A Coach by Any Other Name… Might Get Hired More

Recently in the treatment of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, especially among military, there’s been a shift away from the word “therapy” towards STAIR, Skills Training in Affective and Interpersonal Regulation. Veterans are less offended by “skills training” than “psychotherapy.” That's because many veterans resent being told they need therapy and therefore resist it and as a result avoid treatment that could help them.

I’ve had a long career as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist and now as a CEO executive coach and I’ve noticed something mental health, psychotherapy and coaching have in common.

That something is stigma.

By stigma I mean a negative connotation with that a tendency for people to feel personally attacked and who then often become defensive when you suggest they might need therapy or coaching.

And the net result is their often resisting accepting and receiving help from either a therapist or coach that might help them.

What lies beneath people’s feeling personally attacked when you suggest that they might need therapy or coaching or even when you attempt to soften it by saying, “You know. You might really benefit from therapy or coaching.”

The trigger is feeling personally put down and criticized for their personality, because underneath what you are saying is the implication that you and many other people have difficulty dealing with them and furthermore that the cause of such difficulty is not you or those other people, but the person you are telling to hire a therapist or coach.

Often unconsciously beneath the above triggering situation is that the person you’re speaking to may feel that they can’t change their behavior because their behavior is controlled by their personality and their personality is made up of the sum total of all their experiences in life, including how they dealt with many traumatic events early in life. Their personality developed to survive and cope with those traumas. However, what helped them to cope can often create problems later in life in different contexts.

For instance if a person is excessively sarcastic, dismissive and talking down to people, all of which can cause them to be perceived as difficult, it may be that all of those behaviors serve to psychologically protect them from getting too close to anyone which would necessitate their lowering their guard to be more open and vulnerable. And if their prior experiences have been that when they have been open and vulnerable, they have been criticized, belittled, or mocked which emotionally injured them, you can understand why they might adopt sarcasm, dismissiveness and talking down to people as a way of keeping a protective barrier.

The problem of course is when they act that way with people who have no intention of hurting them, it can cause those other people to react negatively or to just avoid them, complain to HR about them or in the worst case, sue the company for having a hostile workplace.

One of the top executive coaches in the world, Marshall Goldsmith, expressed this clearly in his iconic, mega-bestselling book, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There . That book explained that what helped you develop a certain technical expertise to get you to a certain level of success in your career, may prevent you from succeeding further when your success requires you getting along with people if you want to motivate them. For instance, engineers often succeed by focusing on defects and correcting them or preventing them, but focusing on people from that POV can cause problems that prevent cooperation.

What is the best approach to these “difficult” people who can also be thin skinned and reactive when you suggest that they need to see a coach or even a therapist?

For years, the way to make a convincing case is to say to such people, “Even athletes like Tom Brady, Tiger Woods or LeBron James have a coach to become even better by pointing out things they don’t see.”

This on the surface sounds legitimate, but it’s the implied personal attack and innuendo about their difficult personality that comes across as if you’re putting lipstick on a pig. And in this case, that pig is a personal insult.

What is missing in using the metaphor of a star athlete is that it is obvious that the athlete is excellent in many other areas and coaching often focuses on something technical vs. interpersonal. In the case of a person who needs a coach or therapist, it is not necessarily emphasized or made explicit what they are excellent in and even when it is, it doesn’t erase the sting that you are attacking their personality.

One of the ways around this, which I’m guessing is too late to change the vernacular and widespread use of the word “coach,” is to tell people that if they want to be even more successful in their career, they might do well to improve their “non-technical skills” (i.e. people skills). The reason this may work is that it implies and compliments them on their “technical” competence which can soothe their ego.

I have been using this approach effectively for some time and have enhanced it by saying that they owe it to their excellent technical skills to do everything they can to help it achieve the greatest impact their competence can have so they can fulfill their potential.

I also usually tell them that they have more control over how they communicate and express themselves than they do over how its heard and how its heard can make a crucial difference in whether their impact will be positive or negative.

Furthermore, to decisively make the case for coaching to people who manage or lead other other vs. performing a technical task, I ask, "At the end of the day, what will determine your success more, your technical or non-technical, people skills?" And their usual answer is their non-technical, people skills.

I finally tell them that is why in approaching them I have called "coaching," "non-technical skills training." That’s because most people including them hear the word “coaching” as being critical and negative and are often more closed minded to it whereas they're often more open to “non-technical skills training” which many will often admit they could use.