What Coaching Is & What Coaching Is Not ?

What Is Coaching ?

I strongly believe that coaching is about moving forwards and helping people improve their individual performance, which has a knock-on effect for organizations on team and organizational performance. The bottom line is "Coaching is about being a catalyst for positive change in a way that’s appropriate for individuals, helping them to be the very best they can be "

Tim Gallwey agrees with the same thinking when he says: ‘It’s about evoking the best from people, including yourself.

While Sir John Whitmore shares belief that the purpose of coaching is about raising awareness and responsibility of the person being coached, which ultimately is about assisting them with their progress, productivity and Performance .

What Coaching Is Not ?

Unfortunately ‘coaching’ seems to have become a word that is used to describe all manner of things. It’s therefore also important to identify what coaching is not, as it appears to have become ‘the answer’ for anything to do with change, consultancy and training new people. Let’s be clear here, coaching is not a panacea for everything! Coaching is not telling someone what to do , it’s not giving advice or providing solutions. It is not the same as mentoring, counselling, training or consultancy. However, I firmly believe coaching is hugely powerful when it is delivered by competent, emotionally intelligent coaches in the appropriate circumstances .

While there are similarities with other interventions such as mentoring, counselling and consultancy, there are also key differences. Let’s imagine you are going to bake a cake and you want some input from another person. How might a coach, mentor, counsellor, consultant or trainer help you?

• A coach would ask you questions about what end result you want and check if you had everything you needed, what other equipment/ ingredients you might need, and check with you that it matched your priorities.
• A mentor would share his or her recipe with you and his or her experience of how he or she does it.
• A counsellor would explore any anxieties you had about baking the cake.
• A consultant would evaluate the situation, provide three or four recipe options and discuss which was appropriate for you.
• A trainer would demonstrate how it was done, give you the equipment and ingredients you need, and observe while you were baking it, giving feedback when needed.

Mentoring

I believe that the key difference between coaching and mentoring is that mentors bring their range of expertise, knowledge and experience, which is passed on to the mentee where appropriate. So, if a senior manager is mentoring someone junior to him or her in the organization, he or she is modelling and sharing his or her experiences of what it’s like to be doing the job and giving a feel for ‘how we do things around here’.

Counselling

Counselling supports people in working through emotional distress or anxieties that prevent them from functioning as well as they’d like to. The counselling conversation can spend a lot of time looking at the past and how people have got to where they are.

Consultancy

Consultants work in organizations in numerous ways, often to define problem areas/inefficiencies and give advice to develop solutions. They bring knowledge and expertise in their areas of work and pass advice on to their clients. Coaching is not about giving advice, though helping coaches really access their own expertise is a key part of it .

Training

Great training is about equipping people with new skills and knowledge to help their personal and/or professional development. The skilled trainer will train/teach people the relevant new information and. Coaching is not about training someone to do something brand new but it is a great way support teaching/training to really embed the learning, as highlighted by the following research.

Olivero et al (1997) looked at the effects of executive coaching with a group of 31 managers. This group had management development training and they measured that their productivity had increased by 22.4 per cent afterwards. When they followed up the training with some coaching, the productivity rose to 88 per cent – a further improvement of more than 65 per cent. This shows just how important coaching can be to make sure that knowledge and skills acquired during training are actually applied back in the workplace .

I am hopeful that you have got better understanding about what coaching is and what coaching is not and it will help you to analyze your situation in future and make a decision about what you require from training , coaching , mentoring , counselling or consultancy .