Coaching Practiced

20 The application of the responsibility pie technique in coaching

Garret O’Moore

Abstract

This article focuses on the ‘responsibility pie’ technique which can help clients consider the degree to which they are personally responsible for a difficult situation or event and take appropriate action.

Keywords

Responsibility pie, Dennis Greenberger, Christine Padesky, reattribution of responsibility.

Original publication details: O’Moore, G. (2011, December). The application of the responsibility pie technique in coaching. he Coaching Psychologist, 7(2), 154–155. Reproduced with permission of The British Psychological Society.

The ‘responsibility pie’ (Greenberger & Padesky, 1995) was developed for use within CBT to enable clients who felt guilty and ashamed about a situation or event to learn to reattribute an appropriate amount of responsibility between themselves and other causal factors.

The effectiveness of the technique has resulted in it being used with a range of client presentations including people diagnosed with OCD (Westbrook, Kennerly & Kirk, 2007) in which a core feature is an overdeveloped sense of responsibility (Veale, 2007).

Although initially developed for use in therapy it can be integrated into a range of coaching approaches where a coach finds themselves working with clients who have a tendency to attribute a disproportionate amount of blame to themselves or to others.

The following example illustrates how Sarah, who felt distressed after assuming that a ...