It’s been a real privilege – and a lot of hard work – to act as Chair of the trailblazer group that led the new Coaching Professional apprenticeship through to reality. It struck me the other day what a pleasure it is to have played a part in creating a role with the following description:
Work with a wide range of individuals and teams across organisations, to empower and engage with them to enhance their professional performance.
Aside from the agreeable and astonishingly accurate alliteration, it’s hard to read that description and try to argue that coaching is a bad idea. But reflecting on it now, I wonder if that word “performance” is a bit misleading. Yes, one of the first books I ever read on coaching was Sir John Whitmore’s classic Coaching for Performance, and without a doubt coaching certainly is designed to improve the performance of those receiving the coaching, and yet I hesitate to use that word because of some of the limiting assumptions I think get bundled in with it.
To some extent, coaching ought to always lead to improved performance in its broadest application because coaching ought to have an impact. There’s an entirely appropriate tension a coach feels between (a) wanting to support a coachee and (b) holding them responsible for their own actions – nothing undermines the power of coaching much more than a “parent-child” relationship – and I would feel a pull to question the effectiveness of a coaching relationship if there were no performance improvement.
That said, the phrase “performance improvement” drags along a lot of undesirable baggage. Ask most people what performance improvement means and there’s a fair chance the answers will be along the lines of:
- get the same things done better
- get the same things done faster
- get more of the same things done
- get slightly different things done.
In other words, performance improvement is about iterative change. If Bob takes a week to respond to emails, give him some coaching and let’s see if we can reduce it to five days. It seems to me that coaching can be so much more powerful than that, despite the neat boxes those bullets above fall into and the relative ease with which they can be quantified.
The real power of coaching, I believe, is in mindset change much more than performance improvement.
Mindset change can certainly lead to performance improvement, so the iterative change described above isn’t entirely unjustified as a lagging metric, but looking at that in isolation feels to me like a narrow view of what the coaching is truly achieving. In fact, some of the most gratifying moments in my coaching career have been when someone’s shared the difference that the coaching made years after our relationship concluded! Someone I provided coaching to back in 2014 said to me a few months ago that snippets of our conversations still reverberate around her mind, and that she’s a different – better – person as a result. I’ll take that over a 5% increase in productivity any day.
And the net performance improvement one sees as a result of that mindset shift is far greater than any short-term fix might offer. Which of these people would you employ if you were given a choice?
- A narcissistic, transaction-focused cog in the machine, who once produced the industry average of 10 widgets per hour but now makes 12 since they had some coaching.
- A self-aware, continuously improving, relational human being, who struggles to make the 10 widgets per hour but whose presence increases staff engagement and retention, who each year will add one to that tally, and who will every so often come up with a creative idea that will double the output of the entire team.
The second is the better choice. Of course. And in reality it’s not possible to guarantee the outcomes described there and so option one is a risk-averse temptation. There is a guarantee, however, that without a mindset shift those outcomes won’t happen.
Naturally, that’s harder – but not impossible – to measure, and the timeframes we’re talking about are far longer, not least because the impact is typically felt at their greatest by the system of people the coachee is connected to, many of whom will have their own internal record of the coachee’s previous persona that they need to overwrite.
It’s a complex problem, with only complex solutions – I have some thoughts as to what they are, but will finish instead with a quote from Disney’s Pocahontas:
Sometimes the right path is not the easiest one.
