Stacia Garr’s post, “To Coach or Not to Coach? That is Not the Question” begins this way.
“If Hamlet were a manager in 2011, he might have asked himself, “is it worth it to spend time coaching my employees?â€Â In new coaching research published today, High-Impact Performance Management: Maximizing Coaching, we show that this is not the question any manager or senior leader should be asking themselves. Within our survey population, the relationship between coaching and superior employee, talent management and business results was strong (for an example, see Figure 1). Therefore, the question is not if managers should coach, but rather what the organization should do to make sure everyone in the organization is coaching.”
When I started in business, forty-plus years ago, coaches were only for athletes. Mentors did some of what coaches do, and so did many managers, but what they did wasn’t called coaching. Also, seeking help of any kind was usually judged as a sign or admission of weakness.
Here’s how things were then. Early in my career, I took an assignment that required negotiating with a Japanese company. I wasn’t the savviest boy on the block, but I knew enough to know that a) the Japanese culture was very different from my American culture, and b) that I didn’t know what those differences were or how they might affect my ability to conduct a negotiation.
I did what seemed logical to me. I went to the reference desk at the library and got some help identifying an expert in doing business with Japanese companies. Then I called him up and asked if I could visit and ask some questions. In an hour I learned a lot and left with a list of things I could read and people I could contact to learn more.
When I told my boss, he said, “That was smart, but don’t talk about it. People may think you’re the wrong person for the job.”
That was then. Today, the coaching challenges are different. Today managers need to choose the mix of coaching (professional, manager, or peer) that’s best for a given situation. Today we need to consider the stakeholders in any coaching arrangement and learn to manage the expectations and the experience. It’s a different world. Like Hamlet, we don’t need to wonder if coaching is valuable. Our challenge is to make it productive.
