Winning a Losing Game: Coping with Client Failure

Executive coaching is an inherently optimistic profession. No one takes it up who doesn’t believe people can change for the better.

But not every client does improve. Even the best coaches lose a few once in awhile. 

Coping with a losing situation is one of the most wrenching experiences a coach can face, but experienced coaches develop a variety of techniques to make sure their client’s failure doesn’t take them down too, professionally or personally.

“We all know as coaches you can’t change another person. They have to change on their own,” says Carol Kivler, an executive coach in Lawrenceville, NJ.

Sometimes she can just walk into a room, take one look at the client, and know she can’t succeed. If you walk into the room and your coachee is “sitting there like a prisoner,” improvement is not going to happen, she says.

People are often reluctant to change because the same traits that got them ahead earlier are the traits their superiors now want them to soften. For example, one of Kivler’s lost cases was a tough television executive, the type of leader she calls “a rough rider.”

“She was very successful because of the way she did things, but she really burnt people out and abused them because of her leadership style,” Kivler remembers. Kivler warned her that she was going to get fired unless she changed, but she’d been so successful, “she thought she was untouchable.”

In fact, she was not.

Andrea Zintz, a New York-area vice president for talent development agency Pulvermacher-Firth, once had a client who had the opposite problem: her superiors had thought she ought to act tougher, so although her subordinates respected her, and her office turned in good results, she didn’t fit in culturally with the rest of the team. For her, making a change would be impossible. “I could see right away that what they wanted was not what she valued or needed to be,” Zintz recalls.

Other times, even if the person wants to change, it may be too late.

The coach will be brought in not because management believes the employee can change, but to reduce the friction of firing. “They want to cover their ”anatomy” so they don’t have a (law) suit on their hands,” Kivler explains.

So how do you make sure your clients’ win?

• Ask around. Sherron Bienvenu, a consultant and coach based in Orem, UT,  always asks around the company about her potential coachee before she agrees to an engagement. “If everybody thinks this individual is not performing or doesn’t get it, or is the cause of what is going wrong in his or her division, if everybody holds that perception…..then it won’t work,” says Bienvenu.
• Talk about the risks upfront. Managing expectations with the team that hired you is important.  Bienvenu always tries to give her clients a full picture of what she thinks she may be able to accomplish, and even more importantly, how it could fail. “Here’s all the analysis, here’s the strategy, here’s the tactics, here’s the best stuff — and here’s all the reasons why it won’t work,” says Bienvenu.
• Quiz your client. When some advice Kivler has offered goes wrong, she finds that they haven’t followed through on everything they were supposed to do. “Many times it’s not that it doesn’t work, it’s just that they didn’t follow through,” Kivler says.
• Quit. After being given a series of lost causes at one particular company, Kivler decided that it was hurting her credibility. Rather than build a reputation as a sort of Angel of Death who appeared only when an executive is on the way out, she turned down the assignment. Was it a good move? While she hasn’t been asked back by that particular company, she says, on balance, she believes that it’s been a good policy for growing her business.

If the situation looks hopeless, Bienvenu will also turn down the engagement. “They need a rescue helicopter, not someone to tell them how to drive the boat,” she says.