Goal Setting - how important is it?

I had the great pleasure of seeing , Tony Grant give a lecture today. He was a very engaging, very accomplished lecturer. He knows his psychology backwards and did a very good job of bringing in evidence from all sorts of psychological disciplines into coaching.

The main thrust if his session was about goals, and made me question the importance of goal setting in career guidance and coaching. Goal setting is one of the things that careers advisers often imagine is a key difference between the two career disciplines.

I recently published an article in Constructing the Future which outlines the evidence of the difference between career guidance and career coaching, and previous research suggests that although goal setting is often perceived to be a key difference (with goal setting being a more significant part of coaching than guidance), in reality, coaches and advisers would use goal setting in the same way: setting goals with clients who would benefit from goal setting, and not with those who wouldn't.

This was an explanation that  I was quite happy with, but listening to Tony Grant has made me wonder.

Grant was suggesting that it's just not possible not to have no goals. Goals don't need to be big or long term, but they do underpin everything. Without goals, we wouldn't be able to get out of bed, or make it to the office, and those of us who claim not to have goals, are either not really understanding what goals are, or are being disingenuous.

And, having thought about it, I quite agree. So where does that leave our career interventions? Should we be conducting coaching or guidance sessions that don't start with goals? I begin to think not. And whether we are using the GROW model as a framework for a coaching session, or the Ali-Graham careers interview model, we aren't going to get our clients very far if we don't set goals both for what we're planning to achieve during our time together, and if we don't identify an end point to their current career thinking.

I like the idea that in the collaboration between coach and client, the client is responsible for the topic, and the coach is responsible for the process. I think I've concluded that the place we all need to start in every interaction is with the identification of these two levels of goals. And I think that without a goal for the session, the conversation is just a chat, and without a goal for the client's current career exploration, we are failing to take adequate responsibility for the process, and letting our clients down.

So what do you think? Is it possible to have a productive coaching or guidance conversation without goals? What would you do as a practitioner if your client was reluctant to set a goal during your session?