A Note on Coaching

Before I explain further, consider these two scenarios:

Scenario 1 - Your boss approaches you with some overdue feedback and it doesn't sound good. In short, he says says you've been making some mistakes lately and failing to meet expectations. He didn't witness the mishap directly but has heard enough from your peers, in his opinion, to offer up some good coaching to you.

Using the 5-Why's approach, he dives deeper and deeper into the core of the problem, exposing what he believes to be the true source of your mistakes. Now that he has diagnosed your problem more thoroughly for you, he tells you exactly what to fix. To avoid an unnecessary confrontation, you reluctantly agree. Within a month or so he asks your peers whether you have made the changes or not.

Scenario 2 - A player on the field stops just short of his goal. Frustrated, he runs to the sideline and takes a knee. The coach runs up and kneels right beside him, pulls out his clip board and leads with the words:

• "All right, here's what we're gonna do. You entered perfectly, so let's keep the footwork and pivot hard just like you always do. This time I want you to get lower so that we can punch it through."

In both scenarios, the problem was recognized and coaching was provided. Why do the interactions in scenario 1 leave us feeling so frustrated and awkward, while the coaching in scenario 2 seems to have the exact opposite effect?

I Tend to Learn The Hard Way

Shortly after completing a 14-year career in the Army, I realized that I had spent that entire time coaching my team members incorrectly. Coaching subordinates represents roughly a third of the job performed as a leader in most organizations. As you can imagine, accepting that I had been so wrong for so long was a bitter pill. To make matters worse, getting it wrong in combat arms roles can have particularly destructive consequences.

One of the occupational specialties I held in the military was 'Light Infantryman' (11B), which in terms of modern combat effectively translates to 'rifleman who doesn't own a vehicle'. We moved on foot, carried everything we needed to live on our backs, and relied on those around us to complete the assignment and stay alive. The most important task we have as riflemen is mastering the rifle... go figure. The mission, the team, their families, and our lives, could all potentially depend on our proficiency with this single tool. Despite the serious nature of the training however, our potential was stunted to some degree by what I call the plateau mindset.

The Plateau Mindset

We're all familiar with the scenario - We're new on the job and shortly after learning where the bathroom is, it's time to begin new-hire training. After drinking from the firehose of new and somewhat sensical information, we try our hand in the real world. Over the course of a year or so, and a few blunders later, we begin to earn some degree of confidence. A year after that and we are officially seasoned pros who have witnessed most scenarios and formulated plans for handling them. Every subsequent year, we prove our high degree of professional proficiency with a short retraining and recertification.

Congratulations... you are officially on the plateau.

When we're on the plateau, feedback (or coaching) tends to be sparse. When we do receive it, we are inclined to receive it negatively. After all, this is our livelihood, and we have been doing our job successfully for years now. Someone who has likely built minimal rapport or trust with us is now saying that we are doing something wrong? Thanks, but no thanks.

Both the mentor and mentee hate these conversations and no amount of training from HR makes them comfortable. The feedback sandwich, the OSKAR model, the five why's, the GROW framework... all leave us with the same common outcomes. Now of course personalities differ, and feedback is received differently with different people, however it is my experience that the high performers who take the most pride in their work, are often the most challenging to coach for exactly this reason - they take pride in their level of proficiency. The reality of human nature is no different whether we are a surgeon or a garbageman.

A Cure - The North-Star Mindset

Fast forward roughly two decades after enlisting and I found myself sitting 40 feet behind a far better rifle shooter than I could ever have dreamed to be - my 15-year-old daughter. As she prepares for the 2023 Olympic Trials, her coach, an Olympic Games champion himself, sits cattycornered to her left analyzing her every move. His laptop is attached to several sensors for analysis of her position, approach, follow-though, hold window, balance, breathing cadence/depth, heart rate, trigger squeeze, and much much more. Her rifle, suit, and other gear is continuously re-adjusted to the millimeter or Newton-meter, depending on what is being adjusted. To get here, she has trained this one very specific 10-meter shot for six to eight hours per day, six days per week, for years on end. This, all to be named the best rifle shooter in the world for one day.

The coaching process used is anything but haphazard - it's deliberate, methodical, and continuous. This process is outlined in detail in both of Lanny Basham's books, With Winning in Mind, and Parenting Champions. Most importantly, the coaching is not simply an awkward conversation focused on what the athlete did wrong - quite the opposite. In fact, the two simple but essential details I learned about their coaching process is found in its continuous nature, and the coaches delivery.

Coaching is Continuous

One of the first details I noticed is that the coaching process is never-ending. This means that if someone finds it hard to receive feedback, that discomfort likely won't last for more than a day. It is hard to remain uncomfortable with something that has been built in as a continuous part of the process. Eventually they will grow comfortable with feedback. Case in point, when a high-level shooter trains, they often do so in short spurts, receiving feedback in-between and sometimes during. This could mean 10 to 50 direct coaching sessions each day. More importantly however, is how the coaching is delivered and why.

The Delivery is Crucial

1. Get into a coaching position

As leaders, we perform many tasks and coaching is only one of them. That said, the coaching function is never done most effectively from an authoritative position. This is partially because we lack clarity on how to adjust if we are multiple degrees separated from the task at hand. When we're coaching, we must be in the thick of it alongside them. Secondly, making adjustments to our own behavior is exceptionally difficult, much less attempting to change someone else's. Unless the one being coached is deeply afraid of us, then we will need to establish some rapport and trust at their level before attempting to affect any degree of change.

2.????? Establish the baseline.

It is important to start with what was done correctly. The common assumption here is that we are doing this to build up someone's self-esteem in some manipulative fashion, but there is far more to this. If we hired the right people then the vast majority of what they do should be correct, even if they are not yet meeting expectations. If we fail to call these things out clearly then we risk those things changing as well. Establishing a baseline of what was done correctly does serve to demonstrate our awareness that they know how to do their job, which is important, but it also tells them which actions we need see to continue without change.

3.????? Gameplan for the future. The past does not exist.

The last and most important step is simple - gameplan for the future. Don't focus on the past. The idea that 'you did something wrong' seeks to look backward and assumes there is some sort of nearby threshold we can reach where everything we do is correct - a plateau, if you will.?In this framework, there are no opportunity for continuous improvement, only personal blunders that should be discovered and eliminated. This is the coaching equivalent of a fixed mindset.

As Vince Lombardi famously stated, "perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence." This is not merely an inspirational quote, but a reference to growth mindsets. Put simply, if the goal we're aiming for is currently far out of reach, then we will need to make continuous improvements in the future to get there. We can't reasonably treat every one of those future adjustments as personal failings or mistakes.

Summary

I want to finish by simply reviewing the scenario 2 from the beginning of this essay. Remember, the coach knelt beside the player (in a coaching position) and said the following:

• "All right, here's what we're gonna do (immediately looks to the future). You entered perfectly, so let's keep the footwork the same and pivot hard just like you always do (setting the baseline). This time I want you to get lower so that you can punch it through (game planning for the future)."

Notes

1. The mention of "garbageman" was not meant to be demeaning as I was one for several years and I am proud of that.
2. No portion of this was written with ChatGPT. Given the grammatical errors (insert superfluous comma here) this is probably obvious.

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