity, disability, age — and began understanding intersectionality's role in exacerbating the oppression some individuals or groups experience, I discovered two things. First, “Inclusion is a practice, not a certificate.” You need to continuously update your knowledge about diversity as well as inclusive and equitable practices. Second, DEI is at play in every interaction that involves two or more persons. And that includes coaching. In this article, I distill seven practices that you can incorporate as a coach to deliver more inclusive experiences to your coachees. A lot of them are transferable to other activities such as mentoring and consulting. They can also help managers to create better experiences for hiring candidates and direct reports. Why you should careCoaching is a partnership between the coach and the client, meaning that the rapport between coach and coachee is non-hierarchical — the client is an expert on their life, and the coach is an expert on the coaching process. However, both the client and the coach live in the real world, where there are biases, stereotypes, and privileges. Therefore, the coach must be intentional about how to address the impact of differences with the coachee that may create power asymmetry and exacerbate the systems of oppression the client already endures. Some of those characteristics are gender, social level, sexual preference, ethnicity, (dis)ability, and age, to mention a few. As Trudi Lebron states in The Antiracist Business Book, “The more diversity you have, the more inclusion you need to facilitate to achieve equitable outcomes.” How coaches can facilitate inclusionLet’s look at several best practices you can implement in your coaching to offer clients an inclusive coaching experience. 1. OnboardingWe must ensure our clients feel welcome when they start working with us. In coaching, we may be tempted to only focus on the onboarding of a new client on explaining our coaching approach and program— how many sessions, the frequency, and pricing — as well as ensuring that there is a good alignment with the client about the kind of transformation they want out of coaching. However, DEI is at play in every interaction that involves two or more persons. And that includes coaching. One often overlooked consideration in onboarding is creating a welcoming atmosphere for the client’s physical body and mind. This could be through a conversation or by creating an onboarding form where you ask your client about the following:
I prefer to use an onboarding form and follow it up with a conversation as needed. One advantage of the form is that it allows the client to decide in advance what they want to disclose. I also find that establishing certain reciprocal disclosures may help to level the playing field. This is how it works in my case
2. LogisticsAs with all professionals, coaches have their preferences — virtual versus in-person coaching, phone versus video, etc. But what about our clients’ preferences and needs? If your client is Deaf or hard of hearing, coaching them over the phone may not be an option. Chances are that they prefer to meet in person or use a video meeting application that provides on-the-fly captioning. What about a dyslexic client? Maybe your lengthy emails and requests for daily journaling are a deterrent rather than an enabler of their transformation. A client in the autism spectrum may prefer to keep the video off to reduce the sensory stimulus or may feel more at ease with asynchronous communication such as email. And what about the role of technology? Especially after the pandemic, we tend to assume that everybody is comfortable jumping into a Zoom meeting, sending emails, or using PayPal. That’s not always the case, and it’s on the coach to ensure that their clients feel at ease with the tech applications that will underpin their partnership with their coachees. 3. Your preparation as a coachHow do you prepare for a new client? Maybe you go through your notes about how you coached “similar” clients. Maybe you realize you’ve never coached a client with that goal or with that background, and that triggers feelings of inadequacy and anxiety. The reality is that, either consciously or unconsciously, your brain has already made a “picture” of your client even before the coaching engagement starts. From the first interaction, even if it’s an email from a person with a non-gendered name — Alex, Rowan, Courtney — your mind is already filling in the gaps about characteristics such as gender, ethnicity, sexual preferences, age, etc. And what your brain “decides” is not random but informed by your biases — conscious and unconscious — cultural stereotypes and even your mood. How to counter those rules of thumb? Being intentional. Here are some ways to bring consciousness to your practice:
Finally, when preparing to meet a new client, I invite you to reflect on the following prompts and welcome the answers with curiosity:
4. Be willing to ask for helpCertifications, continuous education, and years of experience practicing coaching are invaluable assets, but they can also make you feel overconfident. For example, you may feel that your long list of curated coaching questions is enough to tackle anything your thinking partner may bring to the session. Unfortunately, that’s not true. In many cases, providing ongoing inclusive coaching experiences to disabled people, those with a history of trauma, or people weighing the decision to come out as LBTQAI+ employees at work requires specific practices. It’s your duty to search for support through supervision, peer groups, and training to fill in those gaps. Moreover, you should be willing to refer the client to another colleague or service if you anticipate that you won’t be able to minimize those gaps in your coaching practice fast enough that they don’t hinder your client’s transformation. 5. Factor systems of oppressionMost coaching approaches rely heavily on the power of our minds to shape our reality. However, helping your client to gain awareness about their limiting beliefs, strengths, and internal resources doesn’t mean assuming that privilege and opportunity are equally distributed. When a client shares experiences of sexism, racism, or ageism in the workplace and you offer them that “it’s all a thought,” you’re not helping them to access their inner wisdom but rather you’re gaslighting them. More precisely, you’re denying your client’s lived experience and the systems of oppression at play. Instead, coaching can be a great tool to explore those systemic imbalances, more precisely, an opportunity to help your client uncover epistemic injustice, a term coined by Dr. Miranda Fricker that describes injustices done against someone “specifically in their capacity as a knower.” Examples of epistemic injustice are when somebody is not believed because of their identity — testimonial injustice — or when their experiences are not understood, so they are minimized or diminished — hermeneutical injustice. What if coaching could help your client to get insights into the role biases, patriarchal structures, and privilege play in their life? 6. Overreliance on training within your coaching programThe coaching spectrum of Miles Downer invites us to consider how different activities are more directive than others. Some, like telling, instructing, and giving advice, are more hierarchical, whereas paraphrasing, reflecting, and listening to understand are less directive. Hence, a more directive style can further inequity, if left unchecked. By monitoring your usage of directive activities and understanding the reasons behind your chosen techniques, you’ll ensure they align with your values around equity rather than come from a place of perceiving your client as “helpless.” 7. Inclusive pricingYou may rely on coaching as your main and only source of revenue. As such, it may be difficult to consider reviewing your pricing scheme to offer your skills at a lower price or for free. However, you may be fortunate enough to have some spare cycles to make coaching accessible to those who are less financially privileged. If that’s the case, you could consider the following ideas:
Final thoughtsOnce you go through this list, I invite you to apply an inclusion lens to other areas of your coaching practice. For example
And remember “Inclusion is a practice, not a certificate.” SCALING IMPACT: Introducing the “Joyful Annual Career Assessment Workbook”The Joyful Annual Career Assessment Workbook, is a 24 pages manual that distils
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