Coaching Mindset: The Push and the Pull

Posted January 23, 2020 by Dr Larvein Harverty

In my first blog post, published earlier this month on my website, I addressed the question of how I got into the field of coaching in the first place. This week, I’ll address another question I receive frequently from new and prospective clients.

Question: What is your coaching style?

​​Answer: I used to think that coaching was all about asking open-ended questions, actively listening, providing behavioral feedback and developing a trusting, open relationship in which a client could safely explore questions large and small, experiment with new ways of being in the world, and look frankly at his or her own contributions to current and future challenges. I still believe those practices are hugely important in good coaching, and they’re definitely a key part of my own coaching style. But now I think there’s also got to be a counterbalance to all that feel-good, Rogerian “nonjudgmentalness.” To borrow a concept from my friend Rob Kaiser, author of the Leadership Versatility Index 360, there’s tremendous value in versatility. The old adage about all things in moderation, it turns out, applies even to practices as powerful as asking, listening, and caring. Sometimes, as a coach—and as a leader—what’s called for is taking a position, offering advice, and employing brutal honesty.

Using the simplest terminology, I’ve come to think of these opposed but complementary coaching practices as pushing and pulling.

Let’s refer to the skillful and versatile use of pushing and pulling as coaching mindset.  I believe that both executive coaches and organizational leaders benefit from utilizing a coaching mindset, moving between pushing and pulling, and selecting their behaviors based on the context. Contextual factors include the experience level, competence and commitment of the person being coached (the coachee), the nature and urgency of the problem being addressed, and the quality and duration of the relationship between the coach and coachee. A great coach, whether external or internal, knows when to push and when to pull.

I’m going to propose here four pairs of coaching mindset practices, one in each pair representing the push of coaching, and the other representing the pull. I’ll also share an example of each pair of practices using my work with actual clients. Names and identifying details, of course, have been left out to protect the innocent.

Push-Pull Pair One: Telling and Asking

When I’m pushing, I’m telling. When I’m pulling, I’m asking.

Peter Senge of MIT’s Sloan School of Management, in his book The Fifth Discipline, used the terms “inquiry” and “advocacy” to describe fundamentally different modes of communication. When they’re advocating, leaders state their positions and try to influence others to accept those positions. When they’re inquiring, leaders ask questions to try to understand better the positions and perspectives of others. Both practices, Senge argues, are important, but most leaders err on the side of advocacy. Great leaders—and, I believe, great coaches—use a more balanced approach. They ask and they tell, they push and they pull, they create dialogues in which both parties share their own perspectives and are genuinely open to the experiences and opinions of the other.

Client Example:  One of my goals with my coaching clients is to work myself out of a job. My hope is that my clients will internalize the questions I ask them, so that they can begin to question themselves, eventually making me entirely unnecessary. I’m working with a client now who tends to be very hard on himself. He’s incredibly bright and accomplished, and a genuinely kind person. But if he’s not careful, his irrational beliefs about his own lack of legitimacy in his high-level leadership role can overwhelm and paralyze him. We’ve explored and developed some insight into those irrational beliefs, making it easier for him to challenge them when they surface. Over our months of working together, I’ve both asked him a lot of questions (pulled) and shared suggestions about how he can respond in the face of his fears (pushed). When we talked the other day, my client mentioned a concern he was having about the effectiveness of his approach in a particular situation. I was delighted when he followed up with: “And I know you’re going to ask me what evidence there is to support that concern;” he told me that as he reflected upon it, the hard evidence actually supported his effectiveness, rather than the lack thereof, in the situation in question. So while I both ask and tell with this client (and all of my clients), I was particularly gratified to see that the asking had not only led him to some interesting conclusions, but that he is now capable of asking himself the questions that ultimately lead him to a more confident and comfortable place.

Push-Pull Pair Two: Performance and Development

When I’m pushing, I’m focused on my clients’ performance. When I’m pulling, I’m focusing on their development.

In my early days as a coach, I focused almost exclusively on my clients’ personal and professional development. I wanted to help them identify their short- and long-term professional goals, develop their skills and earn promotions, and decide when it was time to look for a new opportunity. Those outcomes are still incredibly important to me. But now I realize that development and performance are intricately interwoven, and that to fail to ask for performance feedback from clients’ key stakeholders, such as superiors and HR business partners, is to do them a grave disservice. It would be like asking my children only about how much fun they are having at school and ignoring feedback from their teachers about how (and whether) they are demonstrating their learning. Performance feedback is crucial to supporting ongoing development. When I’m being versatile as a coach, and when leaders are being effective internal coaches, we are focusing on both development and performance.

