Building Trust in Coaching Relationships
Learn the importance of trust in a coaching relationship, and how to build it.
When I work with people who are building a coaching relationship, I ask them which manager has had the greatest influence on their development. Then I follow up with two questions:
What about the relationship made them an effective coach for you?
What created the environment where you were willing to be coached by them?
Naturally, the responses include several qualities, but the one that shows up most often is trust.
Building trust in a coaching relationship is crucial to the success of the coaching because people are willing to be challenged if they trust the person coaching them. People often tell me that they’re open to uncomfortable coaching conversations when they trust that the coach has their best intentions in mind.
In this context, I’m referring to the manager as ‘coach’ and the direct report as ‘coachee’—but this advice can be applied to any coaching relationship.
Unfortunately, there’s no simple, step-by-step process for building trust in a coaching relationship. But my experience as a coach and Core Strengths’ insights on what makes a successful workplace relationship can shed some light.
What is trust in a coaching relationship?
Trust means different things to different individuals. Some definitions that we use at Core Strengths in the context of a coaching relationship include:
A belief in the reliability, competence, honesty, integrity, and positive intentions of your coach or coachee
The freedom to be real and vulnerable with your coach or coachee without being judged
A high-trust coaching relationship creates an environment of psychological safety. Psychological safety is not about building relationships by avoiding difficult conversations. In fact, when there’s psychological safety, you can dive into difficult conversations and achieve the outcomes that both the coach and coachee desire.
Most people have been in a situation where they’ve said the wrong thing in a high-trust relationship and the other person still gets their meaning. Conversely, you can measure your words carefully in a low-trust relationship and still be misunderstood.
The role of integrity in a coaching relationship
The opposite of trust is lack of trust, where we tolerate each other but don’t truly commit to participation in the relationship or conversation.
As everyone knows, trust is hard to build and easy to break. A coaching client recently said to me, “I hold back from letting my true self be seen because my boss tells me about conversations she has with others.”
As a manager, one of the best ways you can promote psychological safety and trust is to always behave with the utmost integrity:
Make expectations clear and live them out in every interaction
Speak about people as though they were present
Demonstrate genuine respect and concern
Don’t disclose private conversations
Respect all, not just those who can do something for you
Speak up when others don’t adhere to this standard of integrity
Exploring unconscious bias in the coaching relationship
When we ask people who they trust and who they don’t, there tend to be three main reasons for trusting or not trusting:
Past experiences with that person
Information about that person that others have shared
Not knowing that person well enough
But we also just trust some people naturally. We all have unconscious biases that contribute to who we do and don’t trust implicitly, based on culture, personality, race, class, gender, accent, appearance, mannerisms, and more.
As a coach, you need to explore your own unconscious biases to understand why you may or may not trust a coachee. Ask yourself the following questions:
Who do you tend to assume has positive intentions and why?
How much of this is based on objective information about their competence and attitude, and how much on subjectively liking them?
Do you support, listen to, or make yourself available to, some people more than others?
Who do you trust, what do you trust them with, and why?
Who don’t you trust, and why?
If you don’t know people well, is it easy or hard to trust them?
Trust is a two-way street. Coachees also bring unconscious bias to the table, and a productive coaching relationship requires a reciprocal assumption of the other person’s positive intentions. An environment of psychological safety requires that the coach show the same amount of vulnerability that they’re asking of the coaches.
How to build trust in a coaching relationship
To address unconscious biases and previous experiences that may be impacting trust, coaches should follow a process known as recasting the past, mastering the moment, and co-creating the future.
Recast the past
Recasting the past is about challenging your previous assumptions, adding new information, and being willing to exchange perspectives.
One reason for recasting the past could be that you have a manager-employee relationship, but not a coaching relationship, and you want to begin this new type of relationship. To cast off baggage from the past, it can be helpful to discuss why you’re sitting down together, what kind of relationship you have currently, and what kind of relationship you want to have.
Step into the shoes of your coachees and consider:
What past experiences could be getting in the way of trust?
How might they see you now?
How can you change the trust landscape in your relationship for both of you?
Master the moment
Mastering the moment means managing behavior, emotions, and perceptions in real time to make interactions more effective. Work with your coachees to create new experiences and memories that are built on authenticity and trust and help ‘reset’ the relationship. The skill required to do this is what Core Strengths refers to as Relationship Intelligence
Click here to read our blog that dives deep into Relationship Intelligence.
Co-create the future
Co-creating the future is interacting in a way that shapes how your relationship will develop over time. The quality of today’s conversation becomes tomorrow’s past and adds another drop to the trust bucket.
The first step in co-creating a trusting relationship is getting to know your coachee on a deeper level and genuinely allowing them to get to know you. This should be a regular practice with everyone on your team, who are all different people and require different things from you.
You can also co-create trust by showing that you trust them to make decisions. Empower your coachees with as much choice as possible (within the realistic constraints of the organization) and allow them to be accountable for those choices.
At the center of all trusting relationships is the ability for people to be themselves, to value themselves, and to value each other.
Core Strengths has the tools to help people better understand and value themselves and each other and to build trust in their coaching relationships.
For more info, or to download the Core Strengths Coaching Guide, click here.
Employee Satisfaction Through Feedback
Constructive feedback is crucial to a good relationship between manager and employee.
Regardless of role, level, or industry, managers can improve employee satisfaction with the feedback process. According to a survey conducted by Officevibe, companies that employ effective employee feedback see 14.9% lower turnover rates, and employees are 30x more likely to be actively engaged at work.
But people don’t change until they see a reason to do so. Feedback is about helping the other person find the reason first — and the response will follow. Managers should go into the feedback process being very clear about their intention: to leave people more inclined, more able, and more motivated to do the job.
