What is coaching - and what isn't, but could be way more useful to you

In this article I am going to clarify what is coaching, how its approach differs from other disciplines like mentoring, consulting, counselling, and what you can do to harvest the best from this variety.

"Everyone these days has or is a coach." Watch it, as it's only going to be more and more so.

So you'd better know what we are talking about.

In recent years the market has witnessed an inflation on the use and adoption of the coaching profession. Many organisations seeking support for their people, reach out to coaches to help them with tailored, cared, personal support. Not only them, but also individuals more and more often want to be coached, as a response to life changes, new challenges, or the need to improve their quality of life, in a specific realm. Employment of coaches is projected to grow 20% from 2021 to 2031, much faster than the average for all occupations. We clearly have a need for people to develop fast in fast changing environments. On the other hand, looking for a coach has become a very "trendy" solution (for a very broad term) but isn't always the best approach: clarifying the terminology and all the different skills that it can address, i.e. all the professions that have been "absorbed" by the term "coach", may be useful for those wishing to find the right help for themselves or for the people they are trying to support.

"The mind that can conceive the problem can also resolve it." Coaching as a process to learn from one's mind.

In coaching the focus is on shifting the forced perspective. This is done mainly by means of language acting on the behaviour of mind. Coaching helps a person to learn rather than teaching them.

The essence of coaching is to:

• help a person change in the way they wish, and helping them go in the direction they want to go;
• support a person at every level in becoming who they want to be;
• build awareness, empower choice and lead to change.

Coaching relies on a range of communication skills (such as targeted re-statements, listening, questioning, clarifying) to help our mind shift perspectives and thereby discover different approaches to achieve our goals. For this reason it is a "meta-profession", a process that can be declined irrelevant of the context or the individual served.

The scientific approach behind these communication skills is so successful that it has led many "experts" to adopt it when advising their clients. Thus, the "relationship counsellor", the "business advisor" and even the "language teacher" have acquired coaching competencies which allow them to help the client more profoundly. It is now common to find "relationship coaches", "business coaches" and "language coaches", the experts who can also make use of the process of coaching to boost the efficacy of their profession... or at least one would hope. But in reality this is quite a rosy scenario. The opposite has unfortunately more often happened, especially in countries which do not require any form of certification to qualify a coach or when certifications imply only a course, without applied training (as opposed to demanding significant hours of practice and proven experience). Thus, a vast arrays of coaches has appeared on the market, merging some field specific knowledge with some intention to help others, but with not much practice and experience on either the field of work or life (organisations, business, relationships, language), or on how to use communication to unravel a person's mind and potential (coaching). This is all fine as it means everyone can get lots of help from all sorts of angles, but it also means that often this help does not fulfil expectations and misses quite the point, to the detriment of the professions involved ("here it is... another coach"..).

Advisors and Mentors

In my 25 years of travelling around the world, I discovered a quite astounding number of versions of a very famous beverage everyone is familiar with: Coca Cola. I have drank Pepsi Cola, Inca Cola, Breizh Cola, Mecca Cola and Coca Colla. I hope you are not surprised if not all of these contain cola seeds: the term "cola" has become synonym with carbonated drinks, the association so strong, that many brands just chose to call their drink something-Cola, no matter what is inside. My favourite is Inca Cola and will always be, but this is largely beside the point, the point being that this is more or less what has happened with the term "coaching". Let's try to undo this by extracting 2 roles that can be amongst the secret ingredients hiding behind the well known buzz term: advisors and mentors.

As we have seen above, the coach, to be a good coach, does not need to know much about the ongoing turmoil of your profession, the type of context where it is realised, or the competence you have or don't to fulfil it. Their work is successful when they help you in the way you think: forward, inward, outside the box, inside it, around it, above it, without it. A coach will not suggest what you should do, even less give you a knowledge you do not have, or pointing out to a solution that could address your problem or the problem of your organisation. This, especially if you went to a coach with some different expectations, may leave you empty handed, that is if what you were looking for was an innovative solution to a problem in the environment that requires knowledge you do not possess.

The teacher knows something the student does not. The opposite is true in coaching, where the client is the expert and the client has the answers, not the coach.

Advisors and mentors are the people who can help you here.

The advisor is the professional who has in depth knowledge of a specific field, sector, industry or competence and can assist you in resolving an issue that pertains this. The advisor intervention is normally short and sweet, and can be repeated across time, to help us fine-tuning at different stages after the implementation of the advice. The problem here, as you can hear, is technical, so there should not be much reason to confuse this with a coach. Yet there is. Extreme specialisation has led our leadership to often have a very limited set of skills. This also means not knowing what is really needed in specific circumstances. HR are even less equipped and the real role that can identify these needs is the COO, or a more broadly competent CEO with the help of a well diverse board. You might encounter "leadership coaches" that are actually dealing with "organisational advisory" or "business coaches" that are in reality "strategy advisors".