Client Example: Here’s an example from my early days as a coach. Warning: this one did not end well for my client. Thank goodness we can all learn from experience. I certainly have! All those many years ago, I had the opportunity to work with an interesting new client who was at a more senior organizational level than the clients I had worked with previously. This client had initiated the coaching herself and was not interested in having me administer a 360-degree assessment; because I was not experienced (or courageous) enough to push back, our coaching focused on her own perceptions of her leadership gaps. We had long, meaningful, seemingly productive conversations about her personal history, her professional successes and setbacks, and what she wanted her legacy to be. I was totally committed to helping her transition into her new leadership role in a way that allowed her to feel effective; I was laser-focused on what she enjoyed or didn’t about the role, and how she could develop the skills she thought she lacked. What I missed seems obvious now, and even a little embarrassing. I didn’t solicit feedback from her direct reports, peers or superiors until it was too late, until a time when her performance was—to her shock—seen as so far below expectations that it was too late for her to save her career at that organization. Now I solicit performance feedback on my clients early and often, and I am very direct with my clients about what I see as the ramifications of not closing any gaps in performance. I want them to develop their skills and abilities, yes, but I also want them to be considered stellar performers by their colleagues.

Push-Pull Pair Three: Weaknesses and Strengths

When I’m pushing, I’m focusing on my clients’ weaknesses. When I’m pulling, I’m focusing on their strengths.

Historically, leadership development (and traditional educational approaches) have used a “weakness approach;” the basic idea is that you figure out what someone really stinks at (whether it’s public speaking or math), and then have them spend lots of time and energy trying to get good at it. Thankfully, the positive psychology movement of the 21st century has led many of us to think differently about development, and to encourage our clients (or direct reports, or students) to focus on their unique strengths, developing and leveraging those in pursuit of important goals. I’ve been operating from a strengths approach for quite a while, but I now believe that a coach can’t solely focus on strengths, no matter how much more energizing that feels than focusing on weaknesses. A true coaching mindset involves identifying and addressing both strengths and weaknesses, finding ways to extend and enhance the application of the former while ensuring that the latter do not become fatal flaws.

Client Example: One of my current coaching clients has an undergraduate engineering degree and an MBA from a top tier school, an impressive and varied resume, with stints both in start-ups and global corporations, and an ability to churn out high-quality work product very quickly. What he’s not so good at, in my judgment, is putting himself in the shoes of others, especially others who move more slowly or are (in his view) less competent. He’s able to do it when prompted, but it’s rarely his initial response. Once he even said to me, without a hint of irony, “Empathy is almost always a waste of time.” (We laugh about it now, and he even gave me permission to include this anecdote—anonymously, of course—in this blog.) In my work with this client, I encourage him both to use his significant, natural strengths to find new ways to meet his leadership challenges, and also to move perspective-taking and empathy a little bit higher on his list of go-to reactions when he’s feel frustrated with his colleagues, especially the slow ones.

Push-Pull Pair Four: Candor and Compassion

When I’m pushing, I’m using candor. When I’m pulling, I’m using compassion.

And of course, as with the other push-pull pairs, when I’m utilizing a coaching mindset, I’m using both.

One of my favorite sayings, usually attributed to communications author John Powell, is this: “The genius of communication is the ability to be both totally honest and totally kind at the same time.” My friend and colleague Margaret Cooley, Director of the Eckerd College Leadership Institute (LDI), shared that quote with me at least a decade ago, and I just love it. It’s easy to know what it looks like to demonstrate one of those behaviors at a time. If I am not worried about being truthful, I can certainly be kind. (“That was the best presentation I’ve ever heard!) And if I’m not concerned about being kind, it’s easy to be honest. (“It was excruciating to sit through your presentation.”) While it generally requires more effort to blend compassion and candor, I believe that doing so is a key attribute of masterful coaching.

Client Example: Early in my career, I had a client who talked so much that I could barely get a word in edgewise—even in a three-hour session. My concern was both about what was happening between us – how could I add any value if I couldn’t participate in her thought process? – and what this meant for her interactions in the workplace. If she dominated conversations with her colleagues, which her 360 feedback suggested she did, I was pretty sure that pattern would have a number of negative impacts on her. Some of her colleagues would simply avoid her, and others might resort to an aggressive approach simply to get some air time; either way, my client was almost certainly losing access to important information and missing opportunities to develop the kind of strong relationships critical to a leader’s effectiveness. Because I was a new coach at the time, it took me a while to gather the courage to share with my client the impact on me of her non-stop talking. While it felt risky to be so honest, it also felt like the compassionate thing to do. Most others in my client’s life (her professional life, at least) probably weren’t as direct with her, and by the time they did give her feedback, it might not have been very diplomatically worded, thereby harming the relationship and probably diminishing her ability to truly take in the feedback.

