What is Coaching?

It sometimes feels like the only word I ever hear.

Coaching.

Everyone uses it. Everyone means something different.

Most mean well, others use it to tick boxes.

Ever heard the phrase “Just go and coach someone”? Amazing. How? What outcome do you want to see? How do I select that person? How do I know who needs the coaching? How will I know if it’s worked? What should I coach them about?

Let’s be honest – the complexities of all of the above questions are way too many and detailed to go into in one article… even a series of articles might take an entire lifetime to do it justice.

Today I just want to focus on one frustration I have. What actually is ‘coaching’?

It’s often confused with giving feedback and training, and the three are often intermittently used as placeholders for each other. We say one and mean the other, but everyone ‘get’s the idea’. Wrong. What they get, is the WRONG idea.

If you approached your team now, and asked “Who wants some coaching” would any of them put their hands up? None, I’d bet. Why is that?

Let’s set the tone. You’ve just been promoted from general staff to your first leadership position. You’re a ‘Manager’. You direct and delegate, you control metrics and challenge those who cause obstruction to the hitting of those objectives… those targets.

“Jenny.. you need to coach your team now. I expect you to do at least an hour per week with each of your team. You’re a leader now, you need to be able to coach your staff. In 3 months, we will sit down and see how well you’ve done when we discuss your probation period. If you have any questions, come and see me.”

We’ve all had that conversation, right? It may be a bit extreme, but we’ve all had a variation of that. From the moment we are promoted to the first rung of the management ladder, we’re expected to be able to do these things, and yet we have no skillset to support it, and nobody ever explains what they mean, or qualifies it to us. More to the point, if you’ve made this request of others, you’ve grossly misjudged the importance and power of coaching within your team.

So, what actually is coaching?

The first google search result I found on this comes back with “Put simply, coaching is a process that aims to improve performance and focuses on the ‘here and now’ rather than on the distant past or future”

Unfortunately, I find that woefully inadequate.

It does however go on to clarify that most coaches believe that the person who is being coached has the relevant knowledge and ability within themselves already.

That’s a bit closer to the truth, in my eyes.

“Coaching is unlocking a person’s potential to maximise their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them.” – John Whitmore, in Coaching for Performance.

I find this an excellent starting point, but there’s more to it still.

“Coaching is the skill of inspiring those who need our guidance in the process of unlocking their own ability to use their knowledge, experience and skillset to successfully navigate their challenges, goals and ambitions.”

This, although probably not accurate in everyone’s eyes, feels much more comfortable to me. It’s NOT about the coach talking for most of the session, explaining how they achieved things and how they did this, that and the other.

It’s about asking questions, listening (active listening, mind you – not just ‘hearing’ – a skillset of it’s own), confirming, reviewing, and facilitating. It’s about helping the coachee come to their own realisations, come up with the right path themselves, and helping them to see how they can proceed down that path.

We help them unlock their potential, help them consider their obstacles and barriers to their success, hold them accountable to their efforts to experiment with ways to resolve these challenges, and help them appreciate their own successes when they correctly navigate those waters.

Coaching is about whatever is most pressing. It’s not necessarily about forcing the coachee down a path (it can be directed, but telling someone “I’m going to coach you on how to talk to customers better” isn’t going to help their openness), but rather it should be guided both by business needs, and the coachees’ own needs and desires. Coaching is about one or two topics of assistance, not a full skillset appraisal – give people too much and they won’t be able to cope, or will give up and revert back to their previous pattern of behaviour.

It’s about helping them find their own path and solutions, agreeing with them a timeframe for them to start that behaviour or path, and then coming back to them to let them assess how well it affected the desired changes.

That’s not a full description of a coaches’ responsibilities, but it’s thereabouts. You make THEM the hero, not you. If you need to go into a true coaching session, and have the client tell you that you’re amazing, then you’re in the wrong role. Coaching is a the sort of role that requires you to feel your own self-satisfaction when you get your coachee to their ‘lightbulb moment’.

So how is that different from training, or indeed giving feedback? Are they not the same, or at least similar?

Short answer? NO.

Training is the art of imparting knowledge, skills or experience on another person with the goal of increasing their abilities, performance and skillset. It’s very much an art of talking, demonstrating, engaging and otherwise disseminating information from you to them, in a way that takes into account the learning styles of all those in the room around you – whether that’s a display on a powerpoint, getting them to write points onto a whiteboard, or role playing situations – training is a very different hat to wear.

 Training does require some of the same skills, and it’s no less an important art. Being able to hold the attention of a digitally distracted audience for hours or even days is a skill that requires honing over time. But it’s also not coaching.

Giving feedback then, is the art of helping a person understand their performance, the impact of that performance, how it might have gone better, or how it went really well, and training them to find those moments themselves to allow them to be more self aware, self critical, and to strive for constant improvement.

Often it’s most successful done at the time of the behaviour which is being fed back on, and does again, use some of the same skills – making it less of an ‘attack’ on them, keeping it impersonal – moving the conversation to “How could WE have done that better” instead of “How could YOU have done that better”. Again, very different from coaching.

So I’ll finish this up by saying this… if any of the above conversations are seen by your team as being negative things to do, then you’ve set the expectations all wrong. Maybe you’re only coaching when performance declines, and not supporting with higher achievers (nobody wants to be that person who ‘has to be coached’ because they’ve missed targets). Coaching, training and feedback are gifts. They should be given out that way, and they should be heralded by the business as that.

Coaching is a two way street – the coach and the coachee are in a reciprocal relationship, and should be learning from each other constantly.

 When you are coaching, it’s time to take off your training hat, and your manager’s hat. Leave judgement to one side.

Importantly, not everyone can coach, and not everyone can be coached. Coaching requires curiosity above all else – the desire to understand what makes another person tick, and to want to help them. Coachees must be receptive and want to be coached. Some may not be receptive because they’re currently in a bad personal situation temporarily, but others may be totally resistant to coaching.

This must all be taken into account when considering coaching in your business, and strategies aligned with this. Support your new leaders – show them HOW to coach. That starts at the top. The leadership should be coaches of their subordinates, and they should lead by example. Few businesses who advertise they do this actually believe it enough to do anything other than pay it lip-service.

Lastly – coaches exist everywhere, and many have a bad reputation. Without doubt there are many ‘cowboy’ coaches out there who have little to no experience or expertise in the subjects they profess to coach, above and beyond the E-Course they just did.

Others may have little to no experience, but have a natural talent for helping people discover the things about themselves that they didn’t even know existed – it’s unfair to judge someone solely on their tenure in an industry.

What’s clear though, is that you should try coaching, if you can. It’s a rewarding, enjoyable experience that offers many advantages to both sides, and it’s one of the greatest gifts we can bestow upon another human!