Advisors come and go, intervene as required and have a more detached approach: they look at the issue, not so much at the subject experiencing the issue: this is the role of the mentor. The mentor has the same extensive and in depth knowledge of the field, abut unlikely an advisor has also a keen understanding of how to develop that knowledge in another person: can transfer the skill, can help the person acquiring it but also developing the necessary inner capacity to work with this novel capability. This means getting acquainted with it, navigating the fractals that it generates, relating it in real case, every-day situations, get out of culs-de-sac, gaining confidence, findings opportunities to apply it, and expand it. The mentor creates the conditions for learning something new while feeling safe: it is the perfect sandbox for the growth of new domains of knowledge and practice. A mentor is a professional with a proven record in developing leadership in others. Again, as in the case of the advisors, C-levels do not like to let it known that they have a mentor (because in spite of what we say, our society does not live in, nor nourish, a learning culture) so they prefer to see themselves in the very private company of a "coach": they leave to their managers the responsibility to "mentor" employees, even if nobody has mentored the former into acquiring leadership development skills.

All the other help you can get

Beside the professions that are hiding inside the term "coach", we also have the opposite issue: going to a coach when the help needed is of a very different type. As a manager or an HR dealing with the request of an employee to be coached, or as an individual at odds with their current situation, one can try to find out more about the real source of the perceived need or discomfort. Sometimes executives ask for a coach, but they need a training; employees ask for a coach but they need someone to trust when their management is letting them down; or, we look for a coach, when we need a therapist to take care of our mental health or a counsellor to help us resolving a pressing problem. While a good coach can support us during the process that helps us finding out what we really need, ultimately we also require to be able to tap into different expertise to solve directly the problems we are facing.

Counselling

Counselling is working with a client who feels uncomfortable, or dissatisfied with their life. They are seeking guidance and advice. A counsellor works remedially on a client’s problem. Think about being stressed because you cannot get your head around your financial future, or wanting to transition skills towards a different profession and not understanding the market, the possibilities, feeling very limited. You are facing a problem in the present, that has strong ties to your past and how it got you where you are now. In these examples, a financial counsellor, a job counsellor are the professionals who can get you straight on course.

Therapy

Therapy is working with the client who seeks relief from psychological or physical symptoms. The client wants emotional healing and relief from mental pain. The client’s motive for entering therapy or counselling is usually to get away from pain or discomfort, rather than moving towards desired goals, while coaching is not remedial, it is generative. Both therapy and counselling are more likely to involve understanding and working with past experience than coaching.

Therapy deals with the client’s mental health. Coaching deals with the client’s mental growth.

Be aware of your health and learn to recognise the symptoms of emotional or mental distress. In this case, delaying the intervention of a therapist who can truly help you, by running after the expectation that a coach will, can only take up time and resources that should better be invested getting you the help you really need.

Training

Training is the process of getting knowledge skills or abilities by study, experience or teaching. The trainer by definition is the expert, and the training course is likely to be targeted on specific skills for immediate results. Training passes knowledge from teacher to student.

What I have witnessed is that those who are more afraid to open up about their lack of specific competencies, will not ask for training. The manager who cannot connect to their team, and keeps on receiving negative feedback, could for example be trained in people management, or listening and communication; the executive who cannot perform well when the organisation grows, could be trained in systems changes or transition management. Coaching can be adopted as a way to bring awareness, and release the fear getting in the way of a truly learning mindset. Another obstacle to requesting training is time bound: as trainings are more likely to be one to many rather than one to one, they are hard to fit some schedules. This is where you can revert, to a certain extent at least, to mentoring.

Consultancy

A consultant provides expertise and solves business problems, or develops a business as a whole. A consultant deals with the overall organization or specific parts of it and not individuals within it. Consultants only indirectly affect individuals.

A consultant never deals directly with individuals but with the overall organisation.

I have been in some very awkward situations where "team coaching" was involved. The complete lack of clarity of what would be the expected outcome of the process was a continuous source of stress for the entire team. It was never clear if the coach was helping the team "future thinking, generating ideas, being creative" or should have rather solved a very unsuccessful organisational set up, with wrong governance, roles and responsibilities, which ended making everyone frustrated and limited. There it is: get a good organisational consultant instead, as in some situations people will never be creative and innovative no matter how much you unwire their mindsets.

In summary

• Coaching is a crucial skill that requires training and practice to work as designed and have its intended outcome.
• Many professions can benefit from being complemented by coaching skills, but watch not to let this happen at the detriment of both the field specific knowledge as well as of the science of coaching.
• For the same reasons, try to become aware of the real needs that lead to the requirement for a coach, and explore the possibilities to fulfil them also through more problem, rather than process, oriented approaches, such as mentoring, training, consulting.
• If you cannot reach this awareness, and need support in the process of getting there, find a good coach, trained and certified in coaching.by a recognised coaching accreditation organisation, such as ICF, IAC, or EMCC.
• Consider training your management and leadership in coaching and mentoring skills, to truly increment their ability to be of help to their teams and contribute to an ecosystem of growth, innovation, creativity, and perseverant optimism.

Remember that advisors and mentors can really help introducing new knowledge safely within organisations, or working with individuals, while also supporting their leadership fully developing within the new context. If you want to discover what organisation advisory, mentorship and business coaching can do for you, or if you have any other question about this article, write to me here.