Building Rapport through Identity
Coaches can also build rapport through identity. Identity involves respecting and understanding the client’s values and beliefs: it is not necessary to agree with them, but it is essential to respect them.
A person’s decisions and behaviours are strongly influenced by their values and beliefs. Coaches are often required to help clients to reflect upon their values and beliefs in order to help bring about the desired change in behaviour and therefore performance.
An individual’s culture or organisational culture also needs to be respected as these will underpin many of an individual’s values and beliefs.
Coaches can match their client’s preferred methods and mode of communications. For instance, some clients might prefer a telephone conversation between coaching sessions rather than an e-mail; some clients might feel comfortable with being coached on-line whereas others feel uncomfortable with using this media; some clients like to have a record of the notes made immediately at the end of the coaching session whilst others prefer an e-mail with key action points.
Building rapport is about sharing common ground and respecting the client’s values, opinions and behaviours.
Managing change
One of the challenges facing coaches is that they are often asked to help bring about change. Change usually requires client to adopt new behaviours and sometimes this might involve modifying long held values and beliefs.
The very process of coaching requires coaches to be able to identify differences between the current situation and the desired situation and to help clients to develop and implement strategies to address the differences. The identification of differences is almost the antithesis of building rapport. It involves identifying the differences between current behaviour and the required behaviours and the replacement of ineffective processes and systems with new ones.
To be able to challenge, identify differences and bring about change requires coaches to have excellent rapport building skills. Rapport provides the foundation on which effective coaching is built.
Mismatching as a technique
Mismatching can be deliberate or accidental and involves the coach using a different pattern of behaviour to the client. Whilst mismatching can harm the relationship by reducing levels of rapport if it occurs accidentally or too often, it is also a useful skill.
Coaches can deliberately mismatch body language to end a conversation naturally. The more rapport that has been built up through matching the more effective this will be. Similarly, coaches can end a telephone coaching session by mismatching voice tone (e.g. speaking louder and more quickly) – clients quickly pick up on the message on both a verbal and non-verbal level.
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