Expanding Client Resourcefulness: Exploring What Becomes Possible Beyond the Client’s and Coach’s Current Awareness
One of the principles I have come to appreciate most deeply in my executive leadership coaching journey is that the client is resourceful, and that the coach’s role is not to provide answers, but to enable the client to think, reflect and discover for themselves. This principle has changed the way I look at conversations. Yet, as I have gained more experience coaching, I have also found myself questioning the limits of this premise.
I have encountered a recurring situation where a client is facing a new responsibility, a difficult decision or an unfamiliar challenge, but is not exploring the situation beyond what they already know. The client may be thinking hard and reflecting deeply, but the exploration remains within an existing frame of reference. At times the issue is limited to what I know; at other times it is a capability or skill that the client has not yet developed. What interests me most is a situation where the client is not even aware that there is something they need to know or develop.
This makes me think about the difference between what we know, what we know we do not know, and what we do not know that we do not know. The second is relatively accessible. Once I know that I do not understand something, I can ask, learn, research or seek another perspective. The third is much more difficult. How do I look for something when I do not know that I should be looking for it?
I have seen this particularly when people move into new roles or transition to leadership roles. Someone may have been highly successful in a previous position and then take on a responsibility that requires a different set of capabilities and skills – which may be soft skill or hard skill. Their past experience naturally becomes the lens through which they interpret the new situation. They may continue to use approaches that worked earlier, without recognising that the new context demands something different.
It is a pattern that management coaching encounters often. For example, a manager who moves into a senior enterprise role may continue to rely on operational problem-solving when the new role requires greater strategic thinking, influencing, stakeholder management or comfort with ambiguity. The person may experience difficulty, but interpret it as a problem with execution or with other people rather than as a signal that their own repertoire needs to expand.
This leads me to a question that has stayed with me:
How does coaching help a client recognise a capability, knowledge or perspective gap that the client does not know exists?
The question becomes even more interesting when the coach does not know what is missing either. Even a certified executive coach brings a finite map into the room. Consider a leader who is contemplating an acquisition. The leader may come to coaching asking, “Should I go ahead with this acquisition or not?” Through questioning, the coach can help the client examine assumptions, motivations, risks, alternatives and consequences. But what happens if both client and coach are unaware of an important dimension of the decision? Perhaps the client is thinking about valuation and strategic fit but has not considered integration capability, organisational culture, regulatory complexity or leadership retention. If the coach does not know these dimensions either, how does the conversation move beyond the client’s current map?
This is where I see a gap within coaching that I would like to explore further.
On one hand, the coach needs to remain client-centred and avoid replacing the client’s thinking with the coach’s own expertise or assumptions. On the other hand, if the conversation remains entirely within the client’s existing frame of reference, there is a possibility that coaching simply enables the client to think more deeply about the same things rather than helping them see something fundamentally different.
This makes me wonder whether there is a distinction between deepening a client’s thinking and expanding the client’s frame of reference.
Deepening might mean helping the client examine an issue more carefully — what they believe, what they feel, what assumptions they are making, and what options they see. Expanding may be different. It may involve helping the client recognise that the way they have framed the issue is itself only one of several possibilities.
Perhaps a coach does not need to know the missing answer to facilitate such expansion. Questions such as, “What might you be assuming?”, “What could you be overlooking?”, “What would someone with a very different perspective notice here?” or “What if the way you are defining the problem is incomplete?” may help the client move from certainty towards curiosity.
But can such questions genuinely take a client beyond the boundaries of what they know, or do they simply invite the client to search within the same boundaries more creatively?
This also changes the way I think about the outcome of a coaching session. I have come to see that a successful coaching conversation does not necessarily have to end with the client finding an answer. Sometimes the more valuable outcome is that the client leaves with a better question.
A client may begin with:
“Should I take this decision?”
and leave with:
“I realise there are dimensions of this decision that I have not considered. I need to learn more, seek help from people with different experience and think about what capability this new situation requires from me.”
The decision may come later. The coaching has nevertheless created value by opening the client’s thinking.
This raises an important question about the notion of client resourcefulness itself. I believe clients are resourceful, but I am beginning to wonder whether resourcefulness should be understood as having access to all the answers required for a situation. Much of what leadership development coaching addresses sits precisely here: could a client be highly resourceful while still lacking the knowledge, experience, perspective or skills required to deal with a new context?
I am not proposing that coaching should become advising, or that coaches should routinely supply answers. Nor am I arguing that client-generated insights are less valuable than knowledge from outside. Rather, I am interested in the space between the two: how coaching can help a client recognise the limits of their current thinking while preserving the client’s ownership of the journey.
My inquiry, therefore, is this: can coaching help a client discover the boundaries of what they currently know, especially when neither the client nor the coach knows what lies beyond those boundaries?
Exploring this question may help me understand where the real power of executive leadership coaching lies – not only in helping clients find answers, but in helping them become aware of the questions they did not know they needed to ask.
