Is coaching earning a bad name?
Let me try and answer it in a somewhat constructive manner.
Truth is that coaching works and is extremely efficacious.
However, like any other professional service, bad news always travels much faster than good news. It is true that many sponsors and coachees are dissatisfied and are certainly saying bad things about coaching and their experiences of having worked with or interacted with coaches.
I would like to step back and dip into our 19 years of experience of having worked with clients, managed over 2000+ paid coaching engagements and try and understand what is causing these gaps. .
The first gap is what I call the consultation gap. Before you have a coaching dialogue, it is important for the coach or the coach solution provider to have a consultative dialogue to understand the stated and unstated needs of clients.
The second is what I call the installation gap. How do we design the whole solution and install it in the client organization so that it is set up for success. This calls for a lot of collaborative efforts including education and alignment.
The third is what I call the competence gap, the gap between whatever you have designed and what you actually deliver.
Now there are many things one can say about competence. First, credentials do not equal competence – just because I have a certificate does not make me a competent coach.
Second, there is something called contextual competence. Many years ago, a very young person used to work in my team, and he used to tell me that his dream was to become a marriage counselor. I said, yes, first you need to get married and deal with your own marriage before you can counsel others on marriage.
Zero understanding of context actually can lead to poor contextual competence.
There is just one more thing I’d like to say here. That is what Jagdish Seth and others wrote in the book Clients for Life. They call it professional independence and they look at three dimensions: Financial independence, intellectual independence, emotional independence.
Finally, is the satisfaction gap. There is a certain understanding, there is a certain design, there is a certain competence, but finally whatever you do can lead to dissatisfaction if the client is not clear about what they actually had in mind.
How do I ensure that I am candid with stakeholders about how we are making progress? How do we ensure there is scope to course correct to ensure that we are realistic of outcomes or we work together to enhance and raise the bar?
So if we address these four gaps, I think we can try and reduce the kind of negative perception that today exists about coaching.
It’s very tough to be a leader today. They need help and coaches can help, but you cannot just get into a room and have a conversation and assume that coaching will work.
Youtube Link: https://youtu.be/QqZYRNW5jP0
