In a recent New York Times article, I was quoted as saying that “therapy mines the past to improve the present while coaching tweaks the present toward a brighter future.” The article examines why Silicon Valley therapists are becoming tech coaches. It’s a fantastic article that examines the pressure to perform and the way that coaching and therapy differ in handling that pressure. In this blog, I’ll go deeper into several important elements of coaching vs. therapy that were beyond the scope of the NYT article.
The purpose of this blog is to help you understand some of the fundamental differences in stylistic approaches to the conversation itself. To do so, we’ll start with the goals of each approach, then progress into the methodologies, and finally the use of seven distinct interaction styles that shape coaching and therapy.
Goals, objectives, and outcomes of coaching versus therapy
The goals of coaching and therapy are related, but substantively different.
Broadly speaking, the primary goal of coaching is to help you thrive in your present and future. The primary goal of therapy is generally to help you address your past, so you feel better in your present and future. While these framings seem similar, their approach to conversations can feel substantively different.
If you’re a leader, you may hire a coach to help you lead and coach your team more effectively, drive results, to communicate more clearly, or to figure out new approaches to problematic working relationships. Coaching can be used on almost anything and gets great results, which I wrote about in a blog revealing 80 different positive, research-supported outcomes that coaching gives you. While it’s a huge list, here are the top 10 topics my coaching clients bring to me.
If you’re a leader, you may hire a therapist to help you excavate your past, heal traumatic experiences or wounds, and give you a safe place for deeper emotional processing. You might address feelings of depression, phobias, or other disorders with therapists. Psychologically diagnosed or diagnosable conditions are the realm of therapy. For more, here’s an article about science-based benefits of psychotherapy.
The focus of coaching and therapy are different, yet their interaction styles can share many similarities.
Coaching versus therapy in the workplace
While it’s possible to hire a coach or therapist outside of the workplace, many organizations are starting to offer access to coaching and therapy in some form. Some companies offer therapy as a benefit through contracted services or Employee Assistance Programs.
However, therapy suffers from a stigma problem as well as a licensing problem. For example, getting therapy may have some feel broken or like they’ll be judged. Many people feel their mental health is suffering but may not feel comfortable going to a therapist – therefore they don’t get help. Additionally, therapy is performed by licensed practitioners, and these licensed therapists are not typically company employees, so most therapy happens outside of the workplace.
Many companies are starting to turn toward coaching to provide support to their employees in multiple ways. They may offer coaching through contracted service providers, internal coaches, or by their managers. Due to the cost of contracting coaches, many organizations provide coaching to executives only. However, the need for coaching occurs at all levels of an organization.
Therefore, many companies are moving towards creating an internal Coaching Center of Excellence where trained coaches provide coaching services to employees. These programs have the benefit of cost savings and providing coaching to internal employees by internal employees.
Yet, the real question is scale. What would you have to do to give every employee coaching? To hire the necessary number of coaches from the outside to give coaching to everyone is cost prohibitive. To hire that number of coaches internally, while less expensive, is similarly cost prohibitive.
So, who could offer coaching to every single employee? Well, every employee – at every level – has a manager. Every manager is in a position to grow, develop, and coach the people on their team.
In fact, a study spanning 10 years found that the top skill of leadership is being a good coach. Another study found that employees are desperate for coaching from their managers and are twice as likely to quit if they don’t think their manager is a good coach.
At OwlHub, we conducted a study of 234 U.S. full-time workers and found that approximately 90 percent of employees quit their last job because of unfulfilled needs directly relating to the manager’s failure to use each of the seven RESPECT Coaching Styles – discussed further down.
In summary, due in part to the stigma and licensure issues with therapy, the trend is towards organizations providing coaching to their employees. Coaching is more accessible as a concept and can be provided with great impact – externally, internally, or managerially. And employees are demanding it.
Methods, structure, and approaches to coaching and therapy
Both coaching and therapy tend to be conversational approaches to supporting someone with their intended outcomes.
The structure is often where the two individuals meet at a designed time and place, virtually or in-person.