Thanks so much for reading to the end of what will likely be the longest blog I ever write. If you have any feedback or questions, I would love to hear!

New Frame of Mind

Posted January 4, 2019 by Larvein Harverty

A few people have asked me recently about the name of my business.

What is mindset coaching, they ask, and how is it different from executive coaching or life coaching?

The short answer is that mindset coaching is not a distinct category of coaching. I’m an executive coach, and Mindset Coaching the name of my business simply reflects my belief in the centrality of mindset in creating and sustaining behavioral change.

The longer answer requires a bit of elaboration. But before I explain mindset further, let me give you a simple example of the power of mindset.

I used to value efficiency in movement. At home, if there were five things that needed to be brought upstairs, I preferred to collect them all before heading up. At the mall, if I saw two parking spots, I would choose the one closest to the entrance.

When I got a Fitbit a couple of years ago, I noticed a shift in my mindset.

If I forgot to bring a clean load of laundry upstairs with me when I went up? Great—that extra trip upstairs got me closer to my goal of 10,000 steps a day. And now I sometimes purposefully pick a more distant parking spot on trips to the mall.

The difference in my mindset has led to a difference in my habits, which has led to a difference in my overall health.

Or consider this example:

Stress is bad for your health, right? Well, yes and no. It certainly can be, but Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonigal found that the way we think about stress may be just as important as the amount we experience.

For example, if we tell ourselves that stress is harmful, that it may overwhelm us, and that we’re under more stress than others are, we’re much more likely to suffer negative health outcomes than if we didn’t hold those beliefs.

In other words, your stress mindset mediates the relationship between difficult life events and your health. If you tell yourself that you have the physical and emotional resources to cope effectively with stress, and that you can learn and grow from it, you’re much more likely to make it through unscathed.

The way you think about something changes the way you react to it, and those reactions in turn produce better outcomes.

The word mindset has worked its way into common parlance—at least among leadership practitioners—since Carol Dweck’s 2007 book Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. In that book, Dweck differentiated between a fixed mindset, in which people believe that intelligence and talent are simply fixed traits, and a growth mindset, in which people believe that such capabilities can be developed through hard work and dedication.

Fixed and growth are only two labels for mindsets, of course, and I’d like to consider the concept more broadly. Here are two of my favorite definitions of mindset.

This one is from Vocabulary.com:

      “A habitual or characteristic mental attitude that determines how you

will interpret and respond to situations.”

Here’s another, this one by Dennis Stauffer, author of the Innovator’s Mindset:

   “Your mindset is like the operating system on a computer. It functions in the background largely unnoticed. Yet how it is designed and how well it performs impacts everything that computer does.

And so it is with people. We each have a personal operating system—your personal paradigm—but for most of us it is largely subconscious.”

Notice that in both of these definitions, mindset is about what you believe, how you frame events, what you tell yourself about the world.

Mindset is distinct from what psychologists consider personality characteristics—traits such as extroversion, interpersonal warmth, openness to change, and conscientiousness—which research suggests don’t change much over the course of an individual’s lifetime.

If you think about mindset as the way in which we frame things (e.g., stress is a learning opportunity), what we tell ourselves about situations (e.g., walking farther is good for my health), what we choose to believe (e.g., I have all the resources I need to weather adversity), it’s clear that we can intentionally adopt new mindsets.

We can’t change our innate characteristics, but we can change how we look at the world, which in turn changes our behavioral responses, which in turn leads to different outcomes.

And that’s why mindset plays such an important role in the coaching work I do.

In working with my clients, I attempt to identify the mindsets with which they currently operate and then invite them to explore whether those mindsets are helping or hurting them.

One of my clients reported feeling frustrated with the frequency of unscheduled calls and drop-ins by his direct reports. He felt these instances to be impositions on his time, and that they were distracting him from his important tasks of generating reports for his superiors, meeting with his peers to get alignment on cross-functional projects, preparing materials for Board meetings, etc.

As we explored the beliefs underlying his frustration, we discovered that my client was looking at his individual responsibilities—and not at leading his team—as his primary “work,” and this impacted how he responded to his direct reports’ ad hoc requests for input, advice, etc.

When he recognized this mindset, he was able to shift it. Once he adopted a coaching mindset, he was then able to prioritize his time with his direct reports over most all of his other responsibilities. He came to believe that as a leader, he would be only as successful as his team was, and that if he didn’t offer the support his team members needed, they would all fail.

Sometimes, all it takes to shift a mindset is a simple and straightforward invitation to look at something differently.

