When to say ‘no’ to coaching assignments: a decision-making framework

This paper presents a coaching assignment decision-making framework to assist coaches, and others in related to roles, to evaluate and make an informed choice about whether or not to accept a coaching assignment. There are good reasons to say ‘no’ to a coaching assignment, and a failure to do so can exact a serious cost – psychosocial, career-related or both. This paper presents empirical data, addressing the consequences of saying ‘yes’ when instead ‘no’ was the best decision in the circumstances, and presents a series of questions to inform the pre-coaching assignment decision-making process. The empirical data consists of a short survey completed by 345 experienced coaches. The data was subsequently analysed using NVivo in order to identify themes and illustrative responses, as well as summarising and synthesising the data as a whole. The findings explore the circumstances and factors respondents take into account when considering a coaching assignment. The authors present a coaching assignment decision-making framework. We hope that practitioners engaged in coaching may be able to benefit from the approach through the application of a practical framework and series of questions designed to be sufficiently flexible to apply to different contextual settings and circumstances.

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