There is a wide variety of approaches to both coaching and therapy. In both coaching and therapy, some approaches focus on action, others focus on thinking, and others explore new territory.
However, there’s a deeper story to understanding the differences between coaching and therapy. For the first time, we have a fundamental language to understand the styles underlying these methodologies, for coaching, therapy, and beyond.
In my doctoral research, I discovered that there are seven distinct styles that the world’s best coaches use. After this research, I realized that these seven styles (now known as the RESPECT Coaching Styles™) underpin how we interact in almost every aspect of our lives.
This discovery impacts how we understand leadership, mentorship, parenting…and therapy.
Overview of the RESPECT Styles in Coaching and Therapy
For my doctoral dissertation, I wanted to understand whether coaches had different styles. I studied many of the world’s best coaches using the most rigorous qualitative methodologies. The result was a breakthrough in understanding exactly how great coaching interactions work.
I discovered there are seven distinct styles that describe how the interactions work – now called the RESPECT Coaching Styles™.
But I quickly learned that these approaches aren’t just found in coaching! These styles shape how leaders interact with their teams. These styles show up in how parents interact with their kids. And how therapists interact with their patients. Wherever I found one-on-one or group interactions, I found these RESPECT styles.
RESPECT boils down what we say and why we say it. These seven distinct styles can be used independently or in combination.
Think of them like spices on food. You can choose to use only salt, only pepper, only rosemary, only cayenne, etc. But you can also use them together – in countless ways and in various proportions. Each combination will influence the taste and experience.
The same is true with RESPECT styles. And they influence the taste and experience of every interaction.
RESPECT stands for:
Rallier: Goals, motivation, and action-orientation to help drive progress forward
Educator: Skills, knowledge, capability, and competency-building
Strategist: Fixing, planning, solutioning, issue-resolving, and recognizing patterns
Provocateur: Hole-poking, examining, rethinking, truth seeking, and scrutinizing
Explorer: Expanding, innovation-creating, curiosity-following, and wondering
Confidant: Empathy, deep listening, authenticity-inducing, and safe space-opening
Transformer: Fulfilling potential, becoming more, envisioning, and processing difficulty
Each of these styles will influence what you say and how you say it. For example, if you ask, “What action are you going to take?” you’re using the Rallier style. It doesn’t matter if you’re a coach, therapist, parent, partner, or anything else. It’s about action and it’s the Rallier style.
Below, we’ll examine how both coaching and therapy use styles, including the emphasis and orientations of each field.
How Coaching and Therapy Use Styles Differently
Each of the RESPECT styles can be used for positive effect. However, coaches and therapists will use each style differently. The New York Times article about therapy versus coaching primarily frames coaching as performance and goal oriented. This is primarily the Rallier style. The best coaches use all seven styles, but we’ll explore Rallier first.
Rallier
Rallier is all about action, improving performance, reaching new heights, and making progress. This style will often focus on moving from point A to B as quickly as possible. It’s about making sure things get done and measurable results are met and exceeded.
It makes sense that this action- and results-orientation is touted and revered by Silicon Valley startups, as reflected in the article. Many of my venture- or PE-backed CEOs, inside and outside of Silicon Valley, face this pressure. They are accountable to results and this pressure often pushes downward through managerial levels.
Coaches will often use the Rallier style to focus on defining or clarifying goals, milestones, and actions to drive results. Setting up accountability with the coachee helps create tangible progress on the most important things.
Therapists might use Rallier as a style as well, but driving actions and goals for business performance tends not to be the focus. Instead, therapists may focus on goals and actions with a healing-centricity rather than a business-centricity.
Overall, the goal-driven, results-orientation of the Rallier style tends to be higher in coaching. This may partially account for the trend toward coaching that Daniel Duane’s NYT article discovered.
Educator
Educator is the style about activating or sharing knowledge. This style helps people fill in information or skills gaps. In coaching vs therapy, the knowledge they’re sharing is usually different.
