One of the fundamental principles of coaching is that it’s about facilitating creativity and independent thinking in the coachee. The coach is there to facilitate but if she starts giving advice then it’s all about her creativity – not that of the coachee.

This reduces the opportunity for the coachee to come up with his own solutions. Not only that, it can be demotivating, since there are few things as empowering and exciting as the opportunity to dream up your own solutions and put them into action.

So I’d have to say I do agree with this approach. One exception I would make would be in a situation where the coachee simply didn’t know enough to come up with an effective solution. In those cases, a coach can be effective if she switches into ‘educating mode’ — explaining the necessary information or pointing the coachee to learning resources.

Strictly speaking, this isn’t coaching, and some coaches would argue that it’s not a coach’s place to take on this educational role — but I’m quite happy to do it for a client, as long as we realise that will be switching back to coaching mode as soon as he or she has enough knowledge to make some informed decisions.

I’m afraid I’ve not come across any memorable discussions of the strengths and weaknesses of the GROW model — most of the coaching books seem to focus on explaining what it is and how to use it rather than critiquing it.

Personally, I’d suggest that it’s a good model and susceptible to the same weaknesses as any other model — i.e. we should take it as a guiding framework but not get too attached to it. John Whitmore himself stresses “that GROW, without the context of AWARENESS and RESPONSIBILITY and the skill of questioning to generate them, has little value”.

I’m afraid I don’t know of any coaching support groups in the North West. All the best with your coaching journey.