3.7Counselling and coaching as tools of consulting

Counselling

Counselling is a method whereby individuals are helped to discover, understand, face and resolve their own personal problems, which may be related to education, health, employment, competence, career, relations with colleagues, family relations and so on. Counselling is often thought of as an intervention that is very different from management and business consulting. Yet there is tremendous potential for using counselling as a tool of consulting, especially in helping individuals or groups to overcome personal difficulties and become more effective as managers and entrepreneurs.

Counselling is necessarily a one-to-one relationship. In the case of small businesses, the person and the business may even be one and the same. A counsellor is consistently concerned in a very personal way with the problems and opportunities facing a particular individual.

The counsellor’s aim should be to help his or her personal client rather than the organization, if their interests do not coincide, and it is perfectly possible for the person being counselled to decide to leave the organization or close down the business as the result of an effective counselling process. However, a more frequent and typical result of personal counselling is a client who feels empowered, more self-confident and more independent in pursuing personal objectives and reconciling personal and organizational objectives. It may be not too much of an exaggeration to suggest that the best evidence of an effective counselling relationship is when the client denies that the counsellor has had any role at all in the successful resolution of his or her difficulties.

An effective counsellor is above all a good listener. All too often managers need most of all someone who will listen to them in an understanding way. They may be afraid of the people who are above them in the hierarchy, while those who are below them are afraid of them in their turn. In some organizations, honest admission of confusion and uncertainty is regarded as a sign of incompetence or weakness, and few managers are fortunate enough to have friends outside the organization who have the time or the ability to listen to them. A consultant who has been called in to what appears to be a traditional consulting assignment may find himself or herself in the position of having to be a counsellor to a lonely and distressed person. It is important not to regard time spent in this way as a distraction from the main business: it may well be the most important contribution that an outsider can make.

Good listening in itself is not as simple as it might appear, but there is more to counselling than sympathetic listening. A counsellor is clearly more of a process facilitator than a specialist resource, whose task is to help the client to think through his or her personal situation, difficulties, priorities, and options, and the advantages and disadvantages of each, and then decide to act. Not only