For instance, when I coach my high-growth CEOs, they often want to focus on developing skills in the areas of leadership, communication, strategic thinking, coaching their senior executives, creating truly engaged and high performing cultures, etc. These topics tend to be areas you’d look to coaching or mentorship to find.
However, the knowledge a therapist could share may be about the impact of stress on one’s mental health, the strain that pressure can put on relationships, or how to communicate with emotional honesty, etc. Typically, coaching uses more Educator style than therapy does, but the main distinction is perhaps shaped by the knowledge-base from which they draw.
Strategist
Strategist is all about helping people solve the issues they’re facing. Both coaches and therapists tend to solve problems. However, the nature of the problems tends to be different.
Coaching will likely focus on solving the strategic problems of the present and future. Ideally, the coach helps the coachee dig down to the root cause of the issue and come up with a plan or practical solution. This can be about issues ranging from team dynamics to broken systems.
While not always the case, therapy tends to look to the past for the root cause of the issues someone faces today. This past-to-present orientation helps identify behavioral and psychological patterns and looks at their emotional or psychological origins.
In an oversimplified sense, coaching and therapy tend to differ on what they fix – the problem or the person. Both have a unique way of expressing the Strategist style.
Provocateur
Provocateur is essentially the rigorous examination and questioning of our assumptions or beliefs. This investigation often leads to discovering uncomfortable truths. These truths can make us squirm. While Provocateur sometimes comes across as skepticism or criticism, it ideally helps someone find flaws in their thinking or behaviors.
In leadership or executive coaching, a coachee may have a plan they think will work. The coach can help them poke holes in that plan to find hidden assumptions and risks. The coach might “call them out” or point out when the coachee says one thing and does another. The Provocateur style believes the best thinking is re-thinking.
In therapy, the Provocateur focus may be in helping someone find the flaw in their story about themselves. They may ask, “Did you think insulting them was a good idea?” or “Is that really who you are or want to be?” The focal point tends to be the past and its impact on the present (which spills into the future.)
However, therapists may use less Provocateur due their desire to provide comfort, nurturing, and healing (which is emphasized by other styles ahead). That said, the use of Provocateur varies widely based on the coach or therapist as an individual.
Explorer
Explorer focuses on helping someone expand their thinking and get out of thought ruts. It’s about creativity, innovation, and new ideas. This style actively uses curiosity to wander into new, undiscovered territory together. Questions like, “What does success mean to you?” or “How would you know if your team was engaged?” are Explorer questions.
While both therapists and coaches ask these questions, therapy is more likely to evoke curiosity about one’s past, whereas coaching will evoke it about one’s present and future.
A coach might ask, “What do you value? How can this value shape your future decisions?” A therapist might ask, “What did you value as a child? How does that value shape your present interactions?”
Again, the focal point of the questions will often be different. Both therapists and trained coaches are usually high in Explorer style questions.
Confidant
Confidant is about deep listening, empathy, compassion. It’s about accepting someone, just as they are. It’s about creating a non-judgmental space to be open and share what’s really going on.
While coaches are often great at empathizing, therapists have deep training in this arena, especially in the areas of past pain, trauma, and wounding. Depending on the therapist’s background, experience, and training, there are ways that a therapist can create the safety to talk about our darkest and worst experiences and emote in ways we often don’t with others. This, perhaps, is the superpower of therapists.
Yes, coaches care. Coaches empathize. Coaches create safety. But healing past traumas is really a central focus of therapy, not coaching.
When trauma isn’t the core focus of the relationship, coaches are great at being a safe space to confide in someone that cares. They won’t look at you as broken. Coaches will often listen and empathize with frustrations, celebrate your successes, and create a space of safety to share about what’s meaningful to you. In sum, coaches and therapists approach Confidant differently, but it’s a major focus of most therapy.
Transformer
Finally, Transformer is about helping someone fulfill their potential. You’ve likely had someone in your life see your potential, even when you didn’t see it in yourself. And perhaps because of them, you are where you are today. In that way, they used the Transformer style to help you fulfill aspects of your potential.
