Field Notes about coaching — and building a coaching function

There are few professions that have managed to make helping people quite so complicated as coaching.

We have models, frameworks, certifications, methodologies, schools, systems and, inevitably, the occasional trademark symbol. There are endless arguments about what a coach is, what a consultant is, and where one ends and the other begins. And whether asking someone in a certain tone of voice is coaching.

None of this is entirely ridiculous. Some of it is useful. Much of it is interesting. But occasionally all of it gets in the way of the rather wonderful thing coaching can do: help someone make a better decision, see something they couldn't see before, or finally do the thing they've been struggling with for six months.

I've come to like the simpler version.

The word coach comes from Kocs, a little town in Hungary that became famous for making particularly good carriages. The original coach was a vehicle. Its job was straightforward: get you from here to there. At some point, the word jumped from the workshop and became a tutor, then a sporting mentor, and eventually an entire profession.

I rather like the original idea.

After years of coaching people, and building and leading teams that do it for a living, I've come to think we may have made the job considerably more complicated than it needs to be. A good coach helps you get somewhere you couldn't quite get to on your own.

I've seen coaching transform people and organisations. I've also seen respectable coaching programmes consume impressive amounts of money, time and enthusiasm and produce very little beyond a slide deck, a pleasing participation statistic and a few vague testimonials.

The interesting thing is that the lessons are remarkably similar. Being a good coach and building a good coaching function are, it turns out, kind of the same problem viewed from two different ends of the telescope. So these are my field notes from doing both. Not a new methodology. Not a manifesto. Just a handful of ideas and insights I've found useful along the way. Take the ones that help. Leave the rest on the shelf.

And at the end of the article is The Department of Interesting Things letter, complete with practical and tactical advice on how to build an internal coaching function, along with some templates too (A capability guide and a sample consulting offers menu).

Some things I've learned about coaching

1. Coaching and consulting aren't opposites.
Sometimes someone needs a question. Sometimes they need an answer. Good coaching is knowing which is which.

2. Think more like a sports coach.
It's not insulting or strange that a tennis coach corrects your serve. The coach doesn't spend three hours asking you what you think might be wrong with it. Or tell you that you'll find the answer within. Eventually. Although you might. There is care, encouragement and direction. Coaching can contain all three.

3. If they already knew how to solve it, they wouldn't have called.
Sometimes your job is to help someone think. Sometimes it's to lend them twenty years of experience. The craft is knowing which one they need, when.

4. You can tell people the truth and still have them like you.
It turns out people don't resent difficult feedback nearly as much as they resent vague feedback.

5. Coach the work in front of them.
If the insight can't survive contact with Wednesday morning, it probably wasn't that useful.

6. The problem is rarely just the person.
An individual may be sitting inside a strange structure, bad incentive system, broken process or communication mess. Fixing the person while leaving the machine untouched is an odd definition of coaching.

7. Broad beats narrow.
Good business coaching requires some understanding of people, organisations, money, systems and incentives. It helps if you've actually had to run something yourself.

8. Don't coach what you've never done.
Know where your experience ends. It is surprisingly liberating.

9. Some people aren't ready. Some people won't like you.
This is normal. Coaching is relational. Sometimes the most professional thing you can do is step away.

10. Kindness and clarity aren't opposites.
Being helpful matters more than being liked. Often the kindest thing you can do is say the thing clearly, carefully and early.

11. A certificate gets you through the door. It doesn't do the work.
You can collect qualifications forever. Eventually someone has to sit opposite another human being and be useful.

And then I started building coaching teams

12. Coaching costs money until it creates value.
That's not an insult. That's how businesses work. Coaching is an investment in potential but that investment costs something. The accountant files coaching on the cost side of the ledger. The interesting question is how does the coaching connect to something valuable?

13. Value isn't just revenue.
Sometimes it's money made. Sometimes it's money saved. Sometimes it's retention, compliance, better decisions or learning that prevents a future mistake. Sometimes it's behavioural change with the same value output. Sometimes it's behavioural change but with a reduction in value generation. It's always nice to define what it is a decision, rather than a surprise later.

14. Don't inherit value. Connect to it.
Stay close enough to the outcome to understand it, without pretending you personally caused everything that happened afterwards, or, even more sketchy, don't accidentally be on the hook for the outcome someone else should own.

15. Decide what you are.
Coaching, consulting, or the more useful combination of the two. Just don't make the client guess.

16. Write three sentences: we do this, we could do this, we don't do this.
Most teams are pretty good at the first two. The third is where the strategy lives.

17. Promise from ability. Build capability behind it.
Don't sell work your team can't currently do in the hope that they'll somehow become capable of doing it afterwards. They might. But why should the client pay for you to fudge your way through on their time?

18. Not all demand is good demand.
Some requests take you towards value. Others take you towards slide decks, reporting and administrative misery. Know what you do, filter work, deliver excellence.

19. Build demand before you need it.
The worst time to start explaining what your team does is when nobody is asking.

20. Put the agreement on one page.
What are we doing? Who owns what? What are we trying to change? How will we know? When does it stop?

21. Review early.
A monthly conversation is much nicer than a six-month discovery that everyone has been unhappy since week three.

22. Claim credit honestly.
Being in the room when something good happened isn't the same as causing it.

23. Leave some space.
Coaching is people work. People work is tiring. A team that is permanently busy eventually becomes a team that is merely present.

24. Teams are cut for being invisible, not for being expensive.
If you can show the value, cost becomes part of a conversation. If nobody knows what you do, cost becomes the entire conversation.

25. Teams don't learn. People do.
You don't develop a team in the abstract. A team is a collective noun. You develop the people in it, one person at a time.

26. Find the stewards.
Every organisation has people who can carry the work further than you can. Find them. Give them room. Help them. Then get out of their way.

27. Transfer judgement, not frameworks.
A framework tells someone what to do when the framework fits. Judgement helps them when it doesn't.

None of this sits neatly on a competency matrix. Which is, on reflection, exactly how you know it's the part that matters.

Because the mark of a good coach – and of a good coaching function – is not applause, or a renewed contract. It's the moment the people you were helping no longer need you, because the ability now lives in them. Like Nanny McPhee. It's the moment you have helped someone go from here, to there. Organisations change that way, subtly. One person at a time.