But even with the best intentions, managers may not deliver feedback well in practice, and employees may not receive it well. While you can’t control how others respond to feedback, you are responsible for offering it in the best way possible, maximizing your chances of making a positive impact on the relationship, performance, and employee satisfaction.
What is feedback?
Feedback is a conversation that shares a message that one person feels is important for another person to hear. It can be developmental (though feedback isn’t criticism), or offer praise or recognition. Feedback has to be timely: fairly close to an event (though not necessarily in the moment), frequent, and consistent.
The relationship between feedback and psychological safety
Feedback is both most effective in an environment of psychological safety and promotes psychological safety.
Psychological safety is not about building relationships at all costs by avoiding difficult conversations or feedback. It’s about developing a culture where team members feel comfortable being themselves and sharing, asking for, and receiving critiques and suggestions about their performance daily.
Why giving feedback improves employee satisfaction
Employees want more feedback. People in all kinds of jobs desire role clarity, skill development, and the opportunity to be their best selves and perform well at work.
When managers come to the feedback process to collaborate with the employee, keeping in mind the goals of growth and empowerment, that’s the ideal starting place for a positive interaction.
Sometimes, employees will ask for feedback, but usually, you have to give feedback based on something you’ve observed. If the feedback is unsolicited, there are two main things to keep in mind to maximize the chances of it being well-received:
Are you in a state of mind where your positive regard for the recipient and desire to help are evident, or might they pick up on some judgment or other negative motivation?
What does the situation look like from their point of view, and what can you do to make the feedback resonate more with them?
Why do managers avoid difficult feedback?
Fear of the other person’s reaction
There are easier and faster options
Fear of being wrong
Fear of hurting others
Don’t know how
Don’t have enough time
Hope the issue resolves itself
Previous bad experience
Waited so long that it will be difficult
How managers can set the stage for effective one-on-one feedback
Get to know each other
Get to know each other at an individual level. You can wait for the relationship to develop over time, or employ some strategies to speed up trust by intentionally spending time getting to know each other.
Create rules of engagement
Define your shared values and rules of engagement and communication to ensure that everyone has a voice not just a seat at the table.
Seek feedback from others first
Create a two-sided contract about feedback by authentically soliciting feedback first. Ask what they need from you as their manager to get the best out of them, including direction, support, and development, and what you may be doing that gets in the way.
Then, listen with the intent to learn, not to just confirm what you already think. You also need to take action on the feedback and review progress in future meetings.
Receive feedback well
The manager-employee relationship is a two-sided contract where you both play by the same rules of engagement. If you expect an employee to accept and learn from feedback, you have to do the same.
Be willing to be wrong
Be the first to hold your hand up when you get something wrong. Don’t defend the indefensible.
How managers can give difficult feedback effectively
While compliments can be easy, some feedback is difficult. Nobody wants to be the bearer of bad news. And nobody relishes putting others on the defensive.
On the other hand, whatever you tolerate without speaking up implies your approval — be it undesirable behavior or underperformance. This is why it’s so important to give feedback, even when it might be difficult.
There are ways to approach difficult feedback that make it easier and more likely to produce a positive result.
First, make sure there’s mutual agreement about what’s expected, and that the expectations are realistic.
Then, start by asking questions. Giving the employee the chance to speak first often reveals that they’re more unhappy with the results than you are! They may also come up with better actionable solutions than you might have had, and readily take ownership of the solution because it was their idea. As a manager, none of the reasons the employee gives for their poor performance or lapse in behavior should come as a surprise; you should spend enough time with them to know what’s going on in their life.
Next, when giving difficult feedback, consider the ‘BIF Model’: behavior, impact, and feelings.
Behavior: Objectively describe the behavior you see, free from judgment. For example, if you see their behavior as indecisive, describe how you can tell they want to keep their options open.
Impact: Describe the impact of the behavior in a way that the recipient will care about, which might be different than what you care about. See the next section to learn how to do this.
Feelings: State the way you are feeling, for example, frustrated, worried, anxious, puzzled, hurt, scared, etc. But watch out for judgments masquerading as feelings. Saying, “I feel that you are doing that intentionally” is not a feeling, it’s an accusation.
Finally, remember that the goal of feedback is to open a conversation, not to get the other person to change. Work hard to keep your suggestions out of the initial feedback. When you describe the impact in a way that speaks to the recipient’s values, they will naturally want to do something about it. As you continue in the conversation, the employee will probably seek your actionable advice about what to do differently, and that’s the time to offer your suggestions.
How to best deliver feedback tailored to your audience
To open a good dialogue, feedback has to resonate with the receiver. This means you need to know your audience and what will make them feel seen and understood.
For example, the director who walked into the room holding a spreadsheet and thanked David (below) for how much money he had brought in this month failed to understand that David’s main focus is helping others. Thanking David for how many clients he had helped would have resonated much more deeply.
Rather than saying something in a way that would resonate with you, adapt your style of delivery to the person in front of you, while remaining authentic. Each person may require a different style of feedback, dependent on their personality type.
For a deep dive into the Core Strengths model of personality types and the three primary motivations, read our blog How to Make Workplace Coaching Successful.
The Manager’s Guide for Team Trust
When team members trust the environment they work in, they move faster and make better decisions. If you can build trust, you’ll gain commitment to the outcome and achieve great results.
At Core Strengths, we’re the experts in workplace relationship-building, and in this guide, we share our best advice for managers who want to build trust in their teams that include:
Connecting team purpose to individual values
Making Relationship Intelligence a team habit
Encouraging healthy opposition
Promoting psychological safety
I created a guide to help managers and leaders strategically build trust in their teams. Follow the link, it’s my gift to you.