Another of my clients, for example, was able to increase her and her team’s productivity after being introduced to the concept of focusing on outcomes rather than activity. That was it! By asking herself—and asking her team members—to prioritize their work according to its impact rather than difficulty, visibility, or sheer effort—all of them were able to make more intentional and effective choices about how to distribute their finite time and energy. The result? They had their best year ever.

By considering all aspects of an individual’s life, we can often find connections between personal and professional behavior, and in so doing, create powerful mindset shifts.

A particularly kind client of mine told me that he had traditionally avoided difficult conversations with his direct reports because they made him uncomfortable. He clearly saw the downsides of such avoidance, but he felt fairly pessimistic about his ability to change his behavior.

When I asked him how he responded to his young children when they made bad choices, he told me that he talked directly and honestly with them almost 100% of the time. I asked how comfortable he felt in doing that; he acknowledged that while he didn’t enjoy it, he knew they needed that feedback in order to make better choices in the future.

He cared so deeply about his children’s growth and development that he felt they deserved his candor. Hearing himself say that, my client was able to recognize that as a leader, he owed the same consideration to his direct reports. If he wasn’t going to be honest with them, who was?

Now my client asks himself, when tempted to let a direct report’s “bad” behavior slide, whether he would react differently if it was his child. Almost always, the answer is yes, and so he gathers up the courage to have the conversation. He has also accepted the fact that he doesn’t necessarily need to feel comfortable initiating tough conversations; he just needs to do it.

In each case, recognizing the initial mindset, then deciding very purposefully to make a shift, led my clients to bring a new lens to the situation, to interpret it differently, and to choose a different behavioral response.

And yet, because human beings are nuanced, there’s not always a simple, linear relationship between mindset and outcomes. Context matters.

For example, a mindset of gratitude, in which you purposefully identify, acknowledge, and appreciate those things in your life for which you are thankful, tends to lead to increased well-being. This is in contrast to a mindset of scarcity or resentment, in which you focus on the things in your life that are lacking, or which you perceive others to be withholding from you. We all experience a mix of good and bad in our lives, and what we choose to focus on can have a profound impact on our levels of happiness, the quality of our relationships with others, and our health.

And so it was of tremendous interest to me when I noticed not too long ago that several of the female executives I have coached over the years have encountered a very specific type of situation in which they felt hampered by over-playing a mindset of gratitude.

What do I mean by that? Here’s what happened. In each case, my client was given a promotion—a new title, a bigger team, and more responsibility. When I asked about how significant the increase in comp would be, each woman acknowledged that comp hadn’t been mentioned at all, or that there had been an offhand comment about taking a look at comp next year, and in each case, she had just let it go.

That’s right; she just let it go. Each woman felt so grateful for the promotion that she didn’t feel comfortable asking for—or even about—an associated adjustment to her compensation.

I don’t do a lot of advocating in my coaching, so it wouldn’t have been my style to try to convince any of these clients to raise the subject with her superiors, but in each case, I invited her to look closely at how she was choosing to respond to the situation, to explore the underlying beliefs driving those choices, and to consider whether those choices were serving her well or not.

In each case, the conversation itself led to a shift in mindset; at the same time she continued to feel grateful for the promotion opportunity, each client was also able to recognize and honor the efforts and achievements that had led to the promotion, and to attach greater value to her work. Sometimes this led to a decision to tackle the question of compensation head on, and sometimes the effect was more subtle, but in each case, looking at the underlying mindset with clarity and objectivity led to a more conscious and informed decision about how to move forward.

This is why good coaching doesn’t depend on the application of simple “truisms,” such as “Always be grateful.” It’s true that practicing a mindset of gratitude has been shown to have significant benefits, but it’s important to examine how and when and with what impact any given mindset is used. Working with my clients to unearth, to explore, and—if beneficial—to shift their mindsets is both a fascinating intellectual challenge and a source of tremendous emotional satisfaction.

One final note: some of you might also know that I have co-authored two psychological assessments, each of which has “mindset” in the title. The Entrepreneurial Mindset Profile® (EMP) was developed in partnership with Mark Davis, Pam Mayer, and the Eckerd College Leadership Development Institute, and the Coaching Mindset Index® (CMI) was developed in partnership with Mark Davis and AIIR Consulting.

I’m currently toying with the idea of creating an assessment of multiple mindsets. I think it would be pretty cool to complete a single questionnaire and then to receive a report that showed you which mindsets you operate with, and which ones you feel are benefiting versus hampering you. If you have any thoughts about particular features that would make this kind of assessment helpful to you, I’d love to hear them. And if you want to learn more about mindset coaching, please also feel free to reach out.

I sincerely wish each of you a happy, healthy and prosperous 2025!