Is your coaching culture driving down performance?

I’ve been a performance coach for the last 10 years or so, and my interest in the trade has only heightened over the years. It’s a fascinating subject and since Tim Gallwey’s brilliant book ‘The Inner Game of Tennis’ brought performance coaching to the fore in the 1970’s much has been written and discussed about it. 

Recently, I have been researching how performance coaching has evolved over the years, reading articles, watching YouTube videos, reading books and generally just boring anyone who had the bravery to engage in discussion with me about it. A lot of the time I have emerged from these travails frustrated, bewildered, and downright cheesed off. Why is this? I hear you ask. Well, it is because about 75% of the things I have viewed or read missed the point of coaching, and the most worrying thing about it was they were peddled by self-proclaimed ‘coaching experts’ or ‘executive influencers’ or the sort of people that put corporate guff on their LinkedIn profile, you know the ones that I mean. Here are three of the things that I picked up as part of my research;

Coaches have to be experts in what they are coaching…

The hazard of using subject matter experts (SMEs) to coach is they will invariably give advice or subconsciously lead the coachee down the path that they feel is ‘best practice’ which means the coachee will not be empowered to solve the problem themselves and will remain dependant on the SME or manager. This creates a culture of low awareness and responsibility, which has employee’s dependant on following rules and doing what they are told, the team becomes risk averse and any performance improvement is short lived. The team become dependent on managers or SMEs for answers and when something goes wrong blame is often the tendency.

The best coaches can coach anyone, at any time, about anything. In fact, when Tim Gallwey’s coaching services took off he found that he didn’t have enough coaches for the vast amount of tennis clients that were booking his team’s services, so what did he do? Did he rapidly recruit more fantastic tennis players to deal with the demand? No, what he did was to take some of the coaches from the newly formed golf team, dressed them as tennis players and told them to “go coach tennis”. The benefit of this was because the golfers were not experts in the game of tennis they couldn’t give any advice on how to play. Through true coaching the tennis students were empowered to come up with their own solutions and in many cases the golf coaches had better results with the tennis students than the tennis coaches did. This then created a set of players who were much more invested in their own performance, they saw the coaches as facilitators of success and they were much more aware of their own development needs.

Coaching is a formal activity…

When you make coaching formal, it can, not always, but can, shut down the conversation. It is normally a scheduled 121 or a meeting that has been booked in due to a performance issue. This is the traditional face of coaching, something that happens twice a year and looms in the diary like an ogre as the next meeting advances. The manager may see this as doing their job, developing the team as part of a formal process, and in some circumstances the formal approach is necessary, but, more often than not, it does little to empower or engage an employee. If the coaching becomes so formal that any outcomes are saved on a SharePoint to be viewed by a team of managers then confidentiality will be broken, trust will be lost and coaching becomes something to be feared. This happens, regularly, in fact I have seen this very recently.

Great coaches can engage with employees at the drop of a hat, no bells and whistles, no formality. When really fantastic coaches are in full flow the coachee doesn’t even know they are being coached, they just think they are having a conversation at work. A great coaching conversation could take as little as a couple of minutes (this type of engagement was called Clint Eastwood coaching where I used to work because it was ‘quick on the draw’) and there is absolutely no requirement to take notes, however the coachee can take notes if they wish, but the coach doesn’t need to because it isn’t them that owns the process, it’s the coachee. Informality breeds trust, coach and team build big relationships as part of the process and that leads on to performance improvements and enhancements on the bottom line.

Its’s not a manager’s job to coach…

Lots of managers don’t see it as part of their job to coach their teams and in the bygone days of the command and control, carrot and stick style of leadership and they probably had a point. Managers told their teams what to do, the teams did it and if they didn’t the big stick or a juicy carrot would come out. For many years this was the chosen method of leadership by managers in businesses throughout the world. However, the world has changed. Employees want more and as the ‘much-discussed’ Millennial generation entered the workplace they demanded development, engagement and flexibility. Millennials have now been replaced by Generation Z as the new kids on the block and they demand even more of our leaders. The old-style leadership ways simply won’t wash with these leaders of tomorrow and they will very quickly leave an environment where they feel they are not empowered to drive their own success.

Coaching works brilliantly with this new generation of employees, they want development and they want it now, and coaching facilitates that. Because the coachee owns the process they can choose exactly which path the coaching will take, they can choose the frequency of the sessions (within reason), they can choose the subject of the discussion, they can chose where the coaching takes place, in fact they are totally empowered to drive their own success and for this new breed who crave engagement and live in a world of 24 hour instant gratification it works very well and has been proven to lower attrition rates with this group of employees in particular. 

…. Remember coaching is unlocking people’s potential to maximise their own performance, there’s not a carrot or stick in sight. It is helping people learn rather than teaching them and it’s empowering them to take ownership of their own development. Many companies brag about their coaching culture and people claim to be coaching experts without really understanding the game. It is very easy to get it wrong and if you do your coaching culture may actually be driving down performance.

John Whitfield

Coach