An Idea for Today: Are you coaching or showing off, coach?

Business acumen, social skills, a keen eye for spotting trends and opportunities, savvy decision making and the ability to coach subordinates to great heights. Does this sound like the wish list for the perfect leader? The ability to mentor the brightest minds in your posse is a leadership virtue as old as leadership itself and central to the grooming of new talent. Coaching is a more recent trend popping up on job descriptions. Some leaders make awesome coaches, they get it - while others, simply don’t. How are you doing with coaching, coach?

The idea

It’s understandable that many feel and behave as if coaching was merely the hip, more happening term for mentoring. It isn’t though.  In a coaching relationship, knowledge is not passed down between coach and coachee. The coach need not have any experience of the issue at hand nor be able to offer sage advice. Of course, it’s tempting to want to jump in with; “back in 2000, I was faced with a similar dilemma and here’s what worked for me.” This seems innocent enough and could even be useful, but it also completely defeats the point of coaching. On a more ominous note, I have witnessed many a coaching session completely degenerate into a painful, hour-long narcissistic rant by a leader who believes that their experience is the most valuable, or only, thing they have to offer, what a pity.

Coaching sessions create a space where the coach guides the coachee into fully appreciating and understanding the situation they are in and what is required to move forward. They do this through listening to and interpreting all the signals displayed by the coachee. Big, open probing questions are asked to encourage the coachee to explore options and find blind spots, themselves.

Aha! Moment               Mentoring fulfils a very important function, however, when introduced into a coaching structure, it can potentially limit someone’s frame of a situation. Coaching delimits current mindsets by asking intelligent and probing questions to expand perspectives.

In practice

·         Try to be very clear on whether the development time spent with employees is going to be used for coaching or mentoring, and stick to this agenda.

·          Gen Y’s are generally big fans of coaching and flourish under the attention that a coaching session places on them and their big ideas. This is a good time to help them explore the risks and limitation of those big ideas, through careful questioning.

·          If you are new to the idea of coaching, grab a book that explains its principles, and power and perhaps prepare a few good, probing questions that you could use in a coaching session.  


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