However, sometimes when we reach toward our potential (like aspiring towards or getting a new level of success) our limiting beliefs, emotions, and pains churn to the surface. Both coaches and therapists use Transformer. Yet coaching and therapy often focus on opposite sides of the coin.
A coach may help you dream about the kind of leader you want to become. Seeing it. Feeling it. And practically touching it. Glimpsing our potential often drives to the surface beliefs and feelings of inadequacy, imposter syndrome, and fears. These emotions show up in the present as we aspire to a brighter future. While the past may come into a coaching conversation, the coach will primarily help you process feelings in the now to free you to fulfill your potential future.
However, therapists typically focus on the starting point of one’s feelings of inadequacy, imposter syndrome, and fears originating from the past. Through a variety of transformative techniques, the therapist then tries to free you from the limitations of the past so that you feel better in the present – and by extension, the future.
Both coaches and therapists use the Transformer style differently. Both are effective, and perhaps complementary, approaches to the interaction.
Summary
Both therapy and coaching use RESPECT styles to shape their interactions and interventions. Which is right for you may depend on your preferences. That said, your experience of either coaching or therapy will be highly dependent on the individual RESPECT style habits and tendencies of your coach or therapist themselves.
Knowing or discovering the styles used by your coach or therapist may matter more than the intervention type itself.
How to Find Out the RESPECT Styles of your Coach or Therapist
All coaches and therapists will have various habits and tendencies with their use of these seven coaching styles. Most will have two or three styles they lean towards heavily, two or three styles they occasionally use, and two they don’t use often. It is rare to get a coach or therapist that is high in all of them.
Ideally, the coach or therapist uses a variety of styles. The choice of style should depend on what the moment needs, not what they’re comfortable with. But this isn’t always the case. Some of this style limitation is based on training (or lack of it). Some of style limitation is based on experience level.
For instance, in my original doctoral research, the coach with the most experience used the most style variety. The one with the least experience showed the least style variety.
The best way to tell how the coach or therapist approaches their interaction is to have them take the RESPECT Styles assessment.
Do you lead, coach, or try to take a coach-like approach to your interactions? If so, you can also take the RESPECT Coaching Styles assessment here.
When a coach or therapist knows their RESPECT styles, you can get invaluable insights into how they approach their interactions. If you know their styles, you can also ask them to dial up or dial down various styles according to what you want.
However, what styles do you want your coach or therapist to use most? You can now take the RESPECT Preferences assessment and you can share it with your coach or therapist.
When you know what you’re looking for, you can share your report with either a coach or therapist. It’s like giving them an answer key about the interaction styles you want most!
Prior to the Coachee Preferences assessment, I now realize I spent 25 years guessing what my coachees wanted from me. Some clients clicked immediately with my style, and others took time – but it’s wasted time.
Now, I have every single client take this assessment. I’ve noticed that in a few seconds (not a few sessions) I can dial in my coaching and offer tailored value from the first moment we speak. We get the results they want most, even in the first session. To coach without it seems asinine now, but unfortunately it’s how most coaches and therapists operate until the power of the various RESPECT assessments.
Summary of the Coaching and Therapy Approach to Interactions
The most fundamental difference between coaching and therapy is the orientation to time and the type of work that needs to be done.
Coaches tend to focus on the present to help you create the future you want. Therapists tend to focus on healing from past experiences to positively influence your present and future.
Yet underlying both one-on-one interaction types, the fundamental RESPECT Styles shape what they say and how they say it.
Now that we’ve discovered these seven RESPECT styles, you can see how coaches and therapists may use these styles differently. Having read this blog, you’re now in a better position to understand which might be better for you. Then the only real questions left are, “What are the styles of the practitioner and how do their styles match your preferences?”
David Morelli, PhD
David is the CEO and co-founder of OwlHub and the creator of the RESPECT Coaching Styles™. He has 25 years of executive coaching and leadership development experience. When he's not inspiring people to grow, you can find him making a fool of himself onstage as an improviser.
