12 Coaching Issues
Here is a summary of issues we covered in the Consulting College Grad School that are common focal points when coaching. Thanks again to Betsy Waits for compiling.
Alan’s 12 Coaching Issues
1. No clarity on goals. What are developmental goals to be met? What are we focusing on? What’s the end result?
2. Making assumptions and not looking at observed behavior/evidence. For example, “The trouble is that you are not a team player.” What makes someone say that?
3. No honest feedback from others. As a coach, you have to ensure they have honest feedback and the means to calibrate if it is accurate or not.
4. Blaming “them.” The coaching client is a victim.
5. There are no adverse consequences for their behavior. Why should I change? Need to create reward/punishment.
6. Coaching becomes an excuse for not dealing with a skills deficit. Coaching isn’t training. If they don’t have the skills, you cannot “coach” skills or “train” behavior. If I have a skills deficit, I need training, not coaching. If I have a behavioral problem, I need coaching, not training.
7. Attitude vs. skills. This is Robert Mager’s great contribution. “Gun to the head test.” If I can’t do it with a gun to my head, it really is a skills issue, if I can, then it’s attitude.
8. Failure to marry career development with succession planning. If future job requires certain experience, for example, it should be a part of career development.
9. Bullying and intimidation. A lot of people you coach are either bullies or bullied. Bullies are vastly insecure. People allow themselves to be intimated.
10. Poor presentation skills. One of the basic issues with coaching, there are people who have a hard time communicating either one-on-one or to a large group. They just can’t seem to express themselves.
11. There are the wrong behaviors for the position. You promote a salesperson to a manager and ruin two positions. Behaviors required are vastly different
12. Trying to coach people who are clinically depressed. You can’t confuse the roles. They need therapy, not coaching. As a coach, you need to look for or ask about the appropriate signs (e.g, reports of poor sleeping, loss of appetite, loss if interest in traditional passions, etc.).
© Alan Weiss 2009. All rights reserved.
Phil Hodgen
Yep. On #1 especially.
I am blessed/cursed with multiple and competing goals in my head, and they are as noisy as a bus-load of school kids on a field trip.
That’s why talking to someone else is so critical – so that I am forced to stop, think, and answer the question so eloquently put in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (greatest movie ever made, etc. etc.):
“What . . . is your Quest?”
🙂
@philiphodgen
Philippe Back
Excellent list.
3, 6, 7, and 9 are on my current engagement.
We sometimes should be allowed a gun to prove 7 🙂
Les
Right on the money with points number 6 & 7. Skills attitude and activity. These are the three things that really matter.
Number 11 happens all the time. We take a Super Star and make them a Supervisor. Almost always ends in failure or they become average at best.