Abstract

Support is often described as central to coaching, but it remains loosely defined and rarely taught. While it is widely expected that coaches will provide support throughout the process, how that support is created and managed in practice is often left to the coaches' best intention rather than an explicit agreement and collaboration with the client. This research challenges the notion that support is an assumed skill. Instead, it explores what support really means in workplace coaching, how it is enacted, and how it is managed reflexively throughout the coaching intervention.

Adopting a pragmatist stance and drawing on symbolic interactionism and discourse analysis, the research followed an exploratory sequential mixed methods design. A national survey (108 responses) was used to gather broad insight into how coaches describe support, its role in their practice, and how it is (or is not) addressed in training. The findings indicated a strong consensus around the value of support, but limited clarity on how it is developed or taught. This informed a second qualitative phase involving twenty in-depth interviews with experienced workplace coaches. These interviews explored how support is actually applied in practice, and how coaches navigate the ethical, emotional, and relational complexities that surround it.

Five themes are presented, showing that support is not a fixed behaviour or a set of standardised actions. Instead, it is deeply reflexive, shifting in response to context, client need, emotional tone, and the moment-to-moment flow of the coaching relationship. Participants described moving between care, containment, challenge, and perspective shifting, often drawing on embodied judgement rather than structured models. Support was described as something co-created, not imposed, and something that requires presence, awareness, and relational skill.

This thesis contributes to theory by reframing support as an active, relational skill rather than a passive or backgrounded quality. It positions support as something that is negotiated through interaction, shaped by both coach and client, and embedded in the dynamics of the working alliance. The research also contributes to the coaching practice by providing a new conceptual lens for naming, teaching, and developing support in more explicit and practical ways. A new framework, The Four Dimensions of the Coaching Support Lens, is proposed to help coaches integrate support more explicitly into their practice, offering a practical contribution to coach education and supervision. It argues that support should be recognised as a core skill, not simply something coaches are expected and assumed to “hold” without guidance. These findings carry implications for coach education, supervision, and professional standards, particularly in how relational skills are developed and assessed.