Wrong selection of Coach and Client can be as bad as a wrong marriage. Many a time the coaches make the mistake of selecting the clients who are not coachable. Let us see some of the key indicators of a client who are not coachable.
No buy-in: If the coaching is pushed on to the client by his organization or supervisor, coachee will have no interest and he/she will be keen to prove that the process fail. Coaching being a joint thinking and exploration journey, it is bound to fail if one of the partners do not trust the process, or outcome. In such cases the client may end up questioning the coach or trying to prove him wrong, and the original plan of jointly thinking and exploring new possibilities would go for a toss. There are many reasons why a coachee will not have the buy-in for coaching
- The client is on his/her notice period: During the notice period, the coachee has already made up his mind, and caching session at this stage will be taken as a forced favor to retain him/her. This means, no buy in.
- Coachee is on Performance Improvement Plan : If a coach is assigned to an employee as a last resort before terminating his/her career with the organization, employee will not have a buy-in as he/she will be busy exploring the job market for his next assignment. Even if the organization is keen to give him a last chance, coachee will not believe such intentions. Not Trust, means no Buy-in.
- Coachee is a super successful person: Many a times the employees who are super successful will assume they are ready climb up the organization ladder. They might have this "I know all" attitude, and will not be ready to explore his/her blind spots. Apart from bringing the numbers on the table, most organizations focus on the strong alignment of the employee with the core values of the organization for senior roles. The numbers do not play a major role here as most people in the N-1, N-2 positions reach there with great success in their previous roles. A 360 degree feedback will be an eye opener for many, but some of them do brush away the feedback as opinion of jealous people against him/her. Here again he/she will not be coachable.
- Not realizing the value of perception: Some coachees may not have any specific missing qualities to grow to the next level. However, the decision makers (top management and other stake holders) would have perceived his/her profile negatively due to distortion or generalization of the data about his/her actions reaching them. Since it is an error from the others, the coachee might feel the coaching is to be given to those stake holders and hence will not have a buy-in. A stake holder centric coaching in fact help to change the perception of the stake holders.
- Highly Egoistic: High Ego makes the person become slave of confirmation bias. He/she will not be able to see the numerous stupid actions from his/her side, even though it will be visible to everyone else. He/she will tend to credit all success to him/her and all failures to others. Many successful people in reality are successful "in spite of" their bad behaviors. But they tend to believe they are successful "because of" the same bad behaviors. Even when they fail in another situation OR with another group, they tend to credit the failure to others than looking inward. High ego can come from past success in career, life or education. Such people without any humility and high ego will not buy-in coaching.
