Critical moments of clients and coaches: A direct-comparison study

‘I don’t understand. I just don’t understand. (…) I don’t understand it at all. I just don’t understand.’ ‘What’s wrong? What don’t you understand?’ ‘I’ve never heard such a strange story.’ ‘Why don’t you tell me about it?’ Opening lines of Rashomon (1950), Akira Kurosawa. Purpose: In this study descriptions of critical moments of coaching as experienced by both executive coaches and their clients are analysed and compared, to find out more about what works in coaching conversations. Design/Methodology: This is a real-time direct-comparison study of coaches’ and clients’ critical-moment experiences with data collected straight after mutual coaching conversations. Eighty-six critical-moments descriptions were collected by independent researchers (not the authors) from measurements straight after independent coaching conversations (not with the authors). Exactly half of these descriptions were taken from clients and the other half from their coaches. They are analysed with reference to the full dataset of 352 critical-moment descriptions (102 by clients and 250 by executive coaches). Results: Both coaches and clients report new realisations and insights as most critical in their direct experience of coaching, and they are also in substantial agreement about the specific moments that were critical in the sessions and why. Hence we find no evidence for the so-called ‘Rashomon experience’ in executive coaching. Differences with earlier coach data which showed a completely different picture could be explained by drawing attention to the fact that those earlier data were biased towards moments of exceptional tension experienced by the coach, verging on ‘ruptures’ within the coaching relationship. Conclusions: This study has produced both a confirmation of earlier work when studying critical moments in executive coaching as well as a connection between the various diverging results hitherto found. The findings help us to understand better: (1) why clients’ and coaches’ descriptions in earlier studies were so different; and (2) how descriptions from clients and coaches coming out of coaching sessions can be extremely similar, as was the case here. The main conclusion is that coaches need to be prepared for quite different circumstances in ‘run-of-the-mill’ coaching and in the presence of exceptional tensions